Installation and Licensing
This article covers the mechanics of getting Scalability Pro onto your site: what it needs to run, how to install it, how to enter your licence key so you receive automatic updates, and how the add-ons are licensed. If you want the fastest route to a faster site once it’s installed, follow the Quick Start Guide instead.
Requirements
Scalability Pro requires WordPress 6.4 or newer and PHP 7.0 or newer. Its supported database floor is MySQL 5.7 or MariaDB 10.2 with InnoDB DYNAMIC row format; MySQL 8 and current MariaDB releases are supported. It runs on standard WordPress and WooCommerce installs, works on multisite, and works with a non-standard database table prefix. Because it speeds up raw SQL rather than caching pages, it runs alongside page caches, object caches and CDNs.
Installing the plugin
Install Scalability Pro the same way you would any other uploaded plugin:
- Download the Scalability Pro zip from your account.
- In wp-admin, go to Plugins > Add New and choose Upload.
- Upload the zip and click Install.
- Click Activate.
That’s the plugin installed. On its own, Scalability Pro doesn’t change anything on your site until you create indexes or turn options on, so activating it is safe.
Entering your licence key and automatic updates
Automatic updates are handled by a built-in plugin update checker, and they’re switched on by a valid licence key.
After activating, go to wp-admin > Super Speedy and enter your licence key. Once a valid key is saved, Scalability Pro will check for and install new versions automatically, the same way core and other plugins do.
A few things worth knowing about how licensing works:
- You can install and activate Scalability Pro on as many dev and staging sites as you like. Automatic updates only run on the number of sites you have licences for, so on extra sites just download the latest zip from your account and upload it manually when you want to update.
- If your key ever reports “expired” or “exceeded”, free up unused domains from your account area, or message us with your key and domain.
Activating Scalability Pro changes nothing on your site on its own. It only starts doing work once you create indexes or switch options on, so you can safely install it now and tune it later.
- There’s a Recheck Licenses button above the licence table on the Super Speedy page. Use it after a renewal or upgrade to refresh your licence status straight away rather than waiting for the next check.
Where the settings are
The licence key lives on the main Super Speedy page. Open Super Speedy > Scalability Pro for the plugin’s Indexes tab and optimisation tabs. There’s also a link to the settings page from the plugins list.
Add-ons and how they’re licensed
Scalability Pro has an add-on, Super Speedy Archives, which is available to download for customers with an active Scalability Pro licence. It maintains a pre-computed lookup table so author, taxonomy, filtered and shortcode listing queries resolve from a single optimised table instead of large LEFT JOINs, giving dramatically faster archive and listing pages at scale. As long as your Scalability Pro licence is active you can download it from your account. See the Super Speedy Archives Add-on article for what it does and how to set it up.
What to do next
With the plugin installed and your licence entered, the first and safest thing to do is create the indexes. Go to Super Speedy > Scalability Pro, open the Indexes tab, select all the indexes and create them. Indexes speed up queries all over your site without changing any behaviour, so there’s no downside, and for a lot of sites the indexes alone make a big difference.
Create the database indexes first. They are completely safe, reversible, and for many sites they are the single biggest win, so there is no reason to hold off.
From there, the Quick Start Guide walks you through the fast configuration path, and the Settings and Options Reference explains every option in detail so you can decide which ones suit your site.
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