Fast Woo Order Lookup

WooCommerce’s Order and Subscription pages allow store owners to search for orders and subscriptions by customer name, email, and other attributes. By default, it does a general substring search. For example, if you put OllieJones into the search box, it will search with LIKE '%OllieJones%' using the leading wildcard %. That’s astonishingly slow on sites with many orders.

Upon activation this plugin uses ActionScheduler to run a background process to create a special-purpose index table, a table of trigrams, to speed up that search. Then it uses those trigrams to search for orders.

The downside: the trigram table takes database space and takes time to generate.

The orders page itself contains a slow query to look up meta_keys. This fixes that query’s performance too, using a cache of available values.

If you have problems

The WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystems offer many optional features enabled by plugins. And, WooCommerce sites run on many different versions of database server. It is not possible to test this plugin on every imaginable combination. So, you may have problems getting it to work.

Sometimes the process of creating the index table does not complete correctly. And, sometimes you cannot find some orders after the index is created.

If you tell the author about these problems, he will attempt to fix them. Please create a support topic, then visit Site Health, view the Info tab, click the Copy Site Info to Clipboard button, and paste that information into the support topic. And, of course, please describe what is going wrong.

Credits

Thanks to Leho Kraav for bringing this problem to my attention.

Thanks to Sebastian Sommer and Maxime Michaud for using early versions of the plugin on large stores, and to Maxime Michaud for creating the transation into French.

Thanks to Jetbrains for the use of their software development tools, especially PhpStorm. It’s hard to imagine how a plugin like this one could be developed without PhpStorm’s tools for exploring epic code bases like WordPress’s.

How can I learn more about making my WordPress site more efficient?

We offer several plugins to help with your site’s database efficiency. You can read about them here.