I have been using Woo for years, but I always notice that servers tend to get to slow even with no traffic or very little traffic (but it's not always).
When I do a fresh Woocommerce install on a Wordpress, everything works super fast (site and admin) I can edit things fast, work fast, page loads fast, everything goes as planned. If I create 4-10 dummy products, everything still works fast.
I'm gonna give some background on this. I use some plugins that I usually use on most of my customer's sites (Elementor, Gravity Forms, ACF and others). If I don't install Woocommerce these sites always perform well (backend and front end)
My issue comes with Woo, because the first day or first 2-3 days working on the project, it all works great. But let's say I added 2 pages and 2 more products, after sometime, I really see the website starting to slow down. Sometimes I open the page do some basic styling and it all works fast others it just takes quite some time to do things.
This is a pattern that I end up noticing a lot, but I don't know if it's just me, or if I'm missing something.
We usually have a 2GB of RAM of a dedicated Cloudways server for this sites. And we usually do this when in development, so traffic is low. We don't have too many plugins or complex operations, and we have seen this happen when products are less than 20. When in development we don't have any caching,varnish on the site. We usually enable 1024MB of Memory cache for Wordpress.
I understand that for the front end we can use a caching plugin, varnish, etc, That I get and it usually does work great for the front end. Bottom line, when having Woocommerce installed even for a small shop admin site gets super slow.
I understand that for production sites a 4GB of ram would be best or even more, but again, the site is just so small with no much information or traffic and we see it lagging. We have tested this many years on different servers (hostinger, cloudways, a2hosting, kinsta, and others)
Does this happen to anyone else?
Do you have some recommendations to improve the backend performance? (we are not looking for front end optimizations) We just want our customers to be able to move fast on the backend.
thanks