Why not to use the WooCommerce Customer History Plugin

WooCommerce is a solid, easy-to-use plugin for adding e-commerce to an existing WordPress site. Since WooCommerce is running in WordPress, it means there are many plugin options out there.

One useful plugin is WooCommerce Customer History. The plugin will track how customers browse the site, which would allow you to see the products customers are browsing. But when used on a site, the plugin will add a slow admin-ajax.php POST request on every page, which will add a delay of 300-500ms on every post, page, and product on the site.

Tracking analytics in a site’s database is never a good idea when that should be tracked using an external service. Google Analytics is free and works with WooCommerce. There are many other analytics options for WordPress which work well.

The WooCommerce Customer History plugin will track the browsing data into a custom database table named:

wp_wcch_page_history

After you have created a site database backup, you can safely delete (or drop) the database table that the WooCommerce History plugin was using.

On some sites, that specific plugin created database table was found to be storing 300-500MB of data. Between using admin-ajax.php and causing that delay on every post, page, and product on the site, it also means that the created custom database table will end up bloating the site database with data that should never be stored in the site database. Google Analytics is still one of the easiest options for tracking site analytics. There are many other analytics options like Heap. Analytify is a solid option if you do want to use Google Analytics with WordPress and WooCommerce plugins. This specific plugin, GA Google Analytics, is another easy option to easily add Google Analytics to your site.