Key Takeaways
Managed WordPress providers don’t always get a lot of love. When their customers use major platforms and plugins like WooCommerce, they get the blame when something goes wrong and maybe some glory when something goes right. Today, WooCommerce may be making the latter a little easier.
After a brief delay, WooCommerce 11.0 finally came out on Tuesday, August 4, and the release includes individual code changes, and performance is a pretty big part of the update. Developers dedicated an entire section of the release preview to “performance improvements for larger stores.”
“Performance is a clear theme in WooCommerce 11, with 28 PRs tagged for performance, caching, or scalability,” the team wrote.
Given WooCommerce’s whopping 33% market share, those changes could affect a lot of stores. And, by extension, a lot of managed WordPress hosts. So, without further ado, here are some of the changes providers can expect to see for their WooCommerce clients.
WooCommerce Is Cutting Out the Busywork
Probably the most noticeable change in WooCommerce 11 is product object caching, which will be turned on by default for new stores. “Stores can opt-in and test this experiment, and it will eventually be turned on for existing stores in a future release,” the blog reads.
Instead of repeatedly going back to the database for the same product information, WooCommerce can cache those product objects and reuse them.
According to its own benchmarks, this improvement made variable-product pages about 9% to 12% faster in its testing. Bundle-product processing at checkout improved by 6% to 12%.
11 also cuts down on repeated product queries and calculations so that there are fewer server resource requests. Developers say this will make an improvement for stores with large catalogs or product feeds that need to update at specific times.
The Bigger the Store, the Bigger the Problem
WooCommerce has been working on large-store performance for a while now, with High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) itself being a major part of that effort, which became default for new WooCommerce 8.2 installs in 2023.
HPOS gives orders through their own dedicated database tables, and 11 builds on that by making some of those order searches more efficient, including searches that come back empty.
Large catalogs are getting some attention as well. WooCommerce is changing how its point-of-sale system generates catalogs so they can be processed in chunks instead of everything at once. Developers will also be able to configure the chunk size and timeout.
WooCommerce 11 obviously doesn’t change the fact that large, busy stores are going to need the infrastructure to support them — but hey, if WooCommerce can cut out some of the busywork, hosts have a little less to compensate for as those stores grow.
Here’s Your Chance to Take Some Credit
Want to send your clients an update? Here are a couple of the bigger changes they may be most interested in hearing:
- Checkout Recovery Improvements: Merchants can now manually send a recovery email from an eligible order. Website owners can find it under
WooCommerce > Settings > Advanced > Features. - Failed-order inventory: Sometimes, when a customer checks out and their payment fails, the database will register it as unavailable indefinitely. With 11, WooCommerce will automatically put that inventory back in stock even if an order fails.
- Faster product and checkout pages: Customers may notice faster performance during the browsing and checkout processes, with notable improvements for stores with a lot of product variations and bundles.
- Videos in order/marketing emails: The block email editor now supports in-email videos from Vimeo, TikTok, and Dailymotion.
