Hi there, I was looking through the payment options in my settings and noticed that I have the PayPal via the Woo Offical PayPal plugin and PayPal Standard as options.
PayPal Standard isn’t enabled and as there’s no need for it to be there, I figured I’d use the provided ‘deactivate’ option.
Much to my surprise deactivating PayPal Standard via the provided ‘deactivate’ option, also deactivates Woocommerce and crashes our business.
Please either add an option to hide the PayPal Standard entry in the payments area, remove the option to deactivate PayPal Standard, or at least add a warning notice that deactivating PayPal Standard will also deactivate Woocommerce and break your website.
I’m really sorry to hear that turning off the PayPal Standard payment option caused your whole site to crash. That definitely shouldn’t happen, and I can see how frustrating (and disruptive!) that must have been for your business.
Just to make sure I understand what’s going on — when you say it “crashes your business,” do you mean the entire site goes down, or is it more that the checkout stops working? Do you happen to see any specific error messages when this happens? And has it happened more than once, or was it just that one time?
It would also be super helpful if you could share your System Status Report. To grab that:
Head to WooCommerce > Status in your dashboard.
Click Get system report and then Copy for support.
If there are any fatal error logs showing up, please send those over too. You can find them under WooCommerce > Status > Logs.
Once you’ve gathered that info, feel free to paste it into a code block here or upload it to pastebin.com and send us the link. That’ll help us dig deeper and get you a clearer answer.
Just to be clear, PayPal Standard wasn’t active to start with. It’s in the Payment providers list (image below) as I believe it’s included as part of Woocommerce, though it’s recommended by Woocommerce that we use the seperate PayPal plugin: PayPal Payments Upgrade Guide.
Clicking on the three dots gives the option to ‘deactivate’ PayPal Standard, which I assumed would hide it as an option by moving it to the ‘Other payment options’ section.
However as previously mentioned, instead of deactivating / removing PayPal Standard as an option, it deactivates Woocommerce entirely.
As I have several other plugins that require Woocommerce to be active for them to work, it caused my entire site to go down.
I received a ‘Your Site is Experiencing a Technical Issue’ email and entered my sites backend via the “recovery mode” link, where I was able to reactivate Woocommerce.
I don’t understand why PayPal Standard is part of Woocommerce, when they themselves don’t recommend using it… and why it has the option to deactivate Woocommerce in the Payment providers list is beyond me.
You should be able to easily replicate the issue simply by clicking the deactivate option in the Payment providers list, behind the three dots next to PayPal Standard.
Thanks so much for this detailed follow-up. I appreciate you taking the time to walk us through exactly what happened and sharing the screenshots; that is incredibly helpful for understanding the whole picture.
What you described definitely shouldn’t be the expected behavior. Clicking the Deactivate option next to PayPal Standard in the payment providers list should never result in WooCommerce itself being deactivated. That sounds like a conflict, and I agree it’s confusing, especially since WooCommerce now recommends using the newer PayPal Payments plugin instead.
Just to rule out any unexpected behavior with the current setup: have you tried disabling PayPal Standard by unchecking the “Enable PayPal Standard” box in the plugin’s settings instead? You can find that option by following this guide: https://woocommerce.com/document/paypal-standard/#setup-and-configuration
That method disables PayPal Standard without affecting other parts of your site and should give the outcome you were originally aiming for.
After trying the above, if the issue persists, to investigate further and determine if any plugin or server-level conflicts are involved, could you please share your System Status Report? You can get this from WooCommerce → Status → Get system report → Copy for support, and paste it into https://pastebin.com or https://quickforget.com, then share the link with us here.
To be clear, PayPal Standard isn’t active but is displayed in payment providers section with the option to enable it.
Do I need to activate it, to then go into the settings and try “disabling PayPal Standard by unchecking the “Enable PayPal Standard” box in the plugin’s settings”?
Seems odd that I would need to enable a built in feature, so I can disable it… but I’ll certainly give it a go.
edit: Just checked and ‘Enable PayPal Standard’ is unchecked.
As it’s no longer recommended by Woocommerce that we use PayPal Standard, can you request that it be removed?
You don’t need to activate PayPal Standard in order to remove PayPal from the Payments tab. By default, PayPal sometimes appears as a suggested payment method, and you can hide this suggestion by clicking the three dots next to PayPal and selecting “Hide this suggestion.”
However, based on your screenshot, it looks like the PayPal payment method is appearing due to a plugin that’s currently active on your site.
To assist you further, could you please share the System Status Report? You can find it by going to WooCommerce > Status, then clicking Get system report and Copy for support.
This problem need to be fixed. We have exactly the same issue as JapeNZ. We have tested with two different sites with the same problem. Woo is gone, plugin sends problem, frontend is dead and backend is looked. Need server admin fixes to get it all back up and running again.
First, I’m not asking you to hide it. I can hide it, but it will change your payment mode and you can only use PayPal Business Edition to receive payments. Therefore, you can’t work.
Second, I retested 3 sites, and they all had the same problem. Every time, it crashed your site. It couldn’t work properly. This is obviously a big BUG.
Thank you for your input and for confirming that you’ve tested this on multiple sites and are still experiencing the same issue. I understand how frustrating it must be, especially when it leads to site crashes and prevents access.
Has absolutely destroyed my site multiple times, needing deactivation of other woocommerce plugins such as conditional payments, visibility settings and woocommerce analytics before it was able to recover, and only then via the command line to reactivate woocommerce plugin.
There absolutely should not be a button to do this to a site, no matter how trivial or avoidant one could be of it.
I understand your concern, and it’s completely valid. However, to keep the forum organized and ensure we can properly track each reported issue and provide assistance, it’s important that every merchant or developer, like yourself, creates their own topic—as my colleague mentioned. This allows us to get a clearer explanation of your issue and provide dedicated support.
I’m just chiming in here from WooCommerce support to say that I believe this is a bug in the WooCommerce core.
I have raised this to the attention of our development team to take a look.
For now, please do not use the “Deactivate” option next to PayPal Standard. This option should not exist and using it will definitely deactivate the core WooCommerce plugin.
Note that the snippet that used to be able to remove PayPal Standard from the Payments list does not appear to be working at this time. The best workaround we have at the moment is to move PayPal Standard to the bottom of your payments list and ensure it is not active (but do not try to deactivate).
![](https://i.ibb.co/TMMs5bVm/Pay-Pal-Standard-Inactive.png" alt="Pay-Pal-Standard-Inactive)
![](https://i.ibb.co/cSHdWzGj/Pay-Pal-Standard-Inactive-Deactivate-Button.png" alt="Pay-Pal-Standard-Inactive-Deactivate-Button)
