As your eCommerce business scales up, you’d expect thousands of customers flocking your store. If you want your storefront to drive heavy traffic, make sure it does not slow down when visitors start pouring in. Additionally, as the store grows, you’d like to add more products. The eCommerce platform needs to have a high product limit. And at the same time, it should also deliver an excellent user experience.
But is your WooCommerce store capable of handling huge traffic?
There exists a persistent myth that WooCommerce works only for small eCommerce stores, not for large businesses. But this isn’t true. The eCommerce platform runs both on WooCommerce and WordPress, handling many online transactions seamlessly.
In this article, we will analyse if WooCommerce can handle huge traffic. Let’s dive in.
Is WooCommerce Capable Of Handling High Volume Traffic?
As a WooCommerce store owner, you are likely to be focused on growth. More products, more traffic, more customers, more sales. But the question is – does WooCommerce support high volume support?
The answer is – YES.
A powerful eCommerce platform built on WordPress, WooCommerce can handle thousands of page visits and transactions per minute. Numerous WooCommerce stores have 100,000+ products listed and support tons of traffic every minute – and that too without compromising website loading time or user experience.
To put it simply, WooCommerce itself does not have any limit on the amount of traffic it can support. But factors like on-site performance optimization and choice of web hosting can affect your store’s ability to deliver optimum performance amidst heavy traffic volumes.
Additionally, you can always scale with WooCommerce as your business grows. With this, you can grow your store, add more products, and drive increased traffic without affecting performance.
What Are the Limitations Of WooCommerce?
If you are launching an online store, you’d want an eCommerce platform that is best for your business needs. However, with so many options available, you will be spoilt for choices. But if you are looking for one that is high-performance, secure, and scalable, then WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform you can trust. A free WordPress plugin, WooCommerce is widely used for its straightforward and clean storefront system that offers an improved shopping experience.
However, there are certain limitations too:
Functions Only With WordPress
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin and therefore, you cannot use it for websites that do not host WordPress. This can be a disadvantage for established websites that want to leverage the features of WooCommerce for their storefront, but that would mean rebuilding their website in WordPress.
Plenty Of Additions Are Required
Initially, it is free to download and install WooCommerce, but as you grow your store and need more features, you will require purchasing new extensions that ensure optimum performance. This is a limitation because store owners would feel like there are hidden costs involved with using WooCommerce.
Customization Can Be Difficult
Despite being a WordPress plugin, WooCommerce sites cannot be highly customized. Additionally, not all customization options are available out of the box. To use certain features, you might need to install extra plugins.
Does Not Support Many Payment Gateways
Another limitation of WooCommerce is that it does not support many payment gateways. Integrating each payment gateway into your eCommerce store would require installing an additional plugin. In most cases, each of these requires specific configurations.
Regardless of these limitations, WooCommerce is still one of the best eCommerce platforms today that supports seamless integrations and high traffic volumes.
Is WooCommerce Scalable?
Many users claim that WooCommerce cannot be scaled, but this isn’t true. The platform offers immense flexibility and can be seamlessly scaled to meet changing requirements of growing websites. Hence, it supports online stores of all sizes, from small eCommerce businesses to large storefronts. Most importantly, when you effectively scale your WooCommerce store, it does not compromise with the site performance or user experience.
Being an Open Source platform, WooCommerce is backed by a strong community of developers – which makes it an ideal solution even for larger stores. The developers continuously optimize the platform for both performance and scalability. However, several factors affect the extent to which you can scale your WooCommerce store for increased traffic and more product listings, they are:
- Website Traffic: It is the most crucial factor influencing the performance of your online stores. Suppose, you are offering a 50% discount on a particular product at your store. Most of your website traffic will be concentrated on that particular product page and the shopping cart. Hence, you will need to optimize the page to support a spike in traffic.
- Website Code: The store will run and scale only when you update WooCommerce plugins regularly. For this, you will need to check the WordPress admin area and see if new updates for plugins and themes are available.
- Server Hardware: Merely depending on the WooCommerce platform is not enough. Not choosing the right hosting provider can also affect your site’s ability to support high volumes of traffic. To ensure seamless scaling of your WooCommerce store, it is crucial to choose a hosting provider that offers performance-based features like caches, CDN support, and SSL certificate.
In addition to these, there are a few other factors that will help ensure optimum scalability during high traffic surges:
- Hosting provider and features like bandwidth, load time, RAM, disk space, and processing power.
- Load testing helps determine if the website is capable of handling thousands of visitors or tons of transactions in a day.
- Content delivery network for your website.
- Ability to compress the size of your images.
- Plugins that slow down the site’s page loading time and other functions.
- Updating the site regularly for optimum performance.
Based on all these factors, you can scale your WooCommerce store to support large volumes of traffic or add more products as your business grows.
Does WooCommerce Have A Product Limit?
For large-scale stores, one of the biggest challenges is to add new products. As the business grows, the store witnesses more traffic, more customers, and more sales. To serve the customers better and increase ROI, you will need to add more products. But how many products can your WooCommerce store handle? Will it support adding a greater number of products as your business scales?
According to WooCommerce, “We’ve seen instances of shops with 100,000+ products listed, handling thousands of transactions per minute.” So, it is obvious that WooCommerce allows adding unlimited products. But there are other factors that you should also keep in mind when considering adding more products – optimizing website speed, page loading time, database queries, and other elements. Additionally, it is important to choose the finest hosting platform because this is a prime aspect that affects the scalability of your WooCommerce website.
After analysing various large-scale WooCommerce stores, it is found that the number of products does not always affect website performance. The page load time and overall website speed are primarily affected due to unoptimized, unscaled images or images that serve the same content coming through different URLs. Furthermore, if the website is updated regularly and the traffic is evenly distributed, it tends to have a high PageSpeed score.
It is safe to believe that WooCommerce is suitable for large-scale, high-traffic stores, and can handle any number of products if the store is well-maintained, well-optimized, and backed by a powerful hosting server that can perfectly handle average traffic and traffic spikes.
Is WooCommerce Better Than Other Platforms?
WooCommerce holds the largest share in the eCommerce market, handling over 28% of all sites. But is it the best eCommerce platform in comparison to other popular options like Shopify or Magento?
Let’s have a look at how WooCommerce fares in the competition when it comes to certain features:
WooCommerce Optimized Hosting
Other eCommerce platforms have limited optimized hosting and not many choices are available, but this is not the case with WooCommerce. There are innumerable options available for optimized hosting on this platform, but when you search for platforms like Magento, PrestaShop, or OpenCart hosting, not many options are available.
Greater Flexibility
One of the primary reasons why WooCommerce has gained immense popularity among storeowners is its flexibility. Regardless of your business niche, the platform allows you to sell all types of products. These may include physical products like hair products or couches, external products like Amazon affiliates, downloadable items like books, or invites to training sessions or webinars.
WooCommerce store is also highly scalable, which means businesses of all sizes can set up a shop and grow their business over time. There is nothing to worry about if you are expanding your business, adding more products, getting increased traffic, or using several plugins.
Easy Customization
Another aspect that makes WooCommerce stand ahead in the competition is the option for limitless customization. Powered by WordPress, it can work with any number of free plugins available on the WordPress Plugin Directory. You can also use numerous paid variations on WooCommerce’s official website and Codecanyon. It also offers a wide range of themes that you can easily customize.
What is more interesting is you do not need to be tech-savvy to use the WooCommerce wizard or customize your store, it has simple features that anyone can use.
Multiple Features
Unlike other eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce offers more features – tailored to fit the needs of eCommerce stores of all sizes. Being Open Source, it has a very interactive and large community of experienced developers who continue to optimize the platform along with adding intriguing features. An intuitive dashboard, secure & flexible payments, store enhancements & marketing integrations, all these elements make WooCommerce a preferred choice for building an online store.
Maximum Security
Being Open Source, security can be a major concern when you use WooCommerce. However, this eCommerce platform is known for its secure gateways that protect customers’ data. The developers in the WooCommerce community update the platform regularly to prevent it from cyberattacks. However, it does not provide backups to restore valuable information in case of data breaches or attacks.
Improved User Experience
A simplified and professional aesthetic, WooCommerce provides access to POS systems and warehouse management that offers an enhanced and smooth user experience. A clean dashboard, perfectly organized tools, and easy order tracking are some other features that deliver an improved customer experience.
Conclusion
WooCommerce is a highly scalable framework – built for handling huge volumes of traffic as well as process bulk order volumes. Additionally, it combines improved security, high-end features, customization, and flexibility that make it a suitable eCommerce platform.
The amount of traffic your virtual storefront can handle has more to do with the hosting service you choose rather than the eCommerce platform the website is configured upon. However, there are still several ways you can scale your WooCommerce store to help your business grow smoothly and handle traffic surges or bulk orders.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Can WooCommerce handle 50,000 products?
Taking into consideration the level of scalability WooCommerce offers, it can handle 50,000 products provided it is properly configured and supported by a powerful hosting service. Additionally, the store load speed and correct optimization also play an integral role in supporting the eCommerce platform to handle bulk product additions of 50,000.
Q. Can WooCommerce handle 1 million products?
According to WooCommerce, it can handle 1 million and more products; in fact, it is built for handling unlimited products if you focus on optimizing the page loading time, website speed, or database queries.
Q. How many product variations can WooCommerce handle?
By default, the eCommerce platform allows entering up to 50 unique variations for each product. If you want to increase this value, you will need to make a small code change.
- Log in to your WooCommerce Admin Panel.
- Move to the Left Menu and click “Appearance” >> “Theme Editor”.
- Open the option functions.php to edit.
- Go to the end of the file insert code given below – before ?>
- Save the changes.
You can now add more product variations to your store.
Have you used WooCommerce before? Tell us in the comments section what are the most important benefits of using WooCommerce?
