How One Little Switch in WoodMart Can Make Your WooCommerce Store a Rocket: My Experience & Tips for 25,000+ Products

Hey there! If you’re like me, juggling WordPress, WooCommerce, and have chosen the powerful WoodMart theme for your online store, you’ve probably already appreciated its robust features. But let’s be honest, once your product catalog swells to a few thousand items (let alone 25,000+!), you start running into “adventures”: pages load forever, filters sometimes act up, and getting all your filtered pages to be friends with Google can feel like a pipe dream.

This issue has a name: Ajax. And while it’s designed for user convenience, for large stores, it can become a real “bottleneck.” Today, I want to share my experience and show you how one simple step – disabling Ajax in WoodMart – can completely turn the tables. Get ready, your store is about to get a breath of fresh air!

What’s Up with Ajax and Why Can It Be a Problem?

Imagine you’re on a website, you select a filter, and boom! The results appear instantly, without the entire page reloading. That’s the magic of Ajax: it quietly “communicates” with the server in the background, pulls data, and updates only the necessary part of the page. Convenient, right?

Yes, it’s convenient when you have 100 products. But when you have 25,000, 50,000, or more, this “magic” starts working against you.

Why Ajax Becomes Your Enemy with Large Product Catalogs (25,000+ Products)?

As your store grows, the “innocent” Ajax transforms into a “monster” that:

1. Chokes your Server: Every click on a filter, every pagination switch, is a separate request to your site’s database. Imagine a hundred users simultaneously filtering products. That’s thousands of requests per second! The server load increases exponentially, and even powerful hosting can start to groan. The result? Long loading times, errors, and frustrated shoppers.
2. Slows Down the Browser: Ajax filters require a lot of JavaScript execution in the user’s browser to process and display data. If a user has an older laptop or a slow internet connection, their browser simply “drowns” trying to handle all that code. Instead of a quick update, they see a “frozen” screen.
3. Doesn’t Play Nice with Google (and it hurts your SEO!): Here’s where the real trouble lies. Search engine crawlers, while becoming smarter, still prefer “clean” HTML. Dynamically loaded content via Ajax can be indexed less effectively. And worst of all, most Ajax filters don’t change the page’s URL. This means when a user filters for “red Nike sneakers,” Google doesn’t see a unique page for “red Nike sneakers.” You lose thousands of potential entry points from search, which could bring you free organic traffic. It’s like having a huge warehouse but only one entrance.

My Choice: Disabling Ajax in WoodMart – Here’s How to Do It (Step-by-Step!)

It’s not scary, I promise. But please, before making any changes, always create a full backup of your website! Always!

1. Step One: Access Your Site’s Core. Log in to your WordPress admin panel.
2. Step Two: Find WoodMart Settings. In the left-hand menu, locate WoodMart and then navigate to Theme Settings.
3. Step Three: Head to the Shop Section. Now, in the left sidebar of WoodMart settings, find and click on Shop. This is the section where all options related to your product catalog are located.
4. Step Four: Turn Off the Ajax Toggles. Scroll down, looking for options that contain the word “Ajax.” You’ll need to disable them (switch the toggle to “OFF” or uncheck the box) for anything related to Ajax filtering and Ajax pagination. These are usually named something like Ajax Shop, Ajax Filters, or Ajax Product filters. You might even consider Ajax Add to cart (if you want the cart to also update after a page reload).

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     Locate and disable the ‘Ajax Shop’ and ‘Ajax Product filters’ options within your WoodMart Theme Settings to dramatically improve store performance.

   • Important: The exact names and locations of options might vary slightly depending on your WoodMart version, but the “Ajax” logic remains. Be attentive!
5. Step Five: Save Your Changes. After disabling the necessary options, make sure to click the Save options button at the top or bottom of the page.

That’s it! Now, when you apply a filter or navigate to the next page, your browser will perform a full page reload, but trust me – it will be much faster!

What Effect Will This Have: Prepare to Be Amazed!

After disabling Ajax, you’ll witness real changes:

1. Blazing Fast Page Loading Speeds:
   • Your server will breathe a sigh of relief. Fewer Ajax requests mean less load.
   • The browser won’t have to “fight” with heavy JavaScript. Pages load lighter, faster, and with improved Core Web Vitals scores. It’s like shedding unnecessary weight.
   • Users will immediately notice this speed: the site will work instantly, especially with caching, no need to wait like on many other large stores. This speed builds tremendous trust in your website and company, showing that you care about your customers’ comfort and time.
2. Dramatic SEO & Indexing Improvement – This Is Your Golden Ticket!
   • Every filtered page now has a unique URL! When you filter by color, size, or brand, the URL changes (e.g., /category/?color=red&size=m). This means Google can now index these thousands of unique combinations!
   • More Organic Traffic: Imagine how many people search for “red men’s Nike running shoes size 10.” Now your site has a unique page for that query! This opens the door to a huge increase in organic traffic.
   • Clarity for Search Bots: “Clean” HTML is much easier for bots to understand, leading to more accurate and faster indexing of your inventory.
3. A Store Ready for Any Scale (25,000+ Products? Easy!):
   • Reduced load and optimized request handling allow your system to efficiently manage a massive number of products. Filters and pagination will work stably and quickly, regardless of catalog size.
   • Nothing will stop your business from scaling now.
   • Mandatory Testing: After any changes, always test everything. Check all filters, sorting, pagination, add-to-cart functionality, and the shopping cart itself.

For owners of large WooCommerce stores on WoodMart aiming for scalability, high speed, and effective organic promotion, disabling Ajax for filters and pagination is not just an option, but a strategic necessity. It will allow your website to easily handle a huge inventory, become faster for users, and be better indexed by search engines, opening up new opportunities for traffic generation.

Don’t hesitate! Try it on your site, run speed tests “before” and “after,” and you’ll be amazed by the results yourself. This could be the very factor that takes your store to the next level.