WooCommerce Custom Product Tables

In July WooCommerce core developer Gerhard Potgieter announced the beta of the WooCommerce Custom Products Tables plugin that’s designed to improve the performance of WooCommerce stores by adding database tables that are designed for eCommerce.

This builds on the investment the WooCommerce development team made in 3.0 which introduced Data Stores and CRUD functionality which provides a uniform way of accessing a store’s data regardless of where it is saved.

Why products first? Simply because it’s one of the most complex Data Stores to change, and one which can positively impact stores of all sizes.

The plugin replaces the current WooCommerce product Data Store with one that makes use of brand new, normalised, dedicated product tables.

Performance Improvements

During tests two identical stores were set up on the same hosting provider with the same theme and WooCommerce settings, the only difference being one was running the Custom Products Table Feature Plugin.

To test the new product tables a lot of store data needed to be created easily  – specifically products, orders, and customers. To do that, the WooCommerce Smooth Generator was created – an easy to use development plugin which allows you to generate WooCommerce data to test the scalability of any of your development.

For the tests, one data set of 500 products was created and imported into two identical stores with Storefront as the theme and no other plugins – one store with the normal WooCommerce data structures and the other with the new feature plugin.

Both stores also had 70’000 orders in the database and meta data in the range of 1.4 million rows.

Installing the Plugin

To install the plugin you will need :

• Custom Products Table Feature Plugin : Download the Version 1 release.
• WooCommerce 3.5 Dev : You’ll need to switch to the master branch of WooCommerce.
• WP-CLI : To migrate products to the new data stores, you’ll need WP-CLI.

During the beta period access to the plugin’s functionality was limited so that feedback from the developer community can be gathered.

It is not recommend to install and use this on a live store.

This post first appeared on the official WooCommerce development blog with more info on data migration, tables added, compatibility with extensions and themes. The new product tables are supposed to be includd in a major WooCommerce version update early 2019.