WooCommerce checkout: the fields that cost you orders

Checkout is where the customer has already decided to buy. Your only job is to not get in the way. Yet the default WooCommerce checkout asks for more than most stores need.

Fields worth questioning

• Company name — irrelevant for most B2C stores.
• Address line 2 — keep it, but make it optional and collapsed behind "Add apartment, suite, etc."
• Phone — only required if your courier needs it. If it's required, say why.
• Order notes — rarely used, often confusing. Hide unless your business genuinely needs them.
• Separate billing and shipping — default to "same as shipping" and let people expand billing only when needed.
• Forced account creation — always allow guest checkout. Offer an account after the order is placed.

Removing them without breaking tax or shipping

Be careful here: some fields feed tax and shipping calculations. Country, postcode and sometimes state are used to calculate rates. Remove those and your totals can silently go wrong.

The safe approach:

1. List which fields your tax setup, shipping zones and payment gateway actually use.
2. Use the woocommerce_checkout_fields filter (or the block checkout settings) to remove or make optional only the fields outside that list.
3. Test orders for each shipping zone and payment method on staging.
4. Check your invoices and order emails still show what accounting needs.

Small changes that help more than you'd expect

• Correct autocomplete attributes so browsers can autofill.
• Express payment buttons (Apple Pay, Google Pay) above the form.
• Clear error messages next to the field, not only at the top.
• Show the total including shipping before the last step.

The best checkout field is the one you never had to ask for.

If your store has a high cart-abandonment rate, a checkout review is one of the cheapest improvements you can make.