I’ve recently come across this topic on WordPress.org. Someone said that Booster for WooCommerce plugin saves too many options in the wp_options table and that affects the performance of his website.
I decided to test it and installed a fresh WordPress + WooCommerce + Booster for WooCommerce on a local testing environment. I installed the Storefront theme and imported the dummy data from WooCommerce.
Before activating the Booster plugin, I had 296 rows in the wp_options table.
After activating Booster the number of rows grows to 1522, so that’s 1226 rows inserted by the plugin. All of these options have autoload set to yes.
What autoload yes means?
It means that when WordPress is initializing it reads those options from the database. If there are too many options and you’re on limited shared hosting, it might be problematic resulting in slow load time.
Let’s install the Query Monitor plugin and see what queries Booster adds to the shop page.
Number of queries without Booster: 41
Number of queries with Booster activated: 187 (+146 queries)
The load time is still satisfying despite those extra queries but keep in mind this is a local testing environment. I’m using Local by Flywheel with a Nginx + PHP7 setup, but what would happen in a real-life scenario?
Maybe you have a bigger database, more than just 20 dummy products, more plugins; perhaps you’re on shared hosting, no Nginx, no PHP7.
Those extra 146 queries on your page and those additional 1226 options in wp_options with autoload: yes might matter a lot more.
Your loading time might look like this.
If you use Booster for WooCommerce plugin, test your website speed with Pingdom Tools and see if you get that long wait yellow line. It might be those queries and options in wp_options table causing it.
Are you using Booster for WooCommerce? What’s your experience with this plugin?
Good ,thanks.
Thank you for the analysis. Can you please suggest how to minimize the performance impact while using this plugin?
I don’t know if you can.
But in all fairness, I haven’t tested this plugin recently, maybe the developer has been improving it since I wrote the article.
I came across this post after a search for this plugin, I do have the pro version. It works, but I’m always concerned about the performance impact all of this plugins have on a website.
After reading your post I went to check my database and searched for ‘wcj’ and “only” have 296 results. This means that the issue is mostly fixed?
Still… I only have 2 or 3 modules active and probably can get away by searching a few hooks and filters to do what the plugin does without the ‘bloat’.
What do you think?
This post is quite old, so maybe the plugin developer fixed some performance issues.
no, i have 2000 queries , I though its the reason why so slow, but not really from the PivotTables analysis in excel.
SELECTCOUNT:TIME
SUM:TIME
SELECT *
8
0.0084
SELECT autoload
3
0.0041
SELECT COUNT( * )
1
0.001
SELECT COUNT(*)
1
0.0017
SELECT DISTINCT YEAR( post_date ) AS year, MONTH( post_date ) AS month
1
0.0012
SELECT ID, post_name, post_title
12
0.0142
SELECT location_code, location_type
219
0.2492
SELECT meta_id as meta_id, meta_key, meta_value
218
0.001
SELECT method_id, method_order, instance_id, is_enabled
1095
1.5502
SELECT option_name, option_value
SELECT option_value
75
0.1108
SELECT post_id, meta_key, meta_value
2
0.0029
SELECT t.*, tt.*
1
0.001
SELECT user_id, meta_key, meta_value
1
0.001
SELECT zone_id, zone_name, zone_order
SELECT zone_name, zone_order
219
0.0022
总计
1856
1.9489