Defer Term Counting

Every time you add or update a product or post, WordPress and WooCommerce recount how many items sit in each affected term – each category, each tag, each attribute. That’s fine when you save one product by hand. During an import it’s a disaster. If you’re bringing in thousands of rows, that recount runs once per row, so the same categories and attributes get counted again and again as the import works through your file. It’s a huge amount of wasted database work, and on a large catalogue it’s usually the single biggest thing dragging your import speed down.

The Defer Term Counting option changes when that recount happens. Instead of recounting on every single row, it defers the counting so it runs once at the end of the import rather than thousands of times during it. The heavy work happens a single time, on the full set of changes, instead of being repeated for every item. On large catalogues this is typically the biggest import speed boost the plugin offers.

Your term counts don’t go stale. They’re brought back up to date at the end of the import run, and a daily maintenance task keeps them accurate as well, so the numbers you see on your category and attribute screens stay correct.

You’ll find this in the Imports tab under "Defer term counting". Switch it on before you run a large import.

In short: WordPress recounts every affected term on every row of an import, which is enormously wasteful. Defer Term Counting moves that work to the end of the run – and a daily task – so the recount happens once instead of once per row. For large catalogues it’s usually the biggest single import speed improvement you can make.