How Many Products Can WooCommerce Stores handle?

This is a question that many people often ask when they are starting their first eCommerce store.

The answer is: It depends.

There is no hard and fast rule set by WooCommerce developers about the number of that can be loaded to a single store/website. People can have as many products or as few products as they want to have in their stores and their WooCommerce stores would still run fine.

It’s all about the volume of traffic and the capacity of your web hosting server that makes a big difference. So, if your hosting solution has the bandwidth to manage a store with more products, you can easily add them. If not, then your store won’t be able to handle the products and will crash more often.

To understand how WooCommerce website hosting directly impacts store performance and products limit, keep reading this blog.

Will Adding More Products to WooCommerce stores Cause Problems?

If you look for the answer to the maximum product limit on the official WooCommerce website, you will get the same reply ‘sky is the limit’.

It is because the team itself doesn’t have a concrete idea about how many products can be added to a WooCommerce store. In short, the solution is completely scalable. It offers storage capacity that can be increased based on the number of servers available. The software doesn’t have any limits or constraints that can limit performance. At least that’s the common knowledge in 2021.

Most people use WooCommerce stores for 100,000 products or more. However, no one has actually publicly mentioned how many products they have in their stores or how many orders they receive from them.

Is Your WooCommerce Store Taking Ages to Load? Get in Touch

WooCommerce Product Limit Depends on Multiple Factors

The problem with WooCommerce stores product handling is three-fold:

• Bandwidth: The amount of data that can be transferred to the server and back in a limited time period (usually per second)
• Storage: The capacity of the server to store product data on the system.
• Performance (RAM): The performance of the server including the total RAM allocated for the performance of the website.

There are other factors at play that directly impact the WooCommerce server performance. These include the complete hosting stack, the total number of caches used on both server and application layers, CDNs, proximity to the target audience, and the number of logged-in users.

If a WooCommerce store is launched on a slow hosting solution let’s say a shared hosting, then it would hardly work with 1,000 products and 50 concurrent users. It is because most shared hosting solutions have limited bandwidth. A shared hosting solution can’t even handle 10 concurrent users because the site bandwidth is just too small.

On the other hand, if you are using a Google Cloud high-performance computer server (HPC) then you can add as many products to the store depending on the server you have chosen. In most cases, you will be easily able to add over a million products to your store.

WooCommerce Product Limit by Database

MySQL database version also plays a crucial role when adding products to your WooCommerce store. Most people have seen a higher performance when they shifted from MySQL to its forked version MariaDB. MariaDB is a lot faster when compared with MySQL and offers the same functionalities as a relational database system.

WooCommerce Product Limit by Order Volume

WooCommerce stores need to be hosted on high performing servers because they demand high availability. Suppose someone wants to order from your store. But your store is taking ages to load completely. Will that person wait for it to load so that he/she can order? No! In fact, the person will get susceptible that the store is having some technical issues. So, that person will bounce off the store. This happens with almost all stores out there and if people don’t pay attention, then it can directly impact the order volume.

WooCommerce Product Limit by Site Design

Often the products on a WooCommerce store are neither limited by the database nor limited by order volume but the site design directly impacts it. What happens is that when products more than the regular capacity are added to the website, it starts to crash. When the website crashes, store owners don’t realize that their website is not capable of handling this many products. Instead, they think that the hosting solution is the problem. So, site design can also play a crucial role in website performance and hence the store’s product limit.

Increase WooCommerce Product Limit Manually

WooCommerce and WordPress both use the same WP-config file. So, if you want to increase the product limit in a store, follow these steps.

1. Open the PHP.ini file on your Public_html folder.

Now edit the following code in the PHP.ini file.

memory_limit = 256M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (64MB)

2. Edit .htaccess file

The second option is to edit the .htaccess file on your cPanel. Add the following line if it is not available or modify it.

php_value memory_limit 256M

These are two options to increase the bandwidth/memory limit for the execution of any script/page on WordPress. It says the script can consume as much as 256MBs when executing. Previously this was 64MBs.

Do note that the script limit is not synonymous with the product limit on the store. However, it directly impacts the store performance and it is the only way to increase the memory limit of any WooCommerce website.

Will My WooCommerce Website Crash If I Go Over Limit?

No. A WooCommerce store is completely scalable. It means that even if you add 100,000 products to your store, it won’t crash because of the product limit. However, as we said earlier if your hosting stack can lead to its crash if it is not able to manage the load.

So, make sure to choose a hosting solution that can manage the number of products that you want to add to your store. If unsure, ask the support team of the hosting company and then make a decision.

Bottom-line

WooCommerce doesn’t have any product limit. You can easily add as many products as you want to your WooCommerce store without any issue. People have tested WooCommerce with over 1 million products successfully. If you face any issues with your website by uploading more products, then check the factors that we mentioned above. They directly impact the website performance and there is a possibility that any one of those factors would be the reason behind that issue.

Is your store taking too much time to load? Do you need to improve site performance? Get in touch with our WordPress solutions experts and get your problem solved today. Contact us Today!