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Can You Run a Huge Store with WooCommerce?

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WooCommerce is an interesting proposition for small businesses in the huge world of ecommerce. Larger businesses might not want to scoff at the idea of running a store using WooCommerce though.

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It’s a WordPress plugin. Therefore, it’s extremely lightweight. It doesn’t necessarily work with every WordPress theme; however, at the same time, it has the possibility of integrating with an existing theme, cutting out the time and money it would take for you to find a completely new template.

In addition, the WooCommerce plugin is completely free and managed by people all over the world. Even so, the WooThemes company has received tens of thousands of great reviews about WooCommerce, and it consistently powers thousands of transactions per day.

One debate that always seems to be lingering is whether you can consider the WooCommerce plugin for a huge store.Click To Tweet

Is it built to support an insane amount of traffic per month? What happens when the holiday season strikes? Is it going to crash?

What about the actual size of the store? Is it possible to host 10,000 products through WooCommerce without having any problems?

Well, we’re here to solve those problems you have when searching for a way to sell items, so keep reading to learn if you can in fact run a huge store with the WooCommerce plugin.

What Are The Largest Stores Using WooCommerce?
To start our analysis, we think it’s wise to actually take a look at the internet world to see if any companies are using WooCommerce to run their large websites. After a bit of research, we found some of the bigger sites, including the following:

Although HypeBeast eventually stopped using WooCommerce, they implemented the tool for quite some time. The other companies are still running strong on the WooCommerce plugin.

So, does that answer the million dollar question?

Well, let’s look at the numbers. WPML has an Alexa rating of 6.8k, The Spectator boasts over 2.5 million page views per month and HypeBeast was selling over 4,000 products with WooCommerce.

These are huge stores using WooCommerce. But can yours run on WooCommerce?Click To Tweet

I believe it does answer the question, but only part of the way. Since these websites exist, it tells us that it is in fact possible to run a huge store with WooCommerce.

However, is it possible for every company to build a website that runs this smoothly?

Not a chance. It all depends on what types of products you have and the type of business you have running. It’s certainly going to take a strong team and complex infrastructure to manage a site with, say, 5,000 products.

Therefore, the chances of something going wrong with WooCommerce increase without the right tools and team members. Much of the load depends on your server so you need to decide whether you want to fork out the costs for a dedicated server (this handy guide will help too).

How Many Products Can You Sell With Your WooCommerce Store?

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The key here is not necessarily that WooCommerce is the platform for your sales. It’s more so the type of host you go with to support your traffic and sales.

Here are a few stores that have tens of thousands of products:

Do you think these e commerce businesses are using a shared hosting plan? No chance.

What about a plan that only costs $15 per month? It’s possible they started with smaller plans like that, but the truth is, you can’t expect to see a high performance site without quality hosting. This is particularly true when you start cramming thousands of products into your store. Add an influx in traffic and you’ve got yourself a huge problem.

WooCommerce has the tools you need to sell lots of products, but it’s not a hosting company. The tool will only work as fast, or as good, as the support you put behind it.

Does the Number of Products or Visitors Really Matter?

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Yes, both the number of products and visitors matter when you’re trying to scale up your store with WooCommerce.

Once you begin increasing the amount of products you host on the website, other details come into play. For example, each of the products require images and possible videos. You need to create a whole new page and write content for that page.

Guess what? All of these things require additional files.

If your hosting account can’t support that many files, your website is going to lag, and therefore you’re going to lose customers.Click To Tweet

The same goes for the amount of visitors. A website needs to stay up and running with traffic influxes. As discussed before, WooCommerce has very little to do with this, so it’s imperative you give the plugin all the support it needs to sell products efficiently.

Hosting and a Solid Configuration Comes Into Play in the Long Run

If you haven’t configured your products correctly, the WooCommerce plugin will fail you. If you don’t find a quality hosting plan that supports lots of files and visitors, WooCommerce will fail you. In case you’re considering a hosted ecommerce platform you might want to read the WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison.

Actually, WooCommerce doesn’t fail you at all, considering all of these situations bring up third party problems that can be solved by you.

The better question to ask is: Can You Easily Run a Huge Store With WooCommerce?

It’s not exactly easy, but it is possible.

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Comments

    • Hi Hamada,

      That depends on how big the store will be – how many products. Most of us do not recommend Joomla or Drupal for eCommerce. If the store is small it can run on WordPress and if it is large typically you would use something like Magento (if you have a developer and are very serious) or BigCommerce (if you do NOT have a developer).
      Gail Gardner would love you to read ..IOT: eCommerce Retail Trends RevolutionMy Profile

      Reply

  6. Thank you for you good efforts and sharing this information . I heard more about woo commerce plugin and i’m building an ecomerce website beside my current website i think i have to try because there are many wordpress plugins in e-commerce field , which make me need advice about what is the best

    Reply

  8. In my opinion, Shopify and prestashop are much better options whether you have a large or a small business endeavors.

    Reply

  11. very interesting it looks like I need to start using them on my blog, very interesting thanks her info

    Reply

  13. Hey,I found your post really helpful.Great! simple and addictive post, please keep writing the posts like this one, thanks for this post. I like Your writing skills, I am also a blogger and want to write like you.

    Reply

  16. WooCommerce has proved itself to be one of the most powerful and yet most prominent players of the eCommerce industry. But I believe that it is not the best option for running huge store.
    George would love you to read ..ILLITERACY ISSUEMy Profile

    Reply

  19. WooCommerce is not good for eCommerce websites. Shopify is better option for handling huge online shopping websites.
    dnan would love you to read ..Slide #4My Profile

    Reply

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