Testing with a publicly accessible URL

When you're working on a WooCommerce site, you'll need to test all of the e-commerce functionality, such as getting shipping rates, importing tax rates, and accepting payment. Unfortunately, some of these third parties use legacy systems to deliver data to your site. And for some of these systems to work, they deliver data to your site via a publicly accessible URL. For example, a shipping company might return data to your store about a custom shipping price with a link similar to this: yourstore.com/?custom_parameter=foo.

If they can't access your store via a URL, these services might not work. So, if you want to develop a custom theme or plugin that interacts with the cart or checkout, you might have to do that development on a test site instead of a local site on your own computer.

If you are doing a lot of custom development, it still saves time to develop on your local machine and when you want to test the site, move all of your local files to your test site. But for many e-commerce sites, you can save time by doing all of your development on a test site and skipping the local site.

Now that we know how to develop sites, let's make sure our admin is free from promotions.