Transactional emails are a key part of your store’s fulfillment process, and for most store owners they’re the main communication channel with customers. They confirm the order, explain what happens next, carry the shipping details, and set expectations about returns. They’re also one of the few messages a customer will reliably open — which makes the default WooCommerce template, with its grey header and system font, a missed opportunity.
WooCommerce lets you change the header image, base colour and footer text out of the box. Beyond that you’re editing template files. Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer is the most widely used way around that: a free plugin, with more than 90,000 active installs, that gives you a visual editor for every WooCommerce email.
This guide covers what you can change with it, how to set it up, where its limits are, and what to do about the parts it can’t reach.
The WooCommerce emails you can customize
WooCommerce sends eleven transactional emails by default. Some go to your customers, some to you.
Sent to the customer
- Order On-Hold — order received, awaiting payment or confirmation
- Processing Order — payment received, order being prepared
- Completed Order — order fulfilled and, usually, shipped
- Refunded Order — full or partial refund issued
- Customer Invoice — order details and a payment link, sent manually
- Customer Note — a note you’ve added to their order
- Reset Password — password reset link
- New Account — welcome email after registration
Sent to the store admin
- New Order — a new order has been placed
- Cancelled Order — an order was cancelled
- Failed Order — payment failed
Kadence Email Designer styles all of them from one template, and lets you change the heading and body text of each individually.
What Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer does
The plugin adds a visual editor for your WooCommerce email template, so you can change how emails look without editing PHP templates or maintaining a child theme override.
In practice it covers three things. Global styling — background colour, container width, body text colour and size, link colour, heading fonts, and the border and padding around the email body. Header and footer — logo, header background, and footer text, with more control than the WooCommerce defaults allow. Per-email content — the heading, subject line and intro text of each individual email, so your Processing Order email can read differently from your Completed Order email.
It’s free on WordPress.org, and it works with any theme — you don’t need a Kadence theme to use it.
Installing Kadence Email Designer
The plugin is free on WordPress.org, so you can install it from inside your dashboard. Go to Plugins → Add New, search for “Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer”, then click Install Now and Activate.
Once it’s active you’ll find the editor at WooCommerce → Email Customizer. It opens in the WordPress Customizer, with your email template previewed live on the right and the settings panels on the left, so every change you make is visible before you save it.
There’s nothing to configure before you start. The plugin picks up your existing WooCommerce email settings and shows you the template as your customers currently receive it.
Customizing your email template
The Email Customizer is organised into panels, each controlling one part of the email. You can work through them in any order, and the preview updates as you go.
- Prebuilt Templates — a set of ready-made layouts you can load as a starting point instead of building from the default.
- Container — the overall email width, padding, background colour and borders. This is where you set how wide the email body sits inside the message.
- Header — your logo, header image and header background. Most stores start here, because the default WooCommerce header is the most obviously unbranded part of the email.
- Content — body text formatting and the styling of H2 and H3 headings inside the email.
- Order Items — the product table: how it’s spaced, how borders look, and whether product images are shown.
- Addresses — the formatting of the billing and shipping address boxes.
- Button Styles — the call-to-action buttons, including the “view order” link.
- Footer — footer text, social links and the credit line.
- Custom Styles — custom CSS applied across every email type, for anything the panels don’t cover.
- Import/Export — save your configuration out, or load it into another store.
Work top to bottom — container, then header, then content — and you’ll spend less time undoing choices. The container width in particular affects how everything below it sits.
Sending a preview email
Before you go live, send yourself a real one. In the Customizer, find the Send Preview Email section, enter one or more addresses separated by commas, and click Send Email.
Two things to know. Your settings have to be saved before the preview will reflect them — an unsaved change won’t appear in the test send. And it’s worth previewing against a real order from your store rather than the sample data, because real orders expose things mock data doesn’t: long product names, multiple line items, a shipping address that wraps.
Check the result in more than one place. Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail each render HTML email differently, and an email that looks right in one can break in another.
Customizing individual emails
Styling covers how every email looks. The Email Type and Text panel is where you change what each one says.
Pick an email type from the list, and you can edit its subject line, its heading, and the body text that appears above the order details. Each of the eleven WooCommerce emails is edited separately, so the message a customer gets when their order is being prepared can read quite differently from the one they get when it ships.
You can use placeholders to personalise the text — {customer_first_name} and {order_number} among them — so a heading can greet the customer by name and reference their order without you writing anything per-order.
If you only change one email, make it Completed Order. That’s the “your order has shipped” message, it’s the one customers most want to receive, and the WooCommerce default says almost nothing useful: the order is complete, here are the items. Replacing that with a line about when to expect delivery and how to get in touch does more for your support inbox than any amount of styling.
What Kadence can and can’t change
Worth being clear about this before you spend an afternoon in the Customizer.
It can change the visual styling of the whole template, the header and footer, the order table and address boxes, and the subject, heading and body text of each individual email.
It can’t change the underlying structure of the email — the order of the content blocks, or anything WooCommerce renders through its own template parts. If you need to move the shipping address above the order items, or insert a custom block between the order table and the footer, you’re back to template overrides in a child theme.
It also applies to emails sent through the WooCommerce mailer. Plugins that send their own email independently may not inherit the template, so test anything that matters rather than assuming.
Before you rely on it: maintenance status
The plugin is actively maintained but not actively developed. At the time of writing it’s on version 1.5.19.1, updated within the last month, with more than 90,000 active installations. Recent releases have been security and compatibility fixes; the last substantial feature addition was back in version 1.5.0.
Some users have reported conflicts with recent WordPress releases and with Elementor. We haven’t been able to reproduce those on our own installs, but it’s a reason to do what you should do with any plugin touching customer-facing email: install it on staging first, send yourself preview emails from a real order, and confirm the output before it reaches a customer.
Adding tracking details to your shipping email
Styling the email is half the job. The other half is what’s in it.
By default, WooCommerce’s Completed Order email tells the customer their order is complete — but it carries no tracking number, no carrier, and no link to follow the shipment. That gap is what generates “where is my order?” tickets, however good the email looks.
A WooCommerce shipment tracking plugin closes it. Advanced Shipment Tracking Pro adds tracking information directly into the shipping email — carrier, tracking number and a live tracking link — across 1,010+ carriers. It inherits whatever styling you’ve applied in the Email Customizer, so the two work together: Kadence controls how the email looks, AST Pro controls what it says about the shipment.
Frequently asked questions
Is Kadence WooCommerce Email Designer free?
Yes. It’s available free on WordPress.org with more than 90,000 active installations, and no paid tier is required for the customization described here.
Do I need a Kadence theme to use it?
No. It works with any WordPress theme.
Where do I find the email customizer?
Under WooCommerce → Email Customizer. It opens in the WordPress Customizer with a live preview of your template.
Can I preview emails before sending?
Yes. Use the Send Preview Email option inside the Customizer to send a test to one or more addresses. Save your settings first — unsaved changes won’t appear in the preview.
Will it style emails sent by other plugins?
It styles emails sent through the WooCommerce mailer. Plugins that send their own email independently may not inherit the template, so test rather than assume.
Can I move my settings to another store?
Yes. The Import/Export panel lets you save your configuration and load it on another site, which is useful if you run more than one store or build the template on staging first.