Is Booster for WooCommerce a buster for your e-commerce site?

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.

wp_options table before after booster

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

queries-before-booster

Number of queries with Booster activated: 187 (+146 queries)

queries-after-booster

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.

website-load-time

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?

6 responses

  1. malika Avatar
    malika

    Good ,thanks.

    Reply
  2. Hirumani Nath Avatar
    Hirumani Nath

    Thank you for the analysis. Can you please suggest how to minimize the performance impact while using this plugin?

    Reply
    1. Andrei Chira Avatar
      Andrei Chira

      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.

      Reply
  3. MB Avatar
    MB

    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?

    Reply
    1. Andrei Chira Avatar
      Andrei Chira

      This post is quite old, so maybe the plugin developer fixed some performance issues.

      Reply
      1. joody Avatar
        joody

        no, i have 2000 queries , I though its the reason why so slow, but not really from the PivotTables analysis in excel.

        SELECT 
        COUNT: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

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