Admin Panel Optimization for Large Catalogs

Admin panel optimization for large catalogues

A separate problem from a slow storefront, with separate causes. A store can serve customers in under a second while the product list in the admin takes forty — and caching does nothing for it, because admin pages are not cached.

Why the admin slows down first

• Product lists count and sort across the whole catalogue on every page load;
• Filters in the admin run queries that no index covers;
• Order history grows without limit and is never archived;
• Logs and sessions accumulate into tables of millions of rows;
• Modules add their own queries to every admin page, including pages they have nothing to do with.

What I do

1. Measure which admin pages are slow and by how much — before touching anything.
2. Find the actual heavy queries in the slow query log rather than guessing.
3. Add the indexes those queries need.
4. Clean up and archive what has accumulated: logs, sessions, obsolete data.
5. Disable or replace modules that load the admin without benefit.
6. Re-measure and report the before-and-after figures.

Deliverable

Measured improvement on the pages you actually work with daily — product editing, order processing, catalogue search — with the numbers to show it.