WooCommerce built-in importer: 5,000 variable products and 50,000 variations

WooCommerce built-in Product CSV Importer 11.0.1 imported 5,000 variable products and 50,000 variations in 27m 30s in this historical four-vCPU Hetzner benchmark. The completed catalogue passed the recorded correctness checks.

What the benchmark measured

These are historical runs from 18 August 2026 on the same four-vCPU Hetzner server, with a separate restore of the same clean baseline before each run. Timing starts at the final browser import click and ends when the importer reports completion. Exact elapsed times were 717.298 seconds for Super Speedy Imports and 1,650.069 seconds for WooCommerce. Image downloads were disabled on both sides.

Both runs created 5,000 published variable products and 50,000 published variations, with ten colour/size combinations per parent and 55,000 unique SKUs. Prices, stock, categories and variation relationships were checked. Each importer received its supported CSV format for the same catalogue. The WooCommerce transform omitted brands and left Images blank; Super Speedy Imports also imported brands and external image URL metadata.

The Super Speedy Imports run included the selected taxonomy recount, bulk attribute lookup rebuild, bulk product lookup rebuild and WooCommerce cache-clearing jobs. Its checked completion state included 100,000 attribute lookup rows and 55,000 product lookup rows. WooCommerce ran its normal importer completion work. These are single controlled historical runs, not current-version timings or estimates for another server.

Accepted evidence run: 2026-08-18T17-04-52Z-woocommerce-core-variable-55000-initial-a8448eb4.

Reproduce the benchmark

Download the reproduction ZIP. It contains the exact input CSVs, sanitised settings, scenario metadata, software and environment inventories, a guide and checksums. Obtain the recorded plugin versions from their publishers; plugin packages are not included.

Start with a dedicated empty WordPress and WooCommerce site matching the included environment inventory. Restore the same baseline before each test. Import datasets/woocommerce-core.csv through WooCommerce Products > Import, or datasets/source.csv through Super Speedy Imports. Apply the included effective settings, disable image downloads, and use the completion jobs described above. Time the final Run import click through completion and check the catalogue assertions before accepting the result.

Each runs/<run-id>/ directory contains scenario.json, effective-config.json, environment.json and software.json. The root guide and checksum manifest describe the package.

ZIP SHA-256: 35c384907c45d6f58fee5399b53ae7fb5465c2c7f82e57c5d616e5ddf0b778b1.

Related results

WooCommerce individual run · Super Speedy Imports individual run · Side-by-side benchmark · Workflow and feature comparison.