Since January 2022, WooCommerce has been putting in considerable effort to streamline its performance by concentrating on Orders and figuring out better ways to manage Order data. WooCommerce aimed to enhance the experience for merchants and customers while providing developers with a more straightforward system. This led to the development of High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS).
WooCommerce launched HPOS as an opt-in feature in November to collaborate with its developer community to further enhance it while fixing a few bugs and continually testing its platform to improve its performance.
HPOS has led to significant performance improvements, including faster common requests by up to 30% (up to 43% for 95 percentile response time).
Initially, WooCommerce focused on order creation because it directly impacted the checkout flow. With HPOS, WooCommerce achieved significant performance improvements, including up to a 5x improvement during the order creation. In its testing, after enabling HPOS, the checkout flow was up to 1.5x faster.
The new tables have their indexes, resulting in up to a 10x improvement in meta_query lookups and a 40x improvement in searching customer orders. HPOS also reduces the overall database size by eliminating the need to store data in the _posts and _postmeta tables. This results in performance improvements across all queries, not just those relating to orders.
Besides, maintaining order data in core WordPress tables creates unnecessary complexity. HPOS has simplified extracting order-specific data for backups or reporting by creating new data stores.
HPOS ensures scalability, reliability, and simplicity. With it, orders are now scalable, and merchants of any size can handle millions of orders without worrying about performance. Merchants can also back up order data more efficiently, giving them peace of mind that their customer data is secure.
All extensions, themes, or custom Woo CRUD codes are already compatible with HPOS. However, extensions must be marked compatible for merchants to use them with HPOS. To learn how to mark your extension compatible, you can take a look at this guide.
By August 2023, High-Performance Order Storage will be the default experience on all new WooCommerce stores. In addition, from August, any extensions not marked compatible will no longer be able to be activated on new stores.
If you have any questions, please feel free to comment on this post, or you can refer to the available documentation on how to mark extensions as compatible and get started right away.
