WooCommerce 4.0 came with a big warning and a few hidden surprises

All of which are bloat for the CMS:

• WooCommerce Admin – A plugin which was being very heavily pushed via the back-end, and one with terrible reviews
• New reports view (Analytics) – CMS is not the place to churn numbers, do not run this if you have any sense of speed or respect for resources on your server
• Notification bar – Bizarre is all I can say here. When I refreshed post the update, I assumed this was some Gutenberg flaw I had not disabled, it’s unfortunately not and it has no option to remove it within WooCommerce

What this Bloat Looks like

A perpetual bar, that seems to have no context of its state i.e. you see the same bar site wide as an admin, reviews and other things are linked. Its like the Windows Vista dock or similar nonsense UI/UX.

New Analytics Area

A re draw of the old setup, cant say I see any huge need for this, All data should be taken offsite to be crunched, this idea of using your sites resources is wrong, wrong, wrong. Data gets crunched in excel, Tableau etc. Not in your $40 a year hosting account. Even with a good host why put this ‘work’ on the CMS.

This also can crash or take down your site, nothing is written to be backwards compatible, another rushed job from the people who are contributors but still work for one of Automattics’ companies, so confusing, and tbh just another disappointment for the CMS.

The move to align everything with Gutenberg and kick out the other page builders is becoming more and more worrying. WP is no longer guided by sense or community. I still assume this is all to lead up to a sale or IPO here at some stage.

This is not to help the community or the website owners.

How to remove this bloat

https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-dashboard-for-woocommerce/

This will Also create Bloat in Your Database

I have not as of yet cleaned an install but the following are new tables added by this update:

• wp_wc_admin_notes
• wp_wc_admin_note_actions
• wp_wc_category_lookup
• wp_wc_customer_lookup
• wp_wc_order_coupon_lookup
• wp_wc_order_product_lookup
• wp_wc_order_stats
• wp_wc_order_tax_lookup

Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/disable-dashboard-for-woocommerce/

As with any update: backup and use reliable WP specific hosting, ideally a managed WP hosting account, not generic web hosting.

Summary

• WooCommerce 4.0 launched with a lot of pointless tools
• They can be disabled 🙂
• Do not run massive data crunching in your CMS
• Keep an eye on WordPress PR and take it with a massive pinch/punch of salt
  • I advise no one update anything in the next few months without testing this new hidden stuff extensively!
  • WP lost its way with Gutenberg, this now seems to be coming to WC
• Gutenberg is still terrible, if you were wondering 🙂
• I dont seem to be a lone here either: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/new-4-0-dashboard-is-so-bad/ Im sure the mods will disable this topic as they do and then delete it 🙂