Orders are the most valuable records in your store, and WooCommerce has changed where it keeps them. It now stores orders in High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS): dedicated tables built for commerce, in place of the shared WordPress post tables.
New stores have it on by default, and older stores turn it on in the advanced settings. WooCommerce flags any extension that is not yet compatible, which shows us exactly which plug-ins to check before an update touches your orders.
Owners who would rather leave servers behind can move to a hosted platform with Shopify themes and checkout extensions, and we migrate the WooCommerce catalog, buyer accounts and orders across. For stores staying on WooCommerce, every update we run follows four steps.
- We list every extension that reads or writes orders and confirm it supports the new order storage.
- We test checkout, refunds and reports on a private copy of your store.
- We switch the new order storage on in that copy first, then on the live store, with a backup between steps.
- We remove plug-ins nobody uses, so every future update is quicker to test.