With fifty products, almost any hosting plan will carry a shop. With thousands, what was hidden comes out: the database queried again and again, the search and filters, the images, the background requests. There is no magic switch; there is an order to look in, from cheapest to dearest.
Where the time usually is
| Place |
Symptom |
What to do |
| Category pages |
The listing is slow to open |
Page cache, for visitors with no session. See cache rules. |
| Search and filters |
Search is slow or leaves the server out of breath |
Limit the number of filters; a dedicated search plugin helps from a certain size. |
| Images |
The page weighs more than it should |
Right size, right format, lazy loading. See product images. |
| Background requests |
The dashboard and cart are slow for no reason |
See admin-ajax eating your resources. |
| The database |
The products screen is slow |
Find the slow queries and clear what is left over: see slow queries and cleaning the database. |
| Plugins |
Each one adds queries |
Switch one off at a time and measure. |
A clue to which side the problem is on: if cached pages open fast and only the dashboard and the cart are slow, the weight is in the queries and PHP, not in the images or the network. If everything is slow, including the home page seen while signed out, look first at page weight and at the distance to the visitor (fast for you, slow for everyone else).
In this order
| 1 |
Measure before you touch anything. Pick three pages (home, a large category, a product) and note the time. See how to measure speed.
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| 3 |
Switch on the page cache on the server and exclude cart, checkout and account: LiteSpeed Cache.
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| 4 |
Clean up the images. Every image uploaded generates several; thousands of products generate tens of thousands of files, and accounts have a file-count limit (inodes): the limits nobody advertises.
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| 5 |
Check PHP memory and time. Big imports and reports fail here first: PHP limits.
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| 6 |
Review the plugins. The ones that run on every page weigh most.
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On our shared servers there is no persistent object cache. What speeds a shop up here is the page cache and good configuration; an object cache (Redis, for instance) is for a VPS of your own, where you install and maintain it. Do not install a plugin that promises one on a plan that lacks it.
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When configuration runs out, resources begin. If, after all this, the shop still drags at peak hours, the limit is the machine and not WordPress. See shared hosting vs VPS and our VPS servers page.
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Tell us the shop address, a time when you saw it slow and how many products it has. We will measure on our side what the account is using.
Open a support ticket
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