Scalability Pro
Your WooCommerce shop page went from over 180 seconds to 0.4 seconds - on 820,000 products. Scalability Pro is the performance plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce sites that have grown too big for their own good. It adds the right database indexes, rewrites your slow queries to use them, and switches off the features that quietly grind to a halt once you pass 5,000 products, orders or users.
- Makes WP_Query fast and keeps it fast as your catalogue grows
- Speeds up archives, wp-admin, imports, exports and XML sitemaps
- Typically around a 10x boost on large imports, with lower CPU while they run
- A toolbox of optimisations you toggle on and off, no code required
- Complements your cache - it fixes the queries caching cannot
Rated 4.82 out of 5 by 34 customers. 60-day money-back guarantee.
Scalability Pro is the core Super Speedy Plugins optimisation plugin – your performance insurance plan for everything except search and filters. As the team completes performance analysis jobs for clients, and answers customer performance questions on the Discord server, new optimisations for various themes and third-party plugins are added straight into Scalability Pro. The only thing it cannot fully optimise is search and filters, which is why Super Speedy Search and Super Speedy Filters exist to complement it.
Note: Scalability Pro will not speed up a tiny site. It will, however, let a small site grow large without slowing down. It works best alongside Super Speedy Filters and Super Speedy Search.
See it running live: a demo store with almost 1,000,000 products on a $20/month server with no page caching – foundthru.com/shop.
“I purchased Scalability Pro as an experiment to see how it affected WP ALL IMPORT. It managed to turn a 3 day stock sync process into a 1 hour process. It has also sped up WooCommerce pages significantly.”
Thomas Jarvis
“The plugin improved category loading and page display from over 15 seconds to 2 seconds instantly. Over 250,000 products on WooCommerce.”
Daniel Antoniów
“I’m super happy with this plugin! We went from 30s product page load to 1s, which is marvelous for a product with 800+ variations.”
Jeroen Biliet
What Scalability Pro does for you
- Speeds up wp-admin, imports and main queries – and really everything outside of search and filtering.
- Future-proofs your website. A scalable site does not slow down as it gets bigger.
- Reduces server cost. It speeds up many slow SQL queries that run through WP_Query, such as the main query on your archive pages (shop, posts or custom post types).
- Easy to use. One-click custom indexes, automatic front-end query rewrites and options to disable unused wp-admin features to speed up your back end.
- Saves time. Includes optimisations to speed up imports and exports.
- Speeds up slow themes. Includes optimisations for themes such as Avada, and speed boosts discovered through the Performance Analysis Service.
- Good for Googlebot, admins and users. Speeds up imports, archives, wp-admin, XML sitemaps and slow themes.
- Stop worrying about performance. Purchase includes access to the Discord server so you can chat directly to Dave Hilditch about your site performance.
What this gives you back
- Your site stops slowing down as it grows. A scalable site serves a page as fast with 1,000,000 posts as it does with 10,000, so you can add products and traffic without dreading the slowdown.
- Faster imports, quieter server. Typically around a 10x boost on large imports, with lower CPU while they run, so your shoppers are not affected while you update stock.
- A faster back office. wp-admin lists, product screens and quick edits stop crawling once your catalogue is large.
- Lower hosting bills. Fixing the slow queries means you stop paying for a bigger server to paper over them.
- No more performance firefighting. You get direct Discord access to Dave, and every fix made for a client goes back into the plugin.
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 is 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 versus over 180 seconds for 820,000 products on the /shop/ page.
- Optimises your underlying database and queries and eliminates table scans.
- Provides options to alter or remove slow WooCommerce and WordPress features.
- Complements caching systems perfectly.
- Speeds up slow queries. Install the free Query Monitor plugin and view your slowest pages – if you see slow queries reported, Scalability Pro will help. If you instead see thousands of queries occurring, you probably need Super Speedy Filters too.
- Adds indexes to your key WordPress tables to help optimise underlying SQL queries.
- Alters database queries to make them more efficient, avoiding table scans.
- Provides options to disable, alter or microcache slow WordPress, WooCommerce and import functionality.
If Scalability Pro is implemented and there are still table scans occurring, we will fix them.
Every optimisation included in Scalability Pro
Scalability Pro is a toolbox of individual optimisations you can toggle on and off. Here is what is included and what each one speeds up.
Front-end query speed
- Custom database indexes – one-click indexes for wp_posts, wp_postmeta, wp_term_relationships and more, so archive, meta and taxonomy queries use an index instead of scanning the whole table.
- Remove SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS – stops MySQL counting every matching row just to work out how many pages there are, which is the main cause of slow archive pages on large sites. Optionally replaces the page count with the word “Many”.
- Rewrite LEFT JOINs to WHERE EXISTS – converts the taxonomy and meta joins in your main query into EXISTS subqueries, which MySQL runs far more efficiently at scale.
- Remove CAST on wp_postmeta – removes the CAST() wrapper that stops MySQL using the index on meta_value.
- Optimise WooCommerce GROUP BY – drops redundant GROUP BY and DISTINCT when only post IDs are being selected.
- Remove sort options – skips a slow ORDER BY on very large custom post type archives where the sort order is not needed.
- Remove the private items check on the front end – avoids an unnecessary post-status check for logged-out visitors.
- Custom query alterations – define your own hook-based query rewrites for edge cases specific to your site.
wp-admin speed
- Cache author counts – caches the per-author post count that WordPress recalculates on every Posts and Products screen.
- Cache user counts – caches the role counts shown on the Users screen.
- Cache the product category dropdown – caches the product category list on the Products screen so your quick edits stay fast.
- Remove the WooCommerce order summary widget and disable the Marketplace suggestions – removes dashboard elements that run their own queries.
- Ajax attribute editing – loads product attribute terms on demand instead of all at once.
Imports and exports
- Cache post counts – caches the post-status counts that WordPress and WooCommerce recalculate repeatedly during imports.
- Defer term counting – counts terms once at the end of an import rather than once per row, which is the single biggest import speed boost for large catalogues.
- Optimise product attributes lookup – removes a redundant clause from the WooCommerce attribute lookup query.
- Avoid expensive WP All Export meta_key enumeration – prevents or caches the full wp_postmeta scan WP All Export runs to list your meta keys.
- Optimise Action Scheduler – trims Action Scheduler retention so completed and failed actions do not pile up and slow your site down.
WooCommerce bloat
- Fix the WooCommerce onboarding query – replaces a slow post-status COUNT that runs on new installs.
- Remove the custom-meta select box query – replaces a full wp_postmeta scan used to build a meta dropdown.
- Optimise WooCommerce updates – rewrites the WooCommerce transient cleanup so it can use an index.
- Fix the Order Delivery Date plugin admin query – caches its slow year and month grouping query.
- Cache the WooCommerce and Flatsome product-grid shortcodes – caches the output of these product grids so they are not rebuilt on every page load.
- Switch off phone home – blocks unnecessary outbound HTTP calls that other plugins and themes make, which can add seconds to your admin pages.
Diagnostics and housekeeping
- Slow Query Log – records your slowest queries along with their stack traces so you can see exactly what is slow and where it comes from.
- Remove image sizes globally – stops WordPress generating image sizes you do not use every time an image is uploaded or imported.
Add-on: Super Speedy Listings
Super Speedy Listings is an optional add-on for Scalability Pro. It pre-computes term relationships into an optimised lookup table so author archives, taxonomy archives and filtered listings resolve from a single indexed table instead of large joins. It is available to download for customers with an active licence.
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 cannot do everything on its own. If you install the free Query Monitor plugin and view your slow pages, you will 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 will 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 will 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 have 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 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.
Scalability Pro transforms import speeds
Depending on how large your imports are, you will 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.
Super Speedy Plugins are ‘Speed Junkies’
We have 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.
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.
Don’t take our word for it
Here’s a video made by one of our customers
In the video, they talk about both Scalability Pro and Super Speedy Search.
Scalability Pro demo
You can see the speed of a demo and dev site 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, which are not plugin-related: foundthru.com/shop.
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?
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 have tested is badly coded when it comes to performance and scalability. It is too complicated inside a single plugin to fix all of those issues for other filtering plugins, so instead we have created our own filtering plugin. If you have slow WooCommerce filters then you need Super Speedy Filters.
It won’t fix 1000s of product variations
1000s or 100,000s of product variations lead 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 cannot 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 amount – for example, 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.
We are trying to improve performance and scalability across the board, but by owning Scalability Pro you get these optimisations first and you get our incredible support to help with your specific issues.
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
Never worry about WordPress performance or scalability again
We are 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.
Scalability Pro Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →What's new in Scalability Pro?
View full changelog →- Added a "Recheck Licenses" button above the licence table on the Super Speedy Settings page so customers have a clear way to refresh licence status after a renewal or upgrade without scrolling down to the licence-key field. The button is disabled until a licence key is entered/saved and re-enables as you type.
- The Recheck flow now also force-bypasses the auth-server's own 1-hour licence cache (via a `force=1` flag on the `wpiapi/check_product_key` call), so renewals/upgrades that completed less than an hour before a recheck no longer show as expired/exceeded. Normal admin page loads continue to use both caches as before — only an explicit Recheck click bypasses them. (Lives in the `super-speedy-settings` submodule, so the change propagates to every Super Speedy plugin.)
- Security: added capability checks and nonces to every admin AJAX endpoint that was previously reachable by low-privilege or unauthenticated users (slow query log fetch, index create/drop/drop-all, symlink create/delete, wp-config rewrite, slow query log truncate, term recount, profiling results save, cache clears, settings export/import, CSV export, action scheduler maintenance, and the WP All Import diagnostic helper)
- Security: removed `wp_ajax_nopriv_*` registrations from the slow query log fetch and the post-count / author-count cache clear endpoints — these were admin-only operations that should never have been exposed to unauthenticated visitors
- Security: escaped every column rendered in the Slow Query Log admin table (`time`, `url`, `query`, `stacktrace`, `duration`) — prevents stored XSS via a poisoned slow-query log entry being executed when an admin views the tab
- Security: fixed the "Create symlink" button, which previously created a dangling `wp-content/db.php` (the source path the button used had never existed in the plugin) and would have fatal-ed the site on the next request; the slow-query drop-in (`db.php` + `profiling-queries.php`) has been moved into `tabs/slow-query-log/wp-content/` to match the path the button always expected, every readlink check across the tab now derives the path from `plugin_dir_path(__FILE__)` so it works regardless of the plugin's installed folder name, and the symlink source is validated with `is_file()`/`realpath()` before linking
- Refactored: the slow-query-log drop-in files now live under `tabs/slow-query-log/wp-content/` so the tab is self-contained ahead of the planned split of each tab into a separate add-on plugin
- Security: hardened `spro_search_terms` (product attribute search) — requires `edit_products` and null-checks the taxonomy so PHP 8 no longer fatals on an unknown taxonomy
Frequently asked questions
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