WooCommerce is one of the largest ecommerce platforms and is growing rapidly. WooCommerce has a 29% market share if we look at the top 1 million ecommerce websites. But even with WooCommerce being as big as it is, there are still uncertainties surrounding the platform and its performance with some.
1. WooCommerce can’t handle many products
One of the most common questions about WooCommerce is“How many products can WooCommerce handle?“. This is actually the wrong question to ask. What you should be asking is “What can my hosting handle?”.
WooCommerce itself has no limit on the number of products it can handle. So the only correct answer would be unlimited.
This is the same as for any large-scale e-commerce. When you add a lot of products, you also add a lot of data in different formats. At scale, you will always need to optimise everything from images to database queries and page load time so as not to affect performance.
In other words. If you wanted to run an e-commerce site with WooCommerce and say 30,000 products, it won’t be a problem as long as your hosting can handle it and the site has been optimised.
Angry Creative has had several clients running WooCommerce with a large number of products with 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 much easier and lightning fast to search for, filter products and actually convert that intent into sales.
2. It’s not possible to scale WooCommerce
A persistent myth about WooCommerce is that WordPress and WooCommerce can’t scale. But this is a myth that has been debunked time and time again.
WooCommerce is magical, we have to say, but it’s not some kind of superhuman AI platform where everything happens completely automagically. You still have to put work/budget into optimising your site, just like with any other platform.
What is scalability? Scalability is the ability to grow without negatively affecting the performance of the commerce platform.
Of course you can scale WooCommerce! This ties in with the point above. Scaling up WooCommerce and WordPress itself is no problem whatsoever. But you have to take all aspects into account. To scale up, all parts need to work with each other to not create bottlenecks.
- Traffic – The biggest impact on your platform’s performance is the volume of traffic you have and how well that traffic is balanced. This means, for example, that you should use Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to spread the load. Optimise for sales campaigns where you know you’ll get traffic spikes on certain products and so on.
- Code – WooCommerce won’t be the only part that introduces code, you’ll have a theme and probably at least a couple of extensions. All code can be crucial to how well an ecommerce store performs with increased traffic. Make sure all code is optimised.
- Hosting (Server Hardware) – The ability of your hosting to handle large volumes of traffic is directly critical to scaling your ecommerce business. Angry Creative’s hosting, Synotio, for example, is designed to handle this kind of load.
With traffic balancing, optimised code, and powerful hosting, there’s really no limit to how big you can make your ecommerce with WooCommerce.
Automattic (the creator of WooCommerce) is also actively working on implementing significant performance improvements to the way data is handled in WooCommerce. These improvements are scheduled to be implemented in 2022.
There are lots of examples of really big stores using WooCommerce, check out the WooCommerce Showcase to see some of these.
Angry Creative has worked with many large ecommerce companies, from Ideal of Sweden to Djerf Avenue. We know what it takes to scale ecommerce to handle lots of traffic and many simultaneous orders.
3. WooCommerce (WordPress) is not safe
WordPress is by far the largest publishing tool in the world with more than 60 million sites. This popularity comes with a downside, when something gets as big as WordPress, it catches the eye of rogue individuals. In other words, it’s only natural that one of the world’s most widely used publishing tools becomes a target for malicious people.
At the same time, it should be realised that WordPress also has a very large dedicated community that probes every line of code created for WordPress, all to keep unsafe code out.
WordPress is, targeting notwithstanding, one of the most secure platforms you can use. We wouldn’t see large multinationals using WordPress if it was insecure.
Make sure you’re safe
If you look at the data from attacked WordPress sites, you’ll see that WordPress itself is rarely the root cause. It’s more likely that brute force attacks or individual insecure plugins account for the majority of hacked installations. These are things you can protect yourself against.
- Only use themes and extensions from trusted sources
- Keep your installed plugins, themes and WordPress up to date
- 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 common solution. There are also a number of useful extensions that can be used to counter attacks. Such as WP fail2ban, Safe SVG, Electroninja and more.
Spend your time selling and let Angry Creative take care of the rest. We provide complete management, maintenance and hosting for WordPress and WooCommerce sites. We take over all the responsibilities from your current provider(s), keep everything up to date and resolve ongoing bugs and other issues that may arise.