3 Common Myths About WooCommerce

WooCommerce is one of the largest platforms for e-commerce and it is growing fast. 29% of the top 1m sites use WooCommerce. But even though WooCommerce is as big as it is, there is still uncertainty about the platform and its performance among some.

1. WooCommerce can’t handle a lot of products

One of the most common questions regarding WooCommerce is, “How many products can WooCommerce handle?”. This is really the wrong question to be asking. What one should ask is “What can my hosting handle?”.

WooCommerce itself does not have a limit on the number of products it can handle. So the only correct answer would be, unlimited.

This comes down to the same as for any other large e-commerce. When adding many products, you also add a lot of data in different formats. On large scale, you will always need to optimise everything from images to database queries and page loading time to not affect performance.

So, in other words. If you would like to run an e-commerce website with WooCommerce and say like 30 000+ products it won’t be a problem at all as long as your hosting can handle it and optimisation is done.

Angry Creative has had a number of clients running WooCommerce with a large number of products on our Synotio Hosting without any problems.

Helping visitors find the right product also becomes more complex the more products you have. In our solutions, we use Qala Elastic Enterprise Search to make it a lot easier and lightning fast to search for, and filter products and actually convert that intent to a sale.

2. You can’t scale WooCommerce

A persistent myth about WooCommerce is that WordPress and WooCommerce do not scale. But this is a myth that has been debunked time and again.

WooCommerce is magical, we have to say, but it’s not a wizard platform where everything happens automagically. You still have to put in the effort/money to optimize your website, just like any other platform. The difference between WooCommerce compared to other systems (Headless, Shopify, etc) is that with an open system like WooCommerce and WordPress you are not locking yourself in and you won’t need to spend even close to as much money as you would other systems or solutions.

What is scalability? Scalability is the ability to grow without it negatively affecting the store’s performance.

Of course, you can scale WooCommerce! This ties into the point above. Scaling up WooCommerce and WordPress itself is really not a problem. But you need to take all aspects into account. To scale up, you need to have all the parts working with each other to not introduce bottlenecks.

• Traffic – The biggest influence on your store’s performance is how much traffic you get and how well it is distributed. This means, for example, that you should use Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to spread the load. Optimize the load for sales campaigns where you know you will get traffic spikes on certain products and so on.
• Code – WooCommerce will not be the only part that introduces code, you have a theme, and probably at least a couple of plugins. All code can be decisive for how well a shop performs with increased traffic. Make sure all code is optimized.
• Hosting (Server hardware) – The fact that your hosting is able to handle large volumes of traffic is directly crucial to scaling up your e-commerce. Angry Creative’s hosting, Synotio, for example, is designed to handle this type of load.

With traffic management, optimized code, and powerful hosting, there is really no limit to how big you can make your e-commerce with WooCommerce.

Automattic (the creator of WooCommerce) is also actively working to create significant performance improvements for how data is handled in WooCommerce. These improvements are planned to be implemented in 2022.

There are lots of examples of really big stores that use WooCommerce, check out the WooCommerce Showcase to see some of these.

3. WooCommerce (WordPress) is not secure

WordPress is by far the largest content management system in the world with more than 60 million sites and counting. This popularity does come with a downside, when something gets as big as WordPress it ends up in the eyes of rogue players. In other words, it would be natural for one of the world’s most widely used publishing tools to become a target for malicious people.

At the same time, one should take into account that WordPress also has a very large dedicated open source community that probes every single line of code created for WordPress to keep insecure code away.

WordPress is, despite the target on the back, one of the most secure platforms you can use. We would not see large multinational companies using WordPress if it were unsafe. 

Make sure you are safe

If you look at the data of compromised WordPress sites you will see that WordPress itself is rarely the root cause. The cause is more likely to be brute force attacks or a few insecure plugins accounting for the larger part of hacked installs. These are things you can protect yourself from.

• Only use themes and plugins from trusted sources
• Keep your installed plugins, themes and WordPress updated
• Make sure you use secure passwords
• Use a professional hosting service

An extra layer of security

Most professional hosting solutions use extra layers of security to protect your data. Cloudflare is a commonly used solution. There are also a number of useful add-ons that can be used to counter attacks. Such as WP fail2ban, Safe SVG, Electroninja, and others.