WooCommerce Scaling FAQs

Contrary to a persistent myth, WordPress and WooCommerce scale very effectively to work equally well for large enterprises and small stores alike.

We believe in using our own software, which is why WooCommerce.com runs on both WordPress and WooCommerce, handling a large number of products, customers, orders, subscriptions, and transactions.

Here are questions we get most often and the answers.

What is scalability?

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Scalability is the ability to grow a store’s size in terms of products, customers, and orders, without it negatively affecting the store’s performance.

What influences scaling?

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There are four major factors that influence the scaling:

• Traffic. Traffic distribution is the biggest influencer on your store’s performance. For example, when you run a big sale on one product, you’ll concentrate all traffic on the specific product page and the cart. Other stores may have high-traffic volume, but distributed more evenly across multiple products.
• WooCommerce code. Our team is constantly working to improve WooCommerce. Scalability and performance are high on our agenda, and we spend a lot of time optimizing code toward this goal.
• Other system code. WooCommerce will never be the only software running on your store. You likely have a theme and at least a few other plugins. Optimized code can help improve store performance, and identifying and fixing non-optimized code is essential for effective scaling.
• Server hardware. Hosting companies often design their hosting packages to cater to specific traffic volumes. Choosing a good host and selecting the package best suited to the amount of traffic your site will receive, are key to successfully scaling your store. Talk to potential website hosts and ask about the best package for your site.

A mix of the above factors can influence the scalability of your store. As your store grows, you should ideally invest in the infrastructure, and a team to support it, that ensure your store’s performance and speed remains unaffected.

What is the maximum WooCommerce can handle?

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The sky is the limit. We’ve seen instances of shops with 100,000+ products listed, handling thousands of transactions per minute. In those cases, they had great hosting support and their own developer team focused on optimization.

We have stores of different types and sizes in our WooCommerce Showcase.

How do I test the performance of my store?

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There are a few ways:

• Average “Add to cart” calls per minute is a good indication of demands on your server. Use our Google Analytics extension to track add-to-cart calls.
• Google Chrome Dev Tools include a timeline tool that shows how long your store takes to load and which elements are taking the most time.
• Google PageSpeed Tools allows you to test the speed of each page and gives suggestions on how to improve your store.

For detailed information, premium services like New Relic give a myriad of information.

How does WordPress manage updates?

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It is important to have up-to-date code running your store, as the most recent version of software has the most optimized performance.

WordPress has one-click update options for its core, plugins and themes. However, when you start with enterprise stores, we advise using a staging server and/or version control software. Having a good backup system, such as any of Jetpack’s Premium plans, can help with that.

Do you have a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?

We recommend using the Jetpack extension with its high-speed CDN, which is included even in the free plan. This feature offloads images to a lightning-fast server leading to significantly improved load times.