How Many Products Can WooCommerce Handle In 2021? (Best Answer)

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With the rapid proliferation of e-commerce sites, there’s quite a competition to produce the best platforms for this purpose. Some platforms are intended for small stores, others for large ones.

For e-commerce site owners just starting, a popular choice is WordPress with WooCommerce. However, the value of WooCommerce for larger sites is less obvious.

For this reason, many people ask about how many products WooCommerce can handle.

WooCommerce can handle unlimited products. However, many larger WooCommerce sites run slowly or experience downtime, leading some to believe there’s a limit to the number of products it can handle. Fortunately, with the proper optimization and hosting, even a big WooCommerce site can run smoothly.

The rest of this article will discuss how WooCommerce can be effective for startup e-commerce sites and established ones.

We’ll also look at what can make a WooCommerce site run slowly and what we can do to ensure this doesn’t happen. Ultimately, competent development and adequate site maintenance are the keys to well-run WooCommerce sites.

WooCommerce Can Handle Unlimited Products

How do we know that WooCommerce is theoretically able to handle unlimited products? We know because the developers say that this is the case.

Simply put, there are WooCommerce sites that have tens of thousands of products, and they run just fine.

WooCommerce Is Easy to Use

The greatest advantage of WooCommerce is its ease of use. It even features a place for payment portals and other retail-specific functionalities.

If your site is already running WordPress, or you’ve built a WordPress site before, then you already have most of the knowledge needed to succeed.

WooCommerce Is a Great Way to Start With E-Commerce

Because WooCommerce is easy to use, it doesn’t require many resources to run your site. Often, an administrative professional or company founder can do most of the work.

Add to this the fact that WordPress is free to use; you can see how the overall build costs are low, and it’s possible to run a WooCommerce site on a small budget.

Besides being cost-effective, WooCommerce is a great platform overall. Around 5% of all websites are built with this plugin. Considering WooCommerce is exclusively for e-commerce sites, this is a significant market share.

However, the performance of your WooCommerce site is only as good as the other infrastructure you use. Therefore, over time, site speed can suffer.

What Makes a WooCommerce Site Run Slowly?

Many people think that WooCommerce has a limit on how many products it can handle because of slow websites. Site slowness is one way that WooCommerce’s ease of use works against it.

Additionally, many WooCommerce site owners don’t have a large development budget, so they don’t know how to optimize, which can lead to their site running slowly.

Several factors can make your WooCommerce site slow.

Lack of Website Caching

One reason that any site can run slowly is the lack of a caching plugin. Caching plugins essentially gather information from your website, then store it elsewhere.

Caching reduces the demand on your server from browsers requesting the same information constantly. If your website isn’t cached, then it can run slowly.

Insufficient Web Hosting

Unless you spend a lot of money on your server, every site owner needs web hosting. However, hosting packages limit the amount of server space and traffic you have.

As a WooCommerce site grows, the demand for server space is bound to grow. Therefore, you should adjust your hosting plan accordingly.

Large Download Files

No matter what platform you build on, e-commerce sites run more slowly if the files downloaded to a customer’s computer are large. This slowdown is especially problematic for e-commerce sites due to the number of pictures on each page.

Poor Coding

There are many ways to code a website, whether you’re on WordPress or some other platform. However, they’re not all equally effective. If your website has too many plugins to work effectively, or if the coding is clumsy, this can slow site traffic.

It’s possible that even your back-end processing with orders and “add to cart” requests are inefficient. In general, just be mindful of what plugins you add.

How You Can Make a Sizeable WooCommerce Site Run Efficiently

Fortunately, each of the problems I’ve mentioned are relatively easy to fix. All you need is a little bit of know-how and the right tools for your WooCommerce site to enjoy peak performance even with lots of products.

Optimize Your Site

Optimizing your site has two primary components: ensuring your site loads efficiently as customers browse and ensuring the site doesn’t crash.

The goal is to provide a good customer experience, no matter how many products are on your WooCommerce site.

Fortunately, optimizing a website is primarily a site maintenance issue. You can be confident that files will load quickly by using a speed-checking tool.

This tool will let you know how fast your site is loading from a user’s perspective. Then, you can start troubleshooting slowed site speeds.

Use suitable file sizes. The easiest way to speed up an e-commerce site is to ensure the media files are download-friendly. This generally means using relatively low-resolution photographs (unless you’re selling pictures).
Limit plugins and extra code. Not every plugin is a good plugin. Ensure that each plugin used on your WooCommerce site makes your site better, rather than slowing it down. Likewise, don’t include a lot of unnecessary code. When people want to shop, they usually aren’t in the mood for a lot of media anyway.
Ensure you have enough server space. Remember that the amount of server space you have helps dictate the amount of traffic you can handle. As your website grows, the traffic should too. Employ effective performance testing, then adjust your purchased server space and bandwidth accordingly. As an added benefit, performance testing helps you see if your code or file sizes are too big.
Use caching. Finally, don’t forget to cache your website. Caching is one of the best tools to ensure that your website runs smoothly. In fact, it’s usually effortless with a plugin and caching server space.

The Bottom Line: How Many Products Can WooCommerce Handle?

WooCommerce websites can handle an unlimited number of products. However, this makes some assumptions:

You’re optimizing your website for good performance
Your server space is sufficient
Your website is cached correctly

Fortunately, with proper planning, a WooCommerce based website is fully scalable. This way, you can have as much traffic as you want as the website grows.