Hundreds or thousands of products bring their own problems.
WHAT GETS DIFFICULT
Admin pages slow to load Search and filtering slow for customers Imports timing out Database growth affecting everything
PRACTICAL MEASURES
Reduce products shown per page in both admin and shop Index the database properly; some optimisation plugins do this for WooCommerce Use a dedicated product filter plugin rather than relying on default filtering, which is slow at scale Consider a search plugin, since the default WordPress search is poor at product search
IMPORTING AT SCALE
Import in batches of a few hundred rather than thousands. Raise max_execution_time to 300 first, and run large imports at a quiet hour.
VARIATIONS
A product with thousands of generated variations is a common cause of a shop becoming unusable. Reduce the attribute combinations or split into separate products.
IMAGES
A thousand products with six images each is six thousand uploads, multiplied by generated sizes. Watch disk and inode usage, and optimise images before uploading.
WHEN TO MOVE UP
A large catalogue with real traffic eventually outgrows shared hosting. Ask us to look at the usage.
