Your checkout can look fine and still be silently broken.
Checkout Pulse watches your store's order data and logs for the real, documented causes of silent payment failures — and emails you the moment one happens, before it costs a week of sales.
No API keys. No external service. Nothing synthetic — it never submits test payments or touches your gateway settings.
Payment gateways fail silently more often than store owners realise
The checkout page looks normal. WooCommerce shows nothing wrong. Customers just leave — and you find out days later, if at all.
of transactions fail silently
Visa's own cited figure for transactions that fail without a clear, visible error at checkout.
of affected customers never return
A silent failure doesn't just cost one sale — it usually costs the customer relationship too.
live WooCommerce stores
Roughly a third of the world's online stores run on WooCommerce — and almost none of them are watching for this.
Five real, documented failure causes — not vague anomaly detection
Every alert traces back to a specific, verifiable cause. No black-box scoring, no crying wolf over a normal declined card.
Webhook signing-secret mismatches
Orders stuck as "Pending" while your gateway silently retries and eventually gives up — often after a plugin update quietly breaks the webhook handshake.
Expired or revoked gateway API keys
Produces a generic "Payment failed" with zero visible detail — the real cause only ever shows up in WooCommerce's own logs, which this plugin scans directly.
Broken checkout JavaScript
A theme or plugin update silently breaks the "Place Order" button. Detected from real customer sessions — never simulated.
SSL and certificate issues
An expiring certificate — or checkout accidentally served without HTTPS — can silently hide the card-entry field with no obvious error.
Orders stuck in Pending or On-hold
Past a sensible threshold, excluding manual methods like bank transfer, cheque and Cash on Delivery that are expected to sit there.
Passive by design — nothing synthetic, nothing risky
Every credible way to build this safely comes down to the same principle: watch, don't touch. A plugin that automatically toggles a live store's gateway into test mode to "check" it can get stuck there after a crash — silently blocking real customer payments. That's the exact disaster this tool exists to prevent, self-inflicted. So Checkout Pulse never does it.
- Never submits a test payment through your checkout
- Never toggles your gateway into test mode
- Never modifies orders or payment settings
- Runs on your own order data and WooCommerce logs — nothing leaves your server except the alert email itself
Frequently asked questions
Does this slow down my checkout?
No. All monitoring runs on scheduled background checks or passively observes existing WooCommerce hooks and logs — nothing runs synchronously in the checkout request path except a small error listener script, which only reports errors and never blocks page load.
Will it ever submit a test payment or change my gateway settings?
No. Automatically toggling a live store's gateway into test mode is the kind of automated production-config change that can fail open and itself block real customer payments — exactly the problem this plugin exists to prevent.
Why did I get an alert about a "stuck" order when I use bank transfer?
Bank transfer, cheque, and Cash on Delivery orders are excluded by default since they're expected to sit in Pending or On-hold until manually confirmed. Other manual methods can be excluded via a filter.
What does the paid tier add?
Still being scoped — likely more alert channels, longer incident history, and multi-site management. The free tier on WordPress.org will always cover the five core failure detections and email alerts.
Install it before your next silent failure, not after
Checkout Pulse is a free WordPress.org plugin. Submission is in progress — check back shortly, or get in touch to be notified the moment it's live.
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