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Coldstash – Archive Old Orders for WooCommerce

Archive old WooCommerce orders out of the live order tables. Restore any order anytime, nothing deleted, Analytics reports unchanged.

by Narek Zakarian · github.com/narek13/coldstash · website

★ 0stars

Install

Download source zip No release zip yet

This is the repository archive. It installs, but the folder name will carry the branch suffix and updates will not flow.

Install straight from GitHub with WP-CLI:

wp plugin install https://github.com/narek13/coldstash/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
No built-in updater. New versions won't appear under Dashboard → Updates. Install new releases yourself, or let Git Updater track the repository.
Readme github.com/narek13/coldstash ↗

Move old WooCommerce orders out of the live order tables into archive tables in the same database. Archived orders stay searchable and restorable, and WooCommerce Analytics reports are left untouched — historical revenue figures do not change when you archive.

Status: 1.0.0, not yet released. See docs/TECHNICAL-SPEC.md for the full design, and CLAUDE.md for the decisions behind it.

Why

WooCommerce's own most-voted feature request — auto-archive old orders, 118 votes, open since 2023 — with merchants reporting 125,000 to 900,000+ orders, 8 million rows of order meta and 3.5 GB databases.

HPOS already fixed most of the slow-order-list problem. What it did not fix is total database size and the satellite tables it never migrated: wc_orders_meta, woocommerce_order_items, woocommerce_order_itemmeta and order notes in wp_comments. On a large store those hold far more rows than wc_orders itself. That is what this archives.

Requirements

  • WordPress 6.4+
  • WooCommerce 9.0+ with HPOS enabled and compatibility-mode sync off
  • PHP 8.1+
  • InnoDB order tables (archiving runs each order in a transaction)

Legacy post-based order storage is not supported. The plugin activates, detects it, and stays idle with an explanation rather than doing something unsafe.

How it works

  1. Candidate query finds orders in terminal statuses older than the age threshold, excluding anything with active downloads or attached to Subscriptions, Bookings or Memberships.
  2. Payload builder captures every row belonging to the order — six order tables plus notes and download permissions — as a versioned JSON document.
  3. Archive writes it to wp_coldstash_orders, reads it straight back out of MySQL, and compares checksums.
  4. Only then are the live rows deleted, all inside one transaction.

Restore is the exact reverse, preserving the original order ID.

Development

composer install
composer smoke   # standalone: no WordPress, no database
composer lint
composer test

bin/smoke-test.php exercises the eligibility rules and payload checksum in about a second — the two pieces that must never be wrong and happen to be pure PHP.

Extending

Filters: coldstash_should_archive_order, coldstash_candidate_exclusions Actions: coldstash_order_archived, coldstash_order_restored, coldstash_run_completed

WP-CLI:

wp coldstash preview
wp coldstash run [--batch=<n>] [--max=<n>]
wp coldstash status
wp coldstash restore <id> | --all
wp coldstash verify

License

GPL-2.0-or-later