As time goes on and the number of orders in the site rises above ten thousand or so, you may notice that the loading time of the admin pages increases. This increase in loading time is due to certain tables in the database growing in size to be very large. The best way to restore the speed of the admin pages is to archive the data for oldest orders in the database and remove these records from the tables actively used by the database.
wp2print has order archiving functions that move data for old orders from the active database tables into tables specifically built to contain order archive data. When old order data is moved to the archive database tables, the core information for the orders is still stored in the database and can be accessed. However, this data is no longer visible to you in a convenient way using the standard tools. In particular, you will no longer see these orders listed in the WooCommerce > Orders page. Similarly, your customers will no longer see these old orders in the Order History tab of the My Account page.
When you first visit the Order Archive page, the system will show you a total count of the orders in the database summed by year. In the example below (from the middle of 2022), we can see about 5000 orders from 2020 in the database and about 7000 orders from 2021 in the active tables of the database:
In order to launch the order archiving process, simply enter a date and then hit the button "Archive". When you hit the button archive, orders older than the date you entered will be removed from the active database tables and migrated to database tables built specially to contain data on archived orders.
In general, we would recommend that you always leave the order data for at least 12 months in the active data tables. However, if you regularly receive re-orders from customer for order that are 18 months old or even 24 months old, then you should certainly leave these older orders in the active database.