How Many Products Can you Have in WooCommerce
WooCommerce has long been a contender for the most popular eCommerce platform. It powers a staggering 24% of all eCommerce stores worldwide coming ahead of Shopify which powers approximately 21% of eCommerce stores.
A fundamental aspect of running an eCommerce store is product handling. Often, a question that many people have in mind is “How many products can you have in WooCommerce?”
The simple answer is -theoretically- you can have as many products as you like in WooCommerce.
The limiting factor is usually not WooCommerce but several other factors. To help you understand the boundaries and possibilities of how you manage your products in WooCommerce, we have put together this article to help you make an informed decision and maximize your selling potential.
What are WooCommerce’s Product Limits?
Although you can force & control product quantities on your store, the truth is, WooCommerce by default does not have any fixed limits for the number of products that you can add or customers can buy.
Technically, this means that you can have an unlimited number of products on your WooCommerce store.
What this means? You could simply add unlimited number of products to your WooCommerce store. However, there are other practical limitations that will come into play when you scale your product catalog. Here are 4 factors that will affect your WooCommerce product limits.
1. Hosting Resources
Often hosting resources are the number one limiting factor when it comes to WooCommerce product limits. Shared hosting environments that cost $10 a month are just not going to cut it. Resources such as CPU power, memory, and disk space are often extremely limited with shared hosting plans.
Bandwidth tends to be limited as well for shared hosting accounts. To overcome these limits it’s easy to upgrade your host to a virtual private server (VPS) or a dedicated server. Both of these can support larger product catalogs.
2. Server Configurations
Several server configurations such as the PHP version, PHP input times, PHP upload size restrictions, custom PHP codes, and database configurations e.g. MySQL vs MariaDB, CDNs, etc. will all affect the limits of your WooCommerce store. Working with a knowledgeable developer or a hosting provider with good support can help you optimize your server configurations for a larger WooCommerce catalog.
3. Theme and Plugins Compatibility
Premade themes for WooCommerce are often restrictive, they can be difficult to scale, bloated with unnecessary plugins and are simply not built for unique business needs. A custom-built theme will usually be built with your unique business needs in mind, for example, your branding requirements, your custom functionality requirements, catalog size, and performance.
If you have a large catalog size, you may be forced to go for a custom-built WordPress theme. An experienced developer will ensure the themes are well-coded, regularly updated, and optimized to handle a high volume of products efficiently.
4. Backend Management and User Interface
It’s not exactly easy to manage a large product catalog with WooCommerce’s backend interface.
While the interface does have some bulk editing options, it’s not designed to handle large, extensive product catalogs efficiently. It can be challenging to navigate, search, and make bulk updates to products. If you have a large product catalog, you will want to familiarize yourself with WooCommerce’s product catalog import and export options. You will also need some Excel skills to be able to make bulk updates.
Optimization Strategies
As a business expands and grows its product catalog it becomes critical to address the scalability of WooCommerce, you’ll need to ensure your store can handle the increased traffic and larger volume of products without sacrificing performance. Here are some insights on optimizing your WooCommerce store based on the scale of your business.
Small-Scale Businesses
These will typically have a modest number of products on their WooCommerce store. It’s useful to implement a well-structured categorization and tagging system to easily manage and navigate your products. Utilizing product attributes is also an effective way to optimize product management.
Defining and categorizing variations such as color, size or materials will enable customers to find specific products more easily. Regular database optimization including removing unnecessary data and optimizing queries will also help with managing your product catalog. CDNs are also extremely useful for small-scale businesses to reduce server loads and increase page load times.
Medium Scale Businesses
These will typically have a larger product catalog and require more robust solutions to handle increased traffic and a larger product catalog. Medium-scale businesses should consider moving to a VPS or a dedicated server.
Alternatively, load balancing could also be implemented, where the workload is distributed across multiple servers, thereby improving performance and handling of higher traffic. Database optimizations and CDNs are also useful for medium-scale businesses.
Large-Scale Businesses
If your business has an extensive product catalog and consistently receives high traffic volumes, you will need to use some advanced strategies to ensure seamless operations. Large-scale businesses can consider Horizontal scaling, which involves implementing a distributed system architecture, where multiple servers work together to handle the load.
This will virtually allow for unlimited scalability. Cloud hosting solutions can also be effective, they allow you to scale resources based on demand and can handle peak traffic periods effectively. You may also want to consider Enterprise-level hosting that has dedicated options designed specifically for eCommerce businesses with large product catalogs.
Well-structured categorization, tagging, database optimization, and the implementation of CDNs are still useful for large-scale businesses.
Conclusion
We hope you now have a better idea of WooCommerce product limits. While WooCommerce itself does not impose a limit on the number of products other factors such as hosting resources, server configurations, and plugin/theme compatibilities can limit the number of products for WooCommerce. We have also looked at optimization strategies for different business sizes.
WooCommerce stores have tested millions of products successfully. If you are having trouble with uploading more products to your website, you need to check the factors mentioned above, they directly impact your website’s performance and scalability.