Advanced Product Fields 2.0 released

We don’t often write blog posts about new releases, but launching version 2.0 of Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce deserves a blog post so we can explain all the new features & improvements! This is a major release with some exciting features, speed, and SEO improvements.

Let’s get into it!

Advanced Product Fields 2.0 – major performance boost

In this release, we have rewritten large parts of our front-end code (for the technical readers: our JavaScript code). This results in a big performance boost on your product pages. Products with complex or large forms will now function ~45% faster, though we’ve seen product pages that were twice as fast.

If you have simple forms that don’t use much conditional logic, pricing calculations, or quantity-based fields, chances are you won’t notice a difference. The plugin was fast before, but now it got even faster! Only store owners with more complex setups will notice a difference.

In addition to that, we’ve spent a lot of time making sure the file size of our scripts remains small. Why is this important? Loading extra scripts on your site is necessary, but it also slows down your overall page load speed. As a site owner/builder, it’s your job to keep a good balance between the features you need and the plugins you use.

That’s why it is important to keep those extra file sizes as small as possible. Unfortunately, not many plugin developers pay attention to this. All of our powerful features are packed in a file of under 10kb! This is usually 3 to 6 times smaller than competing plugins.

Repeating fields & sections

In previous versions of the plugin, you could repeat fields based on the WooCommerce quantity box. This isn’t always ideal, so we’ve introduced a new way of repeating fields: by clicking an “add new” button. Advanced Product Fields 2.0 just got more powerful!

For example, let’s say you’re selling tickets and you want to collect names of the ticket holders. You could add a repeatable section to collect people’s information. Customers can click a button “Add new ticket holder” to add extra ticket holders.

SEO-friendly images & image swatches with lazy-loading

Images or image swatches created through our plugin will now be faster and more SEO-friendly. They benefit from lazy loading, alt tags, and other nice features built into WordPress. This should further improve your page speed score.

In order to remain backward compatible, this only works for newly created image swatches. Old image swatches will not benefit from these changes until you re-select the image.

Price display settings

Prior to version 2.0, you had to use custom CSS if you wanted to change how the pricing summary should be displayed. Since 2.0, you can now control how you want to display the pricing summary. Go to WooCommerce → Settings → Product fields, and find the following setting:

We’ve also added extra price display settings to WooCommerce. Edit your simple product and find the extra settings in the General tab.

This helps you create more complex products that deviate from the “normal” WooCommerce price display. We’ve written a guide on how to sell business cards with WooCommerce which uses these new features.

Lots of small improvements

We’ve made lots of smaller improvements to both the admin side and the front-end side. Here are a few notable improvements:

• Added a “download files” button in the admin order screen to download all user-uploaded files in one click.
• Improved styling for themes and page builders that use modern CSS techniques. This includes Elementor, AstraWP, and Avada. What is great: This does not enlarge our script code at all. It actually makes it smaller, so there’s a tiny tiny speed improvement there too.
• On page load, the pricing summary (if any) is not hidden anymore for simple products, improving Google’s “CLS” score for your page.
• Deleting a “section” field in the admin screen now also deletes its children. You no longer have to delete them one by one.
• Better “Max file size” handling for uploaded files.

Fixes and more

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs. You can find the full list of changes and fixes here in our changelog.

Updating your plugin

As always, you can update the plugin from your WordPress dashboard. Please note this is a major release! We advise you to perform the update on a test site first, or to create a backup prior to upgrading.

What’s next?

Since this is a large release, we’re giving people some time to update before moving on to the next big thing. We remain available to help customers with upgrading, and we’re ready to squash bugs, should they arise.

After that, we’ve got some ideas on what to work on next but nothing is set in stone. Here’s what we definitely want to get started on: import/export tools, tooltips, and child products (to create bundled products). Some of these items are quite a bit of work, so we can’t say for sure when we’ll release them.

If there is anything you want to see integrated into our plugin, let us know!

Advanced Product Fields for WooCommerce

The easiest way to add extra addons to your WooCommerce products. We're always improving the plugin to ensure your store gets the best of the best.

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