Turn it on
- Go to WooCommerce → Powerups and switch on Advanced order search.
- Open WooCommerce → Orders, pick a type from the Search by dropdown next to the search box, and search.
The Search by dropdown on the Orders list, open and showing the search types
Search types
Each type matches only what it says. For example,
150 as Exact total finds orders totalling 150, not also order #150. WooCommerce’s own options and “All” still match a typed number against order IDs, as WooCommerce always has.
Exact total and Total range cap very large amounts at 999,999,999,999, the largest total they search for. A number too long to read as an amount finds nothing.
Settings
Performance
Types marked Slower look inside text and can’t use database indexes: Customer, Billing email, Billing phone, Company, Product, SKU, Variation, Coupon, Shipping method, Payment method, Transaction ID, Custom metadata and Order notes. On stores with many orders, a search can take several seconds. Order number, the totals, Order status and Customer ID stay fast.- With no keys listed under Custom metadata: only these keys, a metadata search reads every order’s metadata. On large stores, list the keys you need.
- A Custom metadata search finds the matching orders once and uses that list for both the page and its count. On a store with a million order metadata rows, the search itself for one exact value went from 1.9 to 0.3 seconds. When more than 10,000 orders match, it goes back to the slower way and reads the metadata twice.
- Product, SKU and Variation use WooCommerce’s order-product lookup table, which WooCommerce Analytics keeps, so they stay fast on big stores. Orders missing from that table are still checked, but if very many are missing (Analytics off, or history never imported), these searches read every order’s items and get slow. You can import history in WooCommerce → Analytics → Settings.
- In the Trash view, Product and SKU searches always take the slow path, because Analytics doesn’t import trashed orders.
- If a SKU matches more than 5,000 products and the Analytics data is missing, the search is refused with a notice: “More than 5,000 products match this SKU, too many to check every order. Type more of the SKU, or import historical data in WooCommerce → Analytics → Settings.”
Masked fields stay hidden
Custom metadata and Variation searches never match fields that the Order meta inspector masks for you, such as tokens, secrets and card data, so masked values can’t be guessed by searching. Look-alike keys (different case, accents, full-width letters, zero-width characters) are caught too. Staff who are allowed to reveal masked values search them normally. To keep this fast, a background job checks your store’s metadata keys, at most once a day.Data
Known limitations
- Metadata keys added since the last daily check, or rarely used keys (beyond the 1,000 most used), rely on a database check that can’t fold every Unicode form. A field listed exactly (without
*) doesn’t hide a stored key with a trailing line break from search unless that key is on the checked list. The Order meta box still masks it. These keys are set by code (plugins, gateways), not by shoppers.