# Getting started

Source: https://salesdrawer.com/docs/getting-started/

> Install Sale Drawer for WooCommerce, put a product on sale, choose where the drawer appears, and make it cache-safe — in about two minutes.

Sale Drawer works out of the box. If you have at least one product on sale, the drawer appears as soon as the plugin is active. Everything below is optional fine-tuning.

**Requirements:** WordPress 6.0+, WooCommerce 7.0+, PHP 7.4+. HPOS (High-Performance Order Storage) is fully supported.

## Install and activate

Download the free zip, upload it under **Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin**, and activate. Activation creates your starter campaign, so there is nothing to set up before your first sale shows.

1. [Download the free plugin](/download/) — keep it as a .zip, don’t unzip it.
2. In your WordPress admin, go to **Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin**, choose the zip and click **Install Now**, then **Activate**.
3. Open **Sale Drawer** in the admin menu to see the settings. The defaults are designed to be safe for any store.

Updates are delivered automatically through the normal WordPress **Updates** screen, and every release is listed in the [changelog](/changelog/).

## Put something on sale

Any simple or variable product with a sale price — including scheduled sales — appears in the drawer.

Sale Drawer asks WooCommerce which products are on sale, so whatever WooCommerce considers “on sale” is in. That includes:

- **Simple products** with a *Sale price* set.
- **Variable products** where at least one variation has a sale price.
- **Scheduled sales** — products appear when the schedule starts and leave when it ends, with no action from you.

Prices are read live, never copied, so the drawer can’t show a stale price. When nothing is on sale, the drawer and its tab disappear completely.

## Choose where it shows

Page-type rules. Cart, checkout and account pages never auto-open by default.

Under **Sale Drawer → Display** you can choose which page types show the launcher tab and which are allowed to open the drawer automatically: the home page, shop and category archives, product pages, blog posts and other pages. Cart, checkout and My Account are excluded from auto-open by default so the drawer never gets between a shopper and paying.

## Behind a cache?

Turn on deferred mode so WP Rocket, LiteSpeed or Cloudflare APO never serve a stale drawer.

Full-page caches store a copy of each page. If the drawer were printed into that copy, a sale that ended an hour ago could still be shown. With **deferred mode** enabled (**Sale Drawer → Performance**), the page loads a lightweight placeholder and the current sale items are fetched fresh after the page loads, so cached pages stay accurate.

> Turn deferred mode on if you use WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, Cloudflare APO, or host-level caching (Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround and similar). After switching it on, clear your cache once.