How to Migrate PayPal Standard to PayPal Donations
PayPal has deprecated the PayPal Standard Gateway and is no longer supporting its use. If your site is still using the PayPal Standard Gateway, you must migrate to the PayPal Donations Gateway to avoid interruptions in payment processing.
Migrating from the PayPal Standard Gateway to the PayPal Donations Gateway changes how your site communicates with PayPal. The process outlined below will help ensure that you make this critical transition with no interruption to accepting donations via PayPal on your website.
What You Need to Know About this Change
- The PayPal Donations Gateway comes with GiveWP. No add-on is required to enable and begin using it.
- In addition to being fully compatible with the latest PayPal API updates, PayPal Donations offers a number of advantages over PayPal Standard, including the opportunity to accept donations with Venmo.
- There are no additional fees for PayPal Donations. Your costs associated with accepting donations via PayPal will not change.
- Because PayPal handles the payment processing, any existing recurring donations will not be interrupted as a result of migrating from PayPal Standard to PayPal Donations.
How to Safely Transition from PayPal Standard to PayPal Donations
The step-by-step instructions below will help you navigate this change while ensuring that your existing Donation Forms continue to process payments via PayPal without any disruption to your donors.
Connect PayPal Donations to Your PayPal Account
The first crucial step is to make sure the PayPal Donations Gateway is properly connected to your PayPal account. Follow these detailed instructions to connect PayPal Donations with your PayPal account for LIVE transaction processing.
Enable the PayPal Donations Gateway
Once you’ve connected with PayPal, enable the PayPal Donations gateway to add the new PayPal payment method to your Donation Forms.
- Navigate to Donations > Settings > Payment Gateways > Gateways
- Scroll down to Enabled Gateways and locate the PayPal Donations gateway
- Check the box in the “Enabled” column at the far right
- Click “Save Changes”
Note that once you complete this step, both the PayPal Standard Gateway and the PayPal Donations Gateway will be enabled on all the Donation Forms on your site. While it is possible that this may lead to some confusion for Donors, leaving both enabled on your site allows you to fully test the new PayPal Donations gateway and confirm that transactions are being processed without putting your site in “Test Mode” and disrupting LIVE payments.
If you are using the Per Form Gateways add-on, each Donation Form can be configured individually. This allows you to test PayPal Donations on one or more Donation Forms without enabling it on all forms. However, the PayPal Donations Gateway may still be active on your forms in certain situations, so be sure to double-check that your Donation Forms are configured as you intend.
(Recommended) Connect the PayPal Sandbox and Test
Connecting PayPal Donations with the PayPal Sandbox requires that you put your site in “Test mode.” No live transactions are processed through any Payment Gateways while “Test mode” is enabled, so be sure to to consider the implications of this and plan accordingly. You can read more about “Test mode” here.
While it is recommended that you test PayPal Donations with the PayPal Sandbox, there are a few steps that are a bit more technical in nature.
Follow this step-by-step guide for connecting and testing PayPal Donations with the PayPal Sandbox.
Once you have tested and verified that PayPal Donations is working properly with the PayPal Sandbox, be sure to disable “Test mode” to allow LIVE transactions to be processed on your site.
Disable the PayPal Standard Gateway
Regardless of whether or not you choose to test PayPal Donations with the PayPal Sandbox, it’s a good idea to leave both the PayPal Donations Gateway and the PayPal Standard Gateway enabled side-by-side until you are comfortable that PayPal Donations is working properly.
However, because of the potential confusion for donors, you may want to limit the length of time that both are enabled.
When you are satisfied that PayPal Donations is working properly, you can disable the PayPal Standard gateway to remove it from your Donation Forms. To do this:
- Navigate to Donations > Settings > Payment Gateways > Gateways
- Scroll down to Enabled Gateways and locate the PayPal Standard gateway
- Uncheck the box in the “Enabled” column at the far right
- Click “Save Changes”
Optional: Remove PayPal Standard Settings
With the PayPal Standard Gateway no longer enabled, you may wish to remove the settings you had previously configured for it.
To do this, navigate to Donations > Settings > Payment Gateways > PayPal > PayPal Standard and delete the email address from the “PayPal Email” field, as well as any entries in any of the other text fields that you may have modified there.
Click “Save Changes” to complete the process.
