Scalability Pro is changing
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I’ve been working hard on the latest version of Scalability Pro to bring improved performance to you all for a wider range of plugins you have installed. But towards the end of my work, as I was trying to solidify the user interface to make it super easy to use, I realised something that needs to happen in order to make this plugin easier to use.
Table of Contents
The WooCommerce widgets are being moved to their own plugin
Too many people don’t understand that there are replacement WooCommerce widgets included in the Scalability Pro plugin and that to get the maximum speed boost, you really need to switch over to these.
To solve this, to simplify the back-end settings page, to simplify installation and to make everything clearer, I am splitting Scalability Pro into two plugins.
- Scalability Pro
- Faster WooCommerce Widgets
That will mean Scalability Pro will focus on optimising the database for:
- WooCommerce
- Custom Post Types
- WP-Admin
- Datafeedr
- WP All Import
- Any other slow plugins
New features of Scalability Pro
To help me identify the slowest plugins, the reworked Scalability Pro will come with a performance profiler that will measure your performance before and after index creation and with/without the other important archive-page optimisations (e.g. removing pagination, removing sort options). There will be an option for you to submit your profile to WPI so that I can start building a league table of the worst offender plugins (you listening EWWW image optimiser and Wordfence!?). Once I have this league table, it will make it easier for me to work through the top plugins and optimise their database queries one by one to eliminate table scans and keep your site scalable.
To simplify things further, the next release of Scalability Pro will also come with its own infinite scroll feature. To get maximum performance, you need to remove the pagination count that occurs on your archive pages. If you remove pagination, it means you need to switch to infinite scroll, hence I’m adding infinite scroll to Scalability Pro.
The infinite scroll I have developed includes very smart use of Local Storage in your devices browser – what this means is that if a user scrolls down to page 3 (for example) and then clicks a product, and then clicks the BACK button on their browser, they will end up back at the exact same position they were at previously with no further load on your server to fetch page 2 and 3 again. This improves performance AND the key gripe most people have about infinite scroll.
Faster WooCommerce Widgets
This new plugin will contain the extracted Scalability Pro widgets – I’ll use the same underlying widget names (display names in Appearance->Widgets will change). This means if you’re already using the faster widgets, you won’t need to reconfigure anything.
Extracting the widgets to this separate plugin will vastly simplify instructions for use, improve clarity and make it easier to continue optimising performance through these 2 focused plugins.
ETA
The underlying code is all ready – I had been aiming for release yesterday, but finally came to this conclusion that to solve the admin interface and really make this plugin easy for everyone to use, it needs to be split in two.
Given that, the ETA for release is now Thursday 11th May.
Price Changes and existing owners
Splitting these plugins in two will allow me to cut the price of each plugin in half.
Existing owners of Scalability Pro will be emailed a coupon for the Faster Woo Widgets plugin and when this next upgrade of Scalability Pro occurs, it will include a requirement to install the Faster Woo Widgets plugin too IF you have widgets configured.
If anyone has any questions, ask below.
May 6, 2017 @ 4:21 pm
Hi Dave,
I read your mail about the update of Scalability Pro. What Do I have to buy or to pay when I want up to date?
Now I use scalability Pro
Thanks
Greetz Roland
May 6, 2017 @ 4:58 pm
You won’t have to pay anything. The upgrade will come out Thursday and when you upgrade it will automatically install the 2nd plugin too.
You’ll also be sent a coupon for 100% off so you can officially ‘buy’ the 2nd plugin and then have auto updates to that in future.
May 7, 2017 @ 7:04 am
Thanks Dave. Are there any SEO considerations with Infinite Scroll?
May 7, 2017 @ 8:12 am
No not really – technically page 2, page 3 etc still exist. Google sees the pagination, but Scalability Pro fakes the pagination to 100 pages, so if you are allowing Google to index page 2, 3 etc then Google will still do so and people can land directly onto page 2, page 3 etc and if they wish to see page 1 then there’s an infinite scroll ‘fetch previous page’ button at the top.
A better solution would be to have Google only index page 1 however as it’s better for users to start here.
Incidentally, that’s another SEO feature of the Scalability Pro upgrade coming next week I forgot to mention, namely improved SEO titles for the ‘Faster Woo Widgets’ plugin – so if you select filters, the title changes (good for SEO) to reflect the filters e.g. Dresses (Small, Black) – this is basically (attributes,…)
May 11, 2017 @ 11:55 am
Hi Dave, I can’t wait for the update. still ETA for today?
May 11, 2017 @ 2:19 pm
Yes still ETA today, later today.