Scalability Pro

Scalability Pro is our core WordPress optimisation plugin and it’s your performance insurance plan for everything excluding search and filters. As we complete performance analysis jobs for clients or answer our clients performance questions on our Discord server, we add optimisations for various themes and third-party plugins into Scalability Pro. The only thing we can’t fully optimise inside Scalability Pro is search and filters, which is why we made Super Speedy Search and Super Speedy Filters to complement Scalability Pro.

• Speed up wp-admin, imports, main queries, and really everything outside of search and filtering
• Future proof your website – a scalable site will not slow down as your site gets bigger
• Reduce server cost – Scalability Pro speeds up many slow SQL queries that run through WP_Query, for example, the main query on your archive pages (shop or posts or custom post types)
• Easy to use – includes one-click custom indexes, automatic front-end query rewrites and options to disable unused wp-admin features to speed up your back-end
• Save time – includes optimisations to speed up imports and exports
• Includes optimisations to speed up slow themes, e.g. Avada and speed boosts discovered through our Performance Analysis Service
• Good for Googlebot, admins and users – Speed up imports, archives, wp-admin, XML sitemaps and slow themes
• Never worry about performance or scalability again – purchase includes access to our Discord Server so you can chat directly to Dave Hilditch about your site performance

Note: Scalability Pro will not speed up tiny sites. It will, however, enable your small site to become large without slowing down. Works best in conjunction with Super Speedy Filters and Super Speedy Search.

View Changelog

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’s 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 vs over 180 seconds for 820,000 products on /shop/ page)
• Works by optimising your underlying database and queries and eliminating table scans
• Provides options to alter or remove slow WooCommerce and WordPress features
• Complements caching systems perfectly
• Speeds up SLOW queries – install the Query Monitor plugin and view your slowest pages, if you see slow queries being reported, Scalability Pro will help. If you instead see thousands of queries occurring, you probably need our Super Speedy Filters plugin too.
• It adds indexes to your key WordPress tables to help optimise underlying SQL queries
• It alters database queries to make them more efficient, avoiding table scans
• It provides options to disable, alter or microcache slow WordPress/WooCommerce/Import functionality

If Scalability Pro is implemented and there are still table scans occurring, we will fix them.

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 can’t do everything on its own.

If you install the free Query Monitor plugin and view your slow pages, you’ll 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’ll 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’ll 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’ve 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 soon 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.

Super Speedy Plugins Scalability Pro is the core Super Speedy Plugins plugin to transform the speed and scalability of your WordPress site. You’ll never have limits on how big your site can become, how many visitors you can have, how many orders you can receive or how many items you can import ever again.

A scalable site will not slow down as your site gets bigger. Without Super Speedy Plugins Scalability Pro, you’ll see a degradation of performance on your website once you exceed 5,000 products, orders or users. Caching can help, but what you really need is to make sure your website scales, regardless of how big your website becomes. A scalable website is as fast at generating a web page when there are 1,000,000 posts as it is when there are 10,000 posts.

Super Speedy Plugins are ‘Speed Junkies’

We’ve 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.

Scalability Pro Makes WordPress Scale

Scalability Pro makes your WordPress website scale. That means, it won’t slow down no matter how large your site becomes. It also means, if you have a large slow site right now that you can get vastly improved performance simply by activating Scalability Pro and configuring it with a few clicks.

Scalability Pro Transforms Import Speeds

Depending on how large your imports are, you’ll 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.

Scalability Pro is Regularly Updated

We perform regular performance optimisation jobs for clients, and as part of that subsidised deal we add optimisations directly into the plugin so everyone can benefit.

View our changelogs to see all the updates