Speeding Up Single Product and Post Pages

Most of Scalability Pro’s work is aimed at archive pages, the lists of products and posts, because that’s where slow queries usually live. Single pages, a single product or a single blog post, are normally quick because they load one item. But they can still be slow for two reasons, and the Single Pages tab covers both.

The first is widgets. If your product detail or single post template includes widgets or blocks that run their own SQL, related products, filters, category counts, popular posts, then those pages inherit the same slow queries as your archives. The good news is you don’t need to do anything extra here: the archive optimisations in the Query Speed tab (removing SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS, rewriting joins to EXISTS, and so on) apply to those widget queries too, so single pages that embed them get faster automatically once those options are on.

The second is WooCommerce product variations. If you sell products with a lot of variations, WooCommerce runs some slow code on the product detail page to count and check the available variations. On products with many variations this adds a noticeable delay, and it’s usually unnecessary. In the Single Pages tab, set "Remove Woo Ajax variations calculations" to "Remove Ajax variations count" and Scalability Pro skips that work.

In short: single pages are mostly sped up for free by the archive optimisations when they contain widgets that run SQL. For WooCommerce products with lots of variations, turn on "Remove Woo Ajax variations calculations" in the Single Pages tab to drop the slow variation counting on the product detail page.