
In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, a discussion unfolded around WooCommerce cart session management—specifically how long guest carts are stored before expiration.
A core WooCommerce function confirmed the default behavior: sessions expire after 48 hours, with a soft expiration at 47 hours.
This raised further questions about whether the session expiry is extended after a cart update, and how this differs between guest and logged-in users.
Digging deeper, the conversation touched on the role of the _woocommerce_persistent_cart_
option for logged-in customers, and whether it’s still necessary given longer session durations.
Interestingly, this debate coincided with a new WooCommerce pull request suggesting the removal of persistent carts entirely in favor of simpler session management.
If you’ve ever wondered how WooCommerce stores cart data or how it behaves across different users, this post summarizes key findings and links directly to WooCommerce core code and discussions that could impact future releases.
Continue reading WooCommerce Cart Sessions and Persistent Cart Explained