What changes when you run a shop.
THE ADDITIONAL TABLES
WooCommerce adds its own tables for sessions, order data, lookup tables and product attributes.
Newer versions may store orders in dedicated tables rather than in wp_posts.
WHAT GROWS FASTEST
Order data, which accumulates permanently Session data, which should expire and sometimes does not Action scheduler tables, which record scheduled tasks and grow substantially Customer lookup tables
THE ACTION SCHEDULER
Frequently one of the largest tables on a WooCommerce site.
Completed actions are supposed to be cleaned periodically. Without a working cron job, they accumulate indefinitely.
If yours has hundreds of thousands of rows, check cron first.
SESSIONS
Expired sessions should be removed automatically. Check the table size; a very large session table indicates cleanup is not running.
BACKUP FREQUENCY
Daily at minimum. Orders cannot be recreated, and a restore to last week loses every order since.
THE INDEPENDENT RECORD
Your payment gateway holds transaction records outside your database entirely. That is effectively a second copy of your most critical data.
