WooCommerce: The Need For Custom Order Tables

Scaling WooCommerce stores while ensuring optimum performance and pushing a store live from staging while keeping all the orders and customers intact are significant problems stores face, even today. 

Each time a consumer places an order on a WooCommerce store, it adds dozens of order data and entries to the WordPress postmeta database table – which creates a major problem for stores that handle huge volumes of orders and eventually results in performance degradation. 

Hence, WooCommerce received several requests over the years to resolve this issue and make separate and custom tables for each WooCommerce entity – without affecting the site and existing extensions. 

And finally, WooCommerce is now working on the custom order tables implementation to solve the bottleneck issues and ensure more store stability. 

In this article, we introduce you to the WooCommerce custom order tables – what is it, the new tables added to the structure, and how they can benefit your WooCommerce store. Let’s begin!

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WooCommerce: 10 Crucial Issues That Should Be Fixed Right Now

I just spent the last 3 days in Porto with another 2,300 WordPressers at the first in-person WordCamp Europe since Berlin 2019. I had a blast, held a nice (yet long) workshop, spoke to many, but got tired too soon.

Later on, I realized that that tiredness was something more serious – in fact I tested positive against COVID for the first time in my life, and I’m now in self-isolation hoping it won’t last long… Another 7 days without my kid – send help!

Anyhow, what really struck me at WCEU 2022, and based on various chats and some data that I’ll share below, is that the WooCommerce ecosystem is in trouble.

A nicer way to put that? WooCommerce is not moving forward as fast as it should, and unless some key issues are addressed right now, in a few years time we all may pay the consequences.

Please note, this is not a rant. It’s a proper analysis, full of actionable information.

@ WooCommerce team - if you're reading this - my plan is to give you constructive feedback and tell you what the community (really) thinks, needs and wants, so that you can get a better picture of the current situation. I know you've already started working on this, so this is just a recap/reminder and a way to get the whole community realigned. 

In this post, I will share my worries, my fears, the current WooCommerce issues, some data I collected at WCEU 2022 and then a list of actionable solutions that may be implemented in order to clear the backlog and get back on track – asap. Enjoy!

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WooCommerce: Bulk Delete Orders / Products Super Fast

There are times when you have thousands of WooCommerce orders, products, categories, tags, coupons, customers or custom fields and the “Bulk Edit > Delete” option in the WordPress dashboard is simply not cost- and time-effective.

Maybe because your website goes down as it can’t process that much information at the same time, or maybe because you’re on a low budget and can’t afford to hit “delete” 100 or 1000 times by hand.

Thankfully, WooCommerce information is stored in the WordPress database, which means we can access it, write a “SQL DELETE statement”, and bulk delete anything you like, in seconds. Of course, and you will find warnings below, NEVER DO THIS on a live website as I can’t guarantee this won’t have any side effects.

So, have fun!

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WooCommerce Database Explained: How It Works and Where To Find Data

The term “database” is widely used and known to millions of people, but the proportion of people who have it in their vocabulary without understanding what it describes is sizable.

Databases are at the core of so many digital services today that it is easy to overlook them entirely, but whether you run a shopping site or a business server, building an understanding of them is worthwhile regardless of whether or not you are directly responsible for administration duties.

Having a grasp of the underpinnings of what a database is and how it works is sensible, especially if you run a WooCommerce site and you want to make optimal use of all that this platform has to offer.

To that end, here is an overview of the database fundamentals to bring you up to speed.

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