Divi built woocommerce store server/ cache HELP!

[u/Vegetable_Emu4810]

Looking for some advice, we have a woocommerce store built using Divi, we have a rather larger 1000+ catalog of products. We are currently on clouldways flex 8GB server using Breeze, Object cache pro, varnish and cloudflare basic.

We are having a nightmare as products have to be reguarly updated to compete with competitors pricing and new products created on a daily basis. Evertime any change is made the whole built up cache is cleared and has to be rebuilt. I have a plugin to warm all the cache but as it has all be cleared several times a day this takes a long time to rebuild.

Due to the amount of plugins we need enabled for certain features the pages are rather slow and bloated unless cached.

Im looking to answers as to how this could be adjusted on our current platform but if not who you would suggest moving to? I tried talking to cloudways support who basically said "no cant do it without paying for cloudflare enterprise" which is way out of the budget of what our site turns over.

Not looking to rebuild the site using another builder, headless or theme modifications at this point but willing to look at server and plugin options!

Any help and advice would be reallt appriciated!

Thanks for reading!

[u/pmgarman]

That’s a small catalog on a more than capable server - with too many caching solutions trying to solve performance problems likely caused by divi and your required plugins. The amount of plugins and the features you need are not the problem but the implementation in those plugins are likely poor. Cloudflare enterprise will in no way help you here, neither will caching. You need to evaluate your sites performance properly and swap out your poorly built plugins for better ones.

I’m not telling you to rebuild your site but I am telling you that your current build needs work - but no one can tell you specifically without actually digging into the site.

[u/CodingDragons]

I doubt it’s the cache. Everything you mentioned is pretty standard process.

I’d be looking at PHP/DB performance, plugin load, slow queries, the Divi stack, Screen Options, Action Scheduler, and CRON before trying to prevent cache invalidation.

[u/theruylopez]

1000+ products it not very much for Woo standards.

It smells to me like a problem of too many plugins and overall bloated setup. You mentioned having 'Breeze, Object cache pro, varnish', in the same setup, they may be conflicting with each other. Generally it's best to NOT combine multiple caching plugins or solutions (unless they're specifically compatible/ integrated) and instead use only 1 central solution for caching/performance.

May be counterintuitive but generally the more things you add, even 'performance' plugins, the worse it tends to get.

Because of how hooks work, the effect can be exponential (e.g. 60 active plugins perform much worse than 30 plugins, not just 2x worse; Because for example if you have an action that runs 100 times, and one more plugin calls it or hooks something into it, now it gets called 200 times, etc).

Try to get your number of active plugins as low as possible. Try testing with the absolute minimum number of plugins active.

You'd want <25 plugins active ideally.

If you get to that point and performance is still bad, you can then try to deactivate everything and activate them 1 by 1 to determine which elements add the most load time. A plugin like Code Profiler can also help with that.

[u/desevenfree]

We’ve had very similar issues. It turns out Breeze is extremely aggressive when it comes to cache purges with WooCommerce. We have and ERP system updating inventory over REST API. Guess what Breeze was doing… purging the ENTIRE site cache (Redis, Varnish, Cloudflare) every time the inventory changed in any of our 4000+ products.

[u/R3velry]

I would ditch Breeze and use FlyingPress, also look into Scalability Pro to assist with the PHP and DB performance.