WooCommerce Performance Pack – Presales Question
Hi there Dave! :)
I'd just like to start off by mentioning that I'm a huge fan of your work, and have been following your developments since ~2019 when I stumbled upon the post on Facebook where you cracked down on YITH Wishlist performing a check against the entire database to find out which products are included in the Wishlist & which aren't. So to that, and everything else you've worked on & progressed in the WP Community, I say thank you!
I've just noticed that in Version 4.63 of your Scalability Pro plugin you've added indexes to improve the speed of WP All Import once again, this time by a factor of ~9.9x! This has gotten me highly interested, and now I'm considering purchasing the WooCommerce Performance Pack to try this out along with the others that are bundled with it.
Though, as with all Wordpress Purchases, compatability is always the first question that needs to be asked. I'll list each plugin below - and the questions I have for each under the plugin itself.
1. Super Speedy Search:
I'd recently just installed Relevanssi, as it's the only Search Plugin that's mentioned as being compatible with my theme (Woodmart) and have seen mild performance gains, from I'd say 6-7s queries down to 2-3s which is decent but most importantly the search results returned are far more relevant than they were using the default search. Woodmart does have an AJAX search bar, which returns a thumbnail, price & title results in a dropdown before pressing enter. To give you an idea of how their search works, here's a short forum post of a user who implemented Relevenssi into the Woodmart theme's search bar before it was officially included as part of the theme: https://xtemos.com/forums/topic/relevansi-plugin-ajax-search-for-everyone/
Would Super Speedy Search be compatible with Woodmart in this way & how relevant would the search results be in comparison? Are there any weighting options for Title & Description? I'd prefer Title over Description.
2. Faster Woo Widgets
You recently added support for YITH Brands (awesome!) but I'd like to ask whether they show up only as a text filter, or if they also include a Thumbnail of the Brands Logo (as the original YITH widget does?)
I also noticed that you have added a Colour Selector to the Colours Attribute, although Woodmart also has this functionality built-in, and we've already spent a lot of time configuring those, and they also have the added bonus of being shown as a swatch on the single product page for variations. Is there anyway your FWW plugin could be routed to fetch the Colour Selectors already configured in Woodmart, or something similar? My name suggestion by the way - Intense Filters for WooCommerce ;)
3. Auto Infinite Scroll
The Infinite Scroll seems extremely slow on the Foundthru.com demo, and the first page on each archive seems to always return a page of results that either do not have any images, or the images do not load for some reason.
Another thing is that whilst the Infinite Scroll does retain your position when clicking a product & then clicking it back, it doesn't retain your position when you've scrolled down past a few sets of results & then refreshed the page (it'll then force you back to the top once the page has reloaded, whereas other Infinite Scrollers will atleast send you to /page2 but without any results from /page1 as you've mentioned)
Then, just as my personal preference, is there a possibility you could edit the "More" button which appears after every 3 pages to say "Load More" and include an icon of the Mouse Cursor, to make it more apparent?
4. Scalability Pro
The one I'm sure we've all been waiting for :D. I actually don't have many tweaks to point out with this one, as most of the work is done in the back & barely visible from the front, although I will say that currently the demo is really slow & not doing this plugin any justice. Besides that, I'd just like to ask whether the changes made by this plugin are fully reversible (incase of any conflicts) & what your thoughts are on whether WP All Import had to implement similar Indexes as you have in version 4.63 as part of their plugin itself, as well as if Woocommerce / Wordpress had to implement many of the SQL optimizations you've made with this plugin into their own core - as we will eventually reach a point where they can / will drop the backwards compatibility that's currently holding them back? Where does the future of your plugins & our $365 purchase lie when that becomes a reality?
Just for reference, I'm using a Dedicated Server with 64GB RAM, Running CentOS 7, Plesk + PHP 7.4, Litespeed Webserver & Litespeed Cache (I'd tried setting up Varnish for more than a year but could never quite get it right - I'm really sad about that, but Litespeed seems like a really good drop-in replacement to that so far.) with Cloudflare as my CDN.
With all that said, please let me know your thoughts, and whether you think it may actually be a better idea for us to just purchase Scalability Pro rather than the Bundle?
I've currently got a total of 20 000 products on the store with 1000 orders & 1000 users, these numbers will only grow in time but I'm working with a plugin that generates a specs tables based off of product attributes - currently very few of my products have any attributes what so ever (~200) but with this Plugin (https://www.welaunch.io/en/product/woocommerce-group-attributes/) I'll be adding approximately 20-40 attributes to every product & their filters to the archive pages - whilst at the same time I want to avoid a longstanding 4-year core performance issue in WooCommerce for stores with many products & attributes listed on their Github here: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/issues/20262
Once again, thanks Dave. Your work is much appreciated! :)
- The search results are compatible, but currently if you’re looking for the search dropdown as you type, I’m currently re-adding that into SSS and I’ll configure some custom code for woodmart, porto and avada to let you override their search boxes with my search widget.
- Yes – we actually have something very close to this – the inline product filters – currently, these display on the archive only, and currently they only display the text – BUT – this week I’m working on visuals for both SSS and FWW and that includes updating the inline product filters to show the colour swatches, and adding the option to add these inline product filters onto the product detail page. I’m also adding the ability to choose an image as a background for the colours and I’m also adding an option to choose images for attributes and taxonomies too – e.g. if you choose images for your brand attribute/taxonomy, then you use inline product filters, then you’ll be able to place an Adidas logo floating on top of the product image at the bottom left or bottom right. I’m also integrating the Customizer API this week so you can see a live preview of visual changes.
- Auto infinite scroll needs some love and attention from me. I’ll get a KB uploaded for how to alter the load more button, and I’ll add an option to configure it in the options screen.
The main upgrade I need to implement for Auto Infinite Scroll is a custom ajax handler that loads far less WordPress stuff and just returns the products. Currently it’s (same as other plugins) fetching the entire next page then pulling out what it needs. I’m implementing this custom ajax handler today with SSS, it’ll get re-used here.
FoundThru also needs some love – those products with missing images are long out of date, but I have Glyn working on numerous fresh demos as we speak.
- The future of Scalability Pro lies in providing the ability for it to automatically track and identify slow pages and provide a button for admins to submit that identified info back to me. There are frequently fixes I identify that are issues in many themes, and all it takes to apply that fix is to hook the code onto a new WordPress hook specific to that theme. re: WP All Import, I’d provided them the optimisations in the past, but then WooCommerce changed how they count terms and implemented their own term counting function. Changes like this always happen and Scalability Pro can be more agile than other themes/plugins at fixing performance and scalability issues.
There’s a scalability wizard coming to Scalability Pro soon too.
re: your choice of purchase, it’s up to you, but the upcoming visuals in SSS and FWW will probably compel you to choose the bundle. I will not rest until FWW is the best filtering plugin on the market, and similarly with SSS. There are quite a few further speed boosts I can implement in FWW to make it even faster and these will be coming, probably in August or September. In the meantime, FWW has great SEO control for permalinks and canonicals, great filters, and visuals that will be far better by the end of this week.
And finally – we just added a new bonus to the bundle packs where you get access to our Discord server to chat directly to us and help us with development.
To clarify – if you can provide me with a dev/test environment for the Yith Brand images, I’ll make sure that it’s possible to use the image from Yith for the inline filters.