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From active users in the various WordPress groups on Facebook, as well as among the various email and telephone requests that we usually receive, one of the most popular questions we are asked is the one regarding the number of products that WooCommerce can manage.
It sounds something like this: "I should do an ecommerce with n-thousand products, is WooCommerce okay?"
Another variation to the question sounds like: "I should do an ecommerce with n-thousand products. Can I use WooCommerce or should I use Magento or Prestashop?"
The following are the diverse responses on social media from users of varying skill levels, each with their own opinions. Some recommend Magento because Nike uses it, while others advise against it because there's an article online that even WooCommerce can handle stores with over half a million products.
Typically, these threads about WooCommerce on social media always end up in a drunken rant, with banal and childish comments that even descend into flames with mutual insults and the usual “ You don't know who I am. ”
Taking it for granted that conversations like this don't help anyone , we thought we'd write this article, which isn't necessarily meant to be the absolute truth, but at least a surrogate of personal considerations and technical experiences derived from those who, from 2005 to 2019, had the opportunity to do system engineering for companies that work at high levels on Magento, as well as other companies and developers who are more or less experienced (or absolutely novices and "runaways") with the creation of WooCommerce stores.
We personally believe that an ecommerce platform should be chosen especially for the features it offers rather than relying on the number of products it can handle.
For example, if we needed to manage a multistore type shop (where for example each store responds to a different domain or even where each store is verticalized only on a certain product, for example one for glasses and one for shoes) surely Magento or at least Prestashop would be solutions ready to meet our needs, while a WooCommerce should be extended and integrated with additional plugins with the relative pros and cons.
The fact remains that WooCommerce is able to offer excellent potential to those who have the desire to develop profitable ecommerce as we can see for example from this screenshot of one of our customers:
Regardless of the irrevocable decision to use WooCommerce, let's try to answer the simple question above: " How many products can WooCommerce handle? "
Read in this way, the question may sound misleading, as the quantity of manageable products should be at least inherent to the pleasantness of navigation, the fluidity of the same and in short, give a very nice and comfortable user experience.
So that a concept is clear, no one is interested in having an ecommerce with 100 products if the navigation is slow and takes 10 seconds for each page to load.
Otherwise, it could be if the loading time is less than 2 seconds even in the face of 1000 users connected simultaneously.
Strictly speaking, we therefore try to make considerations that are in line with the expectations of the client but above all of the end customer who may be comfortably browsing the site while sipping a hot chocolate in cheerful company, perhaps from his new iPhone.
The plausible answer to those who ask us “ can a WooCommerce store manage 100 products with fluidity and a satisfactory user experience? ” would be: “ Yes, but under certain conditions. ”
If we take the Intershop website ( https://www.inter-shop.gr/ ) as an example, we can say that this e-commerce site developed with WooCommerce could be a clear example of how a WooCommerce site can manage around 170 thousand products without problems.
Intershop.gr with its 160 thousand products.
Inter Shop is an online store that imports and sells products from various Greek companies. Their online store is based on the WooCommerce platform and offers over 158.000 products across categories such as electronic gadgets, electrical items, automotive tools, and more. Inter Shop is limited to Greece and serves consumers worldwide. However, shipping costs vary by country.
Their website, inter-shop.gr, is based on the Flatsome WordPress theme . According to statistics from WPThemeDetector, this WordPress theme from UXThemes is ranked #13 in the top WordPress themes list. FlatSome is a highly customizable theme, well-designed primarily for WooCommerce users.
According to WhoIsHostingThis, Inter Shop is using CloudFlare which is popular for its speed and performance related services thus making it a reliable web performance and security company and giving us all the more reason to believe that WooCommerce is easily scalable if you have adequate hosting support and lean and well-done application development.
Inter Shop uses W3 Total Cache, a plugin that helps improve website speed and performance , giving the user an overall better site experience with loading times of less than two seconds.
So once again, the answer is yes. Yes, it is possible to run large stores with WooCommerce.
Why does it go slow with just a few products?
One of the objections of those who do not recommend the use of WooCommerce is that having tried and tested the use on a site with few products (even a few hundred), the experience was so slow, negative and traumatic that WooCommerce was considered a choice. very bad (even not recommended) for all those who had decided to use it. Obviously they did not ask themselves in the least if everything had been done correctly and if the cause (or causes) of a bad final result there could be more reasons attributable to them.
Because there's a big difference between realizing that a site built with WooCommerce can be excruciatingly slow, and also knowing why. Anyone can throw away a WooCommerce built by their cousin , but porting the site to analysis and profiling tools like New Relic and understanding its bottlenecks (and maybe even fixing them) is a feat for few. Just as few people choose a hosting provider like ours , which provides adequate technologies for hosting a WooCommerce site. Starting with proper partition mounting, proper system and service tuning, the use of multiple caching layers (Redis.io, Memcached, Zend OpCache, W3 Total Cache, Varnish, NGINX Cache), and the use of InnoDB tables rather than the antiquated MyISAM ones, in a global context where performance truly is everything.
In most cases, however, good system tuning, even with all the precautions in the world and the best of intentions, won't be able to solve structural problems caused by "server-killing" themes or plugins, which should be banned from WordPress because they overload the database or processes with queries, making everything extremely slow and unusable. Good system tuning and good hosting with good caches can perhaps reduce the initially unsatisfactory user experience from 10 seconds to 3. Good debugging with an application-specific resolution (perhaps deleting or replacing a plugin) can eliminate the problem, allowing loading in just 1 second.
Slow plugins. An example with WPML.
One of the examples we always mention when a client decides to plan to translate their current site into languages other than their current ones is not using WPML.
Despite its widespread and well-publicized popularity, WPML (the most popular WordPress translation plugin) certainly isn't a standout performer. Implementing custom solutions for translating different languages, such as proprietary tables, multiple joins, and so on, only results (beyond the obvious multilingual translation of WordPress and WooCommerce pages) in significantly slowing down page loading speed.
While it is true that on a fast site increasing the loading speed to 100% can mean having a site that uses WPML that still loads in 2 seconds instead of 1, on slower sites it can mean that a site loads in six seconds instead. of 2 or 3 and this is not tolerable.
A real-world experience we had with one of our clients involved significantly improving frontend optimization, reducing loading times from about 6 seconds to less than 1 second by serving the previously generated cached page to the non-logged-in user. However, the problem persisted when the user (for example, a retailer with their own price lists) decided to log in and thus navigate without benefiting from the Varnish static cache. At that point, all the server optimization was lost, and the site became irremediably slow again.
What to do then?
The site was simply still in only one language and despite using WPML with Italian as the main language it had not yet been translated into other languages, so the wisest and most sensible solution was to extract all the articles, pages and products from WPML and insert them outside of it and then disable and finally delete WPML.
Here is where the site is back lightning even for logged in users.
The only valid alternative to the extremely slow WPML is Multilingualpress ( https://multilingualpress.org ), a choice also recommended by other Performance Based hosting providers such as WP Engine, as its structure based on the native WordPress multisite feature (instead of the spaghetti code and proprietary tables of WPML) allows you to obtain maximum performance and functionality without inventing strange and extremely slow stratagems like WPML does, now at the end of a disgraced career.
It costs about $ 200 a year for each single site, but you sure don't screw up your guts like WPML does.
Obviously we wanted to focus on WPML, because it is common practice to notice a noticeable slowdown at the time of translation into the language, but it is not the only plugin capable of killing ecommerce by making you slow as snails. As a rule, all those who make use of AJAX calls to the backend are advisable to avoid, as well as all those who have non-primary functions and are left unpunished to massacre the DB with queries.
Other negative factors for a performing WooCommerce store?
Other negative factors for a performing WooCommerce that may not be able to handle a good number of products or a good traffic spike are:
Unsuitable shared hosting solutions.
What would be the sense of lending economy and thrift in spending 100 euros a year rather than 100 euros a month for an optimized managed and managed dedicated server if in fact your business is worth hundreds of thousands of euros a year or a month? It seems absurd but it has happened to see companies with slow sites in shared hosting with turnover of a few hundred thousand euros a year that did not want to switch to dedicated servers because according to the administrator it was too expensive. In this case, change jobs and close the business. Go to the beach rather than pretend to be an entrepreneur.
Lack of SSD or nVME disks in RAID.
Still related to the point mentioned above about "Unsuitable shared hosting solutions," the lack of adequate SSD or nVME disks can also cause slowdowns in reading and writing, resulting in increased latency that can create significant bottlenecks and overall slowness. There's no need to elaborate on the details or elaborate technical details; just take a look at the following benchmark to understand the importance of an SSD or, better yet, nVME disk over traditional mechanical HDDs.
Lack of adequate software technologies.
Let's be clear once and for all, if you think hosting means buying an account with CPanel and Plesk from iron (hardware) vendor companies without doing any software tuning and optimization, unfortunately for you they are scamming you.
To seriously host a WooCommerce project, you need a stack based on these software components: NGINX with http / 2, PHP-FPM with Zend OpCache, REDIS.IO and Memcache together with Varnish in reverse proxy and an adequate configuration to work in synergy with WordPress and WooCommerce. If these points are not satisfied and your supplier is not able to provide you with these services, run away because your supplier is not able to do his job very well or to push your store to the maximum. The names of the software mentioned above are not our exclusive recipe because "it is beautiful and we like it", but the recommended requirements and best practices of all high performance hosting.
A real test of one of our customers with over 10 thousand products in WooCommerce
Wanting to stay in reality and not just tell what other ecommerce that we have seen online and documented in this article with our research do, we wanted to give a practical demonstration of an ecommerce made with WooCommerce that has over 10 thousand products published.
Contrary to the usual clichés that WooCommerce is only suitable for small sites with few products, otherwise it starts to be extremely slow, in the video you can see with your own eyes the fluidity of navigation of a WooCommerce that has loaded over 10 thousand products.
Conclusions
We can therefore conclude this overview on the possibility of being able to build large ecommerce with WooCommerce, with the affirmation that WooCommerce gives the possibility to do it in an efficient and elegant way, but it is up to both the developer and the system engineer to make careful choices so that all the problems under construction that would penalize performance, and (as far as the system engineer is concerned) to implement all the best practices by sizing the best ad-hoc solution for the project both on the hardware side and on the software side.
If you need to evaluate the possibility of optimizing your site and increasing the speed considerably, do not hesitate to contact us.
