WooCommerce has a status widget that it loads in your admin panel by default on all installs (it also outputs a Generator tag on your frontend). The status widget is meant to give you a quick overview of how your WooCommerce store is performing.
However if you have a store that is very large, this widget can really slow down the loading time of your admin panel. The primary issue with the status widget is the queries it performs on very active shops (no matter how much revenue is being generated), can be a bottleneck. This bottleneck is really noticeable if you have a lot of orders as the widget takes forever to process the query.
Can’t I Turn It Off With Screen Options?
Well, you could. The screen options functionality allows you to easily hide a widget on the main dashboard page. However, this is not a fool proof solution. In fact, if you disable say the Welcome Box and then look at your HTML code the widget is still in fact loading but it’s just not visible to your eye.
Furthermore, screen options do not take affect for every user on the website. If you have a store manager that keeps your products up to date, they will also generate those same queries.
Here Comes The Code!
Ah yes! Code, it is wonderful. You can disable the box all together, which is what I recommend for all WooCommerce stores. This widget provides basically nothing useful, so if you didn’t have it you wouldn’t be lost. In fact, this could be said about many dashboard widgets, but it’s best to leave the quick draft widget out of this.
function sertmedia_remove_woocommerce_status_widget(){
remove_meta_box( 'woocommerce_dashboard_status', 'dashboard', 'normal');
}
add_action('wp_user_dashboard_setup', 'sertmedia_remove_woocommerce_status_widget', 20);
add_action('wp_dashboard_setup', 'sertmedia_remove_woocommerce_status_widget', 20);The above code can be included inside of your child theme’s functions.php file or your own site-specific plugin.
Dude. Can’t You Just Give Me A Download Link?
Well, I could so here is a prepackaged plugin with the above solution. You can simply drop this and install it like you would any other plugin and it will work out of the box. You can also
Closing Thoughts
This is a nice widget that the WooCommerce developers wanted to include to give you a brief overview of your website. It does it quite well. However, when you have a larger store, it’s only going to be a source of slowness for your admin panel.
If you have any questions about the above plugin feel free to let me know in the comments section below! Or by opening a bug report on the GitHub Repo!
