I have been working on a website this week that makes use of the WP Ecommerce plugin. When I first started on this website, it was extremely slow which was why I was asked to investigate. After deactivating the plugins one-by-one, I discovered that the WP Ecommerce plugin was the culprit.
The website contains more than 1400 products,hundreds of variations, and almost 100 categories. I ran some diagnostics and discovered that the site is producing some very slow MySQL queries, some of which are as long as a short novel. The combination of products, variations, and categories is absolutely killing the website’s speed.
Choosing between WP Ecommerce or WooCommerce?
If you are trying to decide between WP Ecommerce or WooCommerce, please don’t give it a second thought. Go with WooCommerce. WooCommerce is far more robust than WP Ecommerce and able to handle a big catalog and plenty of variations.
Already installed Wp Ecommerce?
If you’ve already installed WP Ecommerce and you are experiencing slow load times, here are two suggestions to help speed the site up.
- Install the WT3 Total Cache Plugin. This plugin will cache your website pages and serve them faster to your customers. From my recent experience, I can tell you that this plugin works quite well with WP Ecommerce.
- Enable MYSQL query caching. This won’t solve all of your problems but you will definitely see a difference, especially since this problem seems to be directly related to slow queries. If you don’t have access to your server, you will have to ask your host to help you implement this.
Transfer from WP Ecommerce to Woocommerce?
There are plugins out there that will allow you to transfer your products from WP Ecommerce to Woocommerce but they are very expensive and will change your URL’s. This is very bad for SEO. I tried working with one of these plugins over the weekend and the results were not good. Unfortunately, you are most likely stuck with finding ways to speed up your existing store site.
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