A big catalog, a slow site, and imports that wouldn't finish.
World Electronics sells a large parts catalog online, updated by nightly catalog and hourly stock files. Both jobs had slowed to a crawl, and so had the site. We found the cause and got the nightly import under 3 minutes.
Craft CMS 5Craft CommerceFeed MeReading, PA
At a glance
At a glance · Craft site takeover, 2026
- 01 / Imports
- 90 min to 3 min
- nightly catalog import time
- 02 / Speed
- About 3x
- faster average response times (Oh Dear monitoring)
- 03 / Revisions
- 7M to 4,000
- from nearly 7 million stored revisions to about 4,000
- 04 / Search
- Fixed
- product search, after searches were timing out with 504 errors
SourcesNumbers come from Oh Dear monitoring, the project repo, and project emails.
The challenge
Years of growth had added up.
World Electronics came to us in June 2026 looking for a new team to run their Craft site. A catalog this size puts real strain on any Craft site, and years of growth had added up. Our first review covered the usual items for a site changing hands, like Craft updates, SEO settings, and structured data.
Stock levels were wrong
The site sometimes showed parts in stock when the import file said zero, or zero when the warehouse had 25. Customers noticed and called.
Imports were crawling
Feed Me jobs that should have taken minutes ran far longer, and background jobs weren't running the way they should.
Search timed out
Typing a part number into the search box returned nothing, then a 504 error almost two minutes later.
Everything else was slow too
Product and manufacturer pages took a long time to load.
The biggest issue was the product and inventory sync.
What we did
Found the cause. Cleared it out.
Moved the site without stopping orders
We stood up a working copy on our own servers, put the code in version control, and rebuilt the old host's cron scripts as Craft feed jobs. Then we switched DNS with both servers serving, so orders never stopped.
Found the real bottleneck: millions of revisions
Craft keeps a revision every time an entry is saved, and the nightly import had piled up nearly 7 million. We built a command to prune old Commerce product revisions, cut the count to about 4,000, and capped revisions.
Got imports and background jobs running on schedule
We fixed the hourly stock feed, sped up parsing, and put Craft's background jobs on schedule. Stock is current within the hour. We're adding Watchtower, our queue monitoring plugin. See our guide to fixing a stuck Craft queue.
Rewrote the slowest queries
Product pages find related products through the search index, and catalog pages no longer scan the full catalog. We sped up manufacturer listings, fixed their counts, rewrote the search autocomplete queries, and cached the menus.
Kept the store current
We updated Craft, Commerce, and plugins to current versions, set up reliable transactional email, and cleaned up SEO settings and product structured data. We also added small improvements along the way, like listing in-stock products first on manufacturer pages.
Before and after
The same store, measured.
The revision cleanup and query fixes went live on September 29, 2026. Response times dropped that day and have stayed down.
Response times from Oh Dear, two weeks before and after the September 29, 2026 fixes.
The stack
- Craft CMS 5
Craft Commerce
Feed Me- Oh Dear
WatchtowerAdding
Holy cow! You're not kidding. We can definitely see a performance increase throughout the site. Much appreciated!
The results
The results · Oh Dear monitoring
About3x faster average response times
The site is about three times faster.
Oh Dear checks the site around the clock. Over the two weeks before our performance fixes, average response time was about 1 second. In the two weeks since, it has held at about a third of a second. Server processing time fell by about 70%.
- About 1s → ⅓s
- average response time
- About 70%
- less server processing time
More results
Imports that finish. Search that works.
The nightly import finishes in under 3 minutes
The full catalog import used to take hours. Now it runs in under 3 minutes, so the night's price changes, new items, and removals are on the site long before the business day starts.
The change was immediate
The revision cleanup and query fixes went live on September 29, 2026. Response times dropped that day and have stayed down.
Stock levels stay current
Hourly stock updates finish on schedule, so customers see accurate stock levels.
Search works again
Part number searches return results instead of timing out.
The live store
A large catalog, running fast.
Our stock levels on the site finally match the warehouse, and the imports just run. We don't think about it anymore.