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Fed up of slow and broken imports? Always wondered why imports take hours or days when they should take seconds or minutes?

Overview of Super Speedy Imports

Super Speedy Imports is a SQL-first, developer-friendly, import tool. Instead of loading items to your site one-by-one, Super Speedy Imports stages imports in a custom table and then loads them all in one fast SQL query.

This architecture breathes life into your WordPress imports. Never again limit the size of your site because of how long your imports and updates take. Super Speedy Imports are so fast and lightweight that you can run them really at any time.

Import millions of items in minutes, not days. Whether you’re updating inventory, loading complex data sets, or expanding your site, Super Speedy Imports lets you handle it all without downtime or delays.

A sample 33,000 product import completing in just over 2 minutes (without uploading images)

Config for the import from screenshot for 33,000 products

Super Speedy Imports is Developer Friendly

The architecture of Super Speedy Imports is focused on speed first, with a close second being modularity and developer-friendliness. Super Speedy Imports runs its imports in ‘stages’. Templates define the stages and their execution order. Typically:

1. import-csv – loads the CSV to 3 import tables. _batch for post and postmeta data, _terms for flat term info and _hierarchical for hierarchical terms
2. massage-data – runs PHP functions against each row of the table to manipulate the data, e.g. change xxs to ‘x-x-small’
3. import-terms – runs wp_insert_term for any missing terms
4. match-existing – updates the _batch table with existing post IDs based on the unique identifier (e.g. SKU)
5. update-posts – actually updates wp_posts with info from _batch
6. insert-posts – inserts to wp_posts from _batch
7. update-postmeta – updates wp_postmeta from _batch
8. insert-postmeta – inserts to wp_postmeta from _batch
9. upsert-relationships – deletes then reinserts to wp_term_relationships based on _term and _hierarchical
10. attach-existing-images – finds previously uploaded images and updates _batch
11. import-images – uploads and attaches missing images
12. save-posts – per row, invokes the save_post trigger

From the above you can see there are various dependencies, but not all stages are required in all cases.

For example, if you are running a simple stock & price update, you could run ‘import-csv’, ‘match-existing’ then ‘update-postmeta’ and skip the other stages.

Each stage will allow you to run stuff before & after that stage. Additionally, you will be able to define additional stages to execute and insert them at any point. So – if you need data sent into a separate custom table, that can happen all inside this plugin. If you need a stage to talk to AI, that can happen. There’s the usual ability to run a function per-row if you MUST, but really I want to educate people how to use this tool properly to build imports which are lightning fast.

Finally – each stage is replaceable in this modular system. Currently, the slowest stage is ‘massage-data’ but this could be replaced by a SQL-first stage if that’s an option for your import giving massive speed boosts.

The idea is that I want to make a great platform for myself & others to create the fastest possible imports for anything in WordPress. There is no requirement that imports should be to wp_posts, wp_postmeta, wp_terms etc – they could ultimately go into any table(s).

Functionality

As of the 4th November 2025, the following functionality is available:

• SQL-first import plugin – this means 100x+ speed boosts!
• Imports posts or custom post types or WooCommerce products. CPTs may require some custom functions depending on their nature.
• Import simple, variable, downloadable products
• Import terms (e.g. categories, tags, brands) for any post type and product attributes for products
• Import postmeta of any type from CSV. If you need serialized arrays, our custom functions can handle that.
• Import from WP CLI
• Delete data missing from previous import
• Custom functions to massage & map source to destination data
• Product image and gallery import
• Update stock status & prices
• Full import history

Some notable functionality not included yet:

• Import from XML or JSON or URL – there are workarounds for this! Come chat on Discord.
• Product-specific attributes (if your attributes are not present under wp-admin > Products > Attributes then you cannot import them yet – product specific attributes are attributes that are not searchable)

You can view the full changelog for Super Speedy Imports here to get an understanding of what’s in the plugin.

Super Speedy Imports Learning Centre

The KB articles are growing in volume rapidly:

https://www.superspeedyplugins.com/kb/super-speedy-imports/

If you have any questions, come ask Dave Hilditch on our Discord server.