Disabling Subscriptions

Disabling plugins is a common process in troubleshooting a problem or turning off a functionality.

A number of issues can arise from disabling WooCommerce Subscriptions, such as for:

• Any dependent plugins
• Renewal payments
• Expiration upon the subscription’s end date
• Cancellation after the end of the prepaid term is reached
• Automatic retry of failed payments

Additionally, simply disabling the plugin may not completely stop all the actions associated with it, such as renewal payments.

Disabling Subscriptions Actions

If choosing to disable Subscriptions, steps will need to be taken to completely stop all associated actions. Scheduled actions, such as renewal payments, are processed in Subscriptions by a job queue library called Action Scheduler.

If another plugin, such as WooCommerce Memberships, Follow-up Emails, or WooCommerce version 3.5 or greater, is active on the site, then they will also be loading a version of Action Scheduler to process their own scheduled actions. In this case, the scheduled events for Subscriptions will continue to be processed, even if Subscriptions is inactive.

To check if another plugin is loading Action Scheduler:

1. Disable Subscriptions
2. Visit the admin screen at https://example.com/wp-admin/tools.php?page=action-scheduler, replacing example.com with your site’s URL

    

   
   

3. If the page loads, another plugin is using Action Scheduler

If nothing else is loading Action Scheduler, the queue will remain but be inactive. This means that it will still be there and continue to run if Action Scheduler is activated, either by re-activating Subscriptions or another plugin that uses Action Scheduler.

If Action Scheduler is still active and you do not want to disable the other plugins, it is possible to stop Action Scheduler from running. In order to completely stop Action Scheduler from running, download, install, and activate the Action Scheduler Disable Default Runner plugin. This plugin will stop the Action Scheduler queue from running altogether.

This means that all actions for all plugins using Action Scheduler will stop. If you need to continue processing actions for other plugins, please open a support ticket.

Disabling a Payment Gateway Plugin

It is also possible to disable a specific payment gateway plugin. If a gateway plugin is disabled while Subscriptions is active, those subscriptions that use that gateway will be converted to use manual renewals. This means that the subscriptions can be paid for, but the customer will need to log in and pay for the subscription using a different gateway, rather than a payment being automatically processed.