As 2023 draws to a close, WooCommerce is proud to announce a game-changing update set to elevate your WooCommerce store to new heights. Central to this transformation is the introduction of High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS), an enhancement designed to streamline the checkout experience for your clients and expedite your order processing.
From August 2023 onwards, all WooCommerce stores will embrace HPOS as a standard feature. For those who are already part of the WooCommerce family, the power to adopt HPOS will be in your hands until Woo makes it a universal requisite.
Let’s delve into the nitty-gritty of High-Performance Order Storage, its inception at WooCommerce, and how you can incorporate it into your store.
The Key Takeaways:
• HPOS is here to expedite your clients’ journey and to streamline your store management experience.
• Although HPOS is currently ready for testing and can be enabled or disabled as desired, not all extensions are compatible with it. Use these guidelines to check compatibility.
• Extension updates are in the hands of third-party developers. WooCommerce is in constant touch with them to ensure full compatibility.
Understanding High-Performance Order Storage
HPOS is a radical enhancement to the database technology of WooCommerce, a project Woo has been zealously developing since January 2022. Through extensive testing by both the internal and external developer community, Woo is confident about its potential.
By implementing HPOS, your store will experience a substantial boost, including a 5x improvement in order creation speed and a 1.5x faster checkout process. On the administrative side, order retrieval will be a breeze — up to 40x faster.
Why HPOS?
High-Performance Order Storage was born out of a demand from Woo’s developer community. It’s not just an upgrade that’ll foster your store’s growth and enhance the technology, but a catalyst that will also enrich the experience of all developers collaborating with WooCommerce.
What does this mean for order storage?
Earlier, your store’s orders were stored using the same technology that supports WordPress posts. HPOS signifies a shift to a new, robust, commerce-first database system that will scale seamlessly with your business.
This cutting-edge feature will turbocharge your store, equipping it with a modern, scalable database technology that evolves as your business expands.
When can you start using HPOS?
Woo has earmarked August 2023 for HPOS to go live. However, we understand that the developer partners may need additional time to ensure their extensions are HPOS-ready. This might push the release date a bit, but rest assured, HPOS is already accessible for experimental use.
The transition to making an extension HPOS-compatible is relatively quick, and Woo is optimistic about having a large suite of ready extensions at launch.
How does this affect your WooCommerce store?
Upon its release, HPOS will be the default for new stores. Existing stores will continue to operate as usual after August, but Woo strongly recommend giving HPOS a spin and experiencing the accelerated checkout process firsthand. You can also request your developer to enable HPOS for your store.
Although HPOS will eventually become the norm, Woo is ensuring a sufficient transition period for a smooth switchover for everyone. All existing stores will be duly informed prior to the universal implementation of HPOS.
Who can switch to High-Performance Order Storage right now?
If your store is running on WooCommerce 7.1 or a later version, feel free to try HPOS anytime. It’s currently an opt-in feature under your advanced settings. However, it’s crucial to thoroughly understand the implications of the new feature by reviewing the documentation.
As usual, if you need help with testing and/or setting up High-Performance Order Storage for your WooCommerce website, we’d be happy to help! Feel free to contact our developers below and we can guide you through the process.