Too many variations in WooCommerce

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I am working with a woocommerce install, and we have a product that has 2016 variations (between selections for each of 4 variables – size, color, type, and extra). The problem is that woocommerce out of the box breaks when more than a couple hundred variations are added to the product page. (the admin page will not load/update at all). I have been searching for a solution to this problem without any success. Does anyone have any suggestions or workarounds? Here are some of the things I have tried:

  1. suggested to client that we break the product up so we can have fewer variations in each, but they are adamant that they want a single link to the product where all variations can be chosen on ONE product page, so that is out

  2. Looked into Smart Manager plugin, but it does not appear to allow duplicating or adding variations, only managing existing ones

  3. Have looked into gravity forms plugin and sent an email to the developer, but have not heard back and not entirely sure this would help in this situation.

I am a bit bummed because we have come a long way down the road, and everything with woocommerce is almost perfect, except for this lack of large variation support.

1 Answer
1

OK, I think I have found an answer to my own question. It appears that the broken admin pages with too many items were a result of my hosting provider (Dreamhost) having “extra web security” checked in the setup of the site. This apparently stops WordPress from updating when the query is too large. Disabling this “feature” restored functioning to this very large group of variations. It is slow, but thankfully, it does work and does update, even with 500 (and counting) variations. Hope this helps someone else who may be experiencing the same problem I was!

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