Scalability Pro is our core WordPress optimisation plugin and it’s your performance insurance plan for everything excluding search and filters. As we complete performance analysis jobs for clients or answer our clients performance questions on our Discord server, we add optimisations for various themes and third-party plugins into Scalability Pro. The only thing we can’t fully optimise inside Scalability Pro is search and filters, which is why we made Super Speedy Search and Super Speedy Filters to complement Scalability Pro.
- Speed up wp-admin, imports, main queries, and really everything outside of search and filtering
- Future proof your website – a scalable site will not slow down as your site gets bigger
- Reduce server cost – Scalability Pro speeds up many slow SQL queries that run through WP_Query, for example, the main query on your archive pages (shop or posts or custom post types)
- Easy to use – includes one-click custom indexes, automatic front-end query rewrites and options to disable unused wp-admin features to speed up your back-end
- Save time – includes optimisations to speed up imports and exports
- Includes optimisations to speed up slow themes, e.g. Avada and speed boosts discovered through our Performance Analysis Service
- Good for Googlebot, admins and users – Speed up imports, archives, wp-admin, XML sitemaps and slow themes
- Never worry about performance or scalability again – purchase includes access to our Discord Server so you can chat directly to Dave Hilditch about your site performance
Note: Scalability Pro will not speed up tiny sites. It will, however, enable your small site to become large without slowing down. Works best in conjunction with Super Speedy Filters and Super Speedy Search.
View Changelog
Awesome Support
We provide fast support for all of our plugins through our Discord server. Come see for yourself!
JOIN OUR DISCORD
- DESCRIPTION
- ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
- REVIEWS (26)
- DOCS
Performance versus Scalability
Performance is how quickly your webpages load, Scalability is how many simultaneous users you can have on your website without crashing.
Scalability Pro focuses on Scalability, so it’s not touching the front-end JavaScript or CSS.
However, the primary technique to improve scalability is to fix performance so that it does not degrade as your site grows.
This means that if you already have a large website, you will see a big performance boost by using Scalability Pro.
How we make WordPress scalable
- Makes WP_Query lightning fast (0.4 seconds uncached vs over 180 seconds for 820,000 products on /shop/ page)
- Works by optimising your underlying database and queries and eliminating table scans
- Provides options to alter or remove slow WooCommerce and WordPress features
- Complements caching systems perfectly
- Speeds up SLOW queries – install the Query Monitor plugin and view your slowest pages, if you see slow queries being reported, Scalability Pro will help. If you instead see thousands of queries occurring, you probably need our Super Speedy Filters plugin too.
- It adds indexes to your key WordPress tables to help optimise underlying SQL queries
- It alters database queries to make them more efficient, avoiding table scans
- It provides options to disable, alter or microcache slow WordPress/WooCommerce/Import functionality
If Scalability Pro is implemented and there are still table scans occurring, we will fix them.
Five Key problem areas for Scalability
Scalability Pro helps speed up your main slow queries, adding indexes to tables and rewriting queries to use them. But it can’t do everything on its own.
If you install the free Query Monitor plugin and view your slow pages, you’ll see one or more of these causes.
Slow queries as your site gets bigger
This is what Scalability Pro helps with. It makes slow queries run quickly when your site is bigger. Some slow filtering and search queries cannot be optimised by Scalability Pro.
If the slow query uses WP_Query, Scalability Pro can optimise it.
Too many queries
This problem most often comes from badly coded search or filtering plugins. The Redis object cache sometimes helps with this a bit, but we recommend you check out our Super Speedy Search and Super Speedy Filters plugins.
Too much RAM and CPU consumption in PHP
In Query Monitor, you’ll see low SQL time, low numbers of queries, but long page generation time and large RAM usage.
If you order queries by row-count, you’ll find some queries that return large row counts, often over 5000 rows even though there are not 5000 items displayed on your page.
The offending plugin on your site is filling PHP objects with those 5000 rows on every page load. Often, this can be fixed by implementing an object cache – but it depends on the type of data.
We’ve seen WOOF filters do this kind of bad-behaviour on numerous client sites once they get more than a couple of thousand items.
Slow API or ajax calls
Your site may be using ajax, or it may be calling third-party APIs. Scalability Pro has a big upgrade coming soon to transform the speed of ajax calls from many third-party plugins.
Poor hosting
Make sure you get a good quality hosting stack. PHP 7, MySQL 8, or MariaDB, nginx or Litespeed, redis in-memory-only and a proper configuration.
WPI Scalability Pro is the core WP Intense plugin to transform the speed and scalability of your WordPress site. You’ll never have limits on how big your site can become, how many visitors you can have, how many orders you can receive or how many items you can import ever again.
A scalable site will not slow down as your site gets bigger. Without WPI Scalability Pro, you’ll see a degradation of performance on your website once you exceed 5,000 products, orders or users. Caching can help, but what you really need is to make sure your website scales, regardless of how big your website becomes. A scalable website is as fast at generating a web page when there are 1,000,000 posts as it is when there are 10,000 posts.
WP Intense are ‘Speed Junkies’
We’ve been called many things, but our favourite is ‘Speed Junkies’. Our founder, Dave Hilditch, transformed the scalability and speed of Skyscanner (a billion dollar website now!) and now focuses on making WordPress the fastest CMS on the planet.
Scalability Pro Makes WordPress Scale
Scalability Pro makes your WordPress website scale. That means, it won’t slow down no matter how large your site becomes. It also means, if you have a large slow site right now that you can get vastly improved performance simply by activating Scalability Pro and configuring it with a few clicks.
Scalability Pro Transforms Import Speeds
Depending on how large your imports are, you’ll get phenomenal improvements in import speed. We optimise item-lookup to make it instant for importing tools to decide whether to update or insert an item, and we defer term-counting so that the expensive operation of counting items per category is done at the end of the import, not once per row.
Typically, users see something in the region of a 10-fold speed boost in their imports, along with reduced CPU usage while importing which means your users are no longer negatively affected by simply updating your products with your import.
Scalability Pro is Regularly Updated
We perform regular performance optimisation jobs for clients, and as part of that subsidised deal we add optimisations directly into the plugin so everyone can benefit.
View our changelogs to see all the updates
Proof that we know what we’re doing
Here is a selection of in-depth case studies where optimisations ended up inside Scalability Pro:
- Speeding up imports
- Theme Speed boosts
- General Speed boosts
- Optimising XML Sitemaps
- Optimising Yith Wishlist
Support is Incredible
We have an active and growing Discord server for all customers where you can come ask any questions you have and get help for anything you need.
Scalability Pro is a ‘Must-have plugin’
Our plugin works wonders on WordPress and WooCommerce scalability and performance, but don’t take our word for it, take our customer’s word.
If you wish to see the Facebook group chat for yourself, here are a couple of links:
- WPI Customers advising someone to get Scalability Pro (WooCommerce Community Group)
- People responding to a Scalability Pro import-speed upgrade (WordPress Speed Up Group)
Scalability Pro Demo
You can see the speed of a demo/dev site here on a $20 per month Digital Ocean server with NO page-caching enabled. It has almost 1 million products, but it is also our test bed for plugin alterations so you may see the style and features available on the demo changing – also, please forgive the missing images on many products, not plugin-related:
Please note that the above shop also has our Super Speedy Filters and Super Speedy Search plugins activated. You can buy all three of these plugins together at one low price in our Super Speedy Plugin Pack.
What Can’t Scalability Pro Do?
WPI Scalability Pro is a true must-have plugin for speed, scalability and growth, but there are some things it cannot do.
It won’t fix your hosting
It cannot fix your hosting. If you have bad hosting, you can follow our latest stack building guide.
It won’t fix your slow WooCommerce filters
Every WooCommerce filters plugin we’ve tested is badly coded when it comes to performance and scalability. It’s too complicated inside a single plugin to fix all of those issues for other filtering plugins, so instead we’ve created our own filtering plugin. If you have slow WooCommerce filters then you need WPI Faster Woo Widgets.
It won’t fix 1000s of product variations
1000s or 100,000s of product variations leads to slow product detail pages and slow archive pages where those products exist. We cannot optimise these because technically the queries are fast – the slow part is that Product Objects are created and stored for each variation and this uses PHP CPU and RAM. There are options to improve this:
- Use an object cache – an object cache allows these PHP built objects to be reused again wherever they appear on your site. Redis or Memcached are good choices. If your hosts can’t help, move to better hosts who understand these basics.
- Use Product Rules – often, variations end up being used because they are a default feature of WooCommerce when Product Rules would have been better. If choosing an option for a product changes the price by a consistent price – e.g. Option A adds £10 – then Product Rules can be used and you can eliminate 1000s of variations.
- Use Product Addons – if particular options are available across all variations, these can be created as Product Addons. For example, Gift Wrapping, Engraving and more can be addons rather than variations.
You may already have benefitted from our work
We regularly submit code optimisations to other plugin and theme creators so they can speed up their creations. If you use the Yoast Sitemaps or the Yith Wishlist plugin amongst others you have probably benefited from our work in the past.
- First Yoast Sitemap optimisation
- Second Yoast Sitemap optimisation
- Yith Wishlist optimisation
We’re trying to improve performance and scalability across the board, but by owning WPI Scalability Pro you get these optimisations first and you get our incredible support to help with your specific issues.
Never worry about WordPress performance or scalability again!
We’re speed junkies. We hate slow. We regularly provide performance optimisations to other plugin developers, but by making the smart choice to buy Scalability Pro you will never have to worry about performance again. Grow your WordPress site with no limits, no worries, and focus on your business – let us focus on performance and scalability.
