Recently, we published a WP Cloud hosting fresh site benchmark on WP Cloud, the new managed WP cloud hosting offering from Automattic. Today, we will be benchmarking a WooCommerce site demo with 10,000 products to see the performance of Woo on WP Cloud.
For this benchmark, we generated 10,000 products through a script. Each product has:
- 3 auto-generated, random images
- Color attribute with a color value from among ‘Red’, ‘White’, ‘Blue’, ‘Yellow’, ‘Green’.
- Size attribute with a value from among ‘S’, ‘M’, ‘L’, ‘XL’, ‘XXL’
- Weight value assigned from a random value between 100g and 1kg
- Dimensions that vary between 1 and 30 cm for width, height depth
- A category from among ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’, ‘E’ example categories
- Any number of tags from among ‘tag1’, ‘tag2’, ‘tag3’, ‘tag4’, ‘tag5’ example tags
This results in the database having:
- 30,000+ entries in the wp_posts table that keeps Woo products and their image attachments
- 277,000+ entries in the wp_postmeta table that keeps information like price, dimensions, attributes about products and their images
- 51,000+ entries in the wp_term_relationships table that keeps the products’ categories and tags
- 133,000+ product images with 650 mb size in the uploads folder
Of course, these numbers are noticeably high compared to the average online shop. However we want to create multiple attributes and many images for products so that we will be able to test performance thoroughly. Many online stores experience performance problems especially when it comes to searching for products by using multiple attributes or when there are too many product images. To push it further, we are going to use the smallest WP Cloud hosting package available at Pressbard, ‘Cloud Starter’ for the performance test.
The first benchmark is the store front page. WooCommerce store page has been set to the front page of the shop. Let’s see how it clocks at Google PageSpeed Insights:
100 page speed score while using Slow 4G throttling – pretty good. Especially considering that the front page loads 16 products with their thumbnails as the first page of results from among 625 more pages of products (16 products each page x 625 pages = 10,000 products). PageSpeed Insights suggests some image optimizations, but these are outside the scope of this benchmark.
Let’s see how fast a random product results page loads from the front page:
Pretty much the same – normal as the front page is treated the result page 1 of 625 other product result pages.
Let’s see how fast a random product page loads:
A very good result – the only recommendations from PageSpeed Insights are optimizing some JavaScript libraries that Woo uses to make them non-render blocking, which is where the 4s speed index comes from. However this kind of optimization is related to Woo and the plugins and not to the underlying host, so they are out of the scope of this benchmark. WP Cloud does great on its part by serving all JS fast, leading to the great 98 page speed result.
Trying ‘Add to Cart’, viewing the cart page and going to checkout each happen pretty quick around ~1-1.5 seconds, however these are not easy to consistently test with PageSpeed Insights and you must manually test them at the demo site if you are interested.
Now let’s test one of the most taxing aspect of an online shop – searching products by using multiple attributes like color, size, dimensions, weight and properties like price. A simple custom search form was made to be able to do this:
Let’s start with a simple search by choosing the color Blue and setting the minimum price 20 – note that the color attribute has no relation with the color of the product images as they were each generated randomly:
Great result: Loads instantly, and is able to find and list 1682 products that fit the two criteria from among 10,000 products.
Now lets crank it up to maximum and set a choice for each possible attribute:
This should search for all attributes, including price range, and should be the most taxing query. Here are its results:
Still lightning quick! Finds 18 products that fit complex criteria from among the 10,000 products in the shop in an instant. There is absolutely no speed loss from having numerous criteria.
Searching for products with multiple criteria is the most performance-critical, taxing action for WooCommerce stores and online shop apps in general, and the starter WP Cloud package at Pressbard aces this test thanks to the power of underlying WP Cloud hosting.
Conclusion
All these results are excellent for WooCommerce. 10,000 products is more than what the average online shop would have, and the fairly complex attribute setup we tested here should cover the needs of a majority of online shops. On top of this, all of these results are with the smallest amount of resources at WP Cloud.
A higher package should work wonders for much bigger shops or shops with much more complex setups in the same way, and enterprise packages should be able to power mega stores that compete with the biggest names on the Internet. If you have or want to launch such an online store, you can contact us for consultation here.
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