WPML slows Woocommerce down significantly

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Supporter timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-08:00)

Tagged: Performance

This topic contains 10 replies, has 0 voices.

Last updated by frankC-20 6 days, 14 hours ago.

Assisted by: Bobby.

Author	Posts
December 28, 2025 at 6:18 pm #17690831
frankC-20	Hi, WPML slows down my Woocommerce pages such as product pages significantly. I have all plugins deactivated and only Woocommerce and WPML activated. When both are active, loading product pages takes up to 20 seconds. When I deativate WPML (only Woocommerce is active), product pages load within 5 seconds. The same problem was described here: https://wpml.org/forums/topic/wordpress-and-woocommerce-product-page-slow-down-so-much/ however there was no solution presented by WPML. Please advise urgently as my shop is performing badly and I'm loosing sales because of WPML!!!! Frank
December 30, 2025 at 12:16 am #17695826
Bobby WPML Supporter since 04/2015 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-08:00)	Hi Frank, Is this issue happening with all product pages? If possible share a product page with me so I can make sure we are both testing the same page in order to remain consistent. Also, is this happening in the backend/edit area or the front end? I would like to request temporary access (wp-admin and FTP) to your site to test the issue. (preferably to a test site where the problem has been replicated if possible) Before we proceed It is necessary to take FULL BACKUP of your database and your website. Providing us with access, you agree that a backup has been taken I often use the Duplicator plugin for this purpose: http://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/ You will find the needed fields for this below the comment area when you log in to leave your next reply. The information you enter is private which means only you and I have access to it. NOTE: If access to the live site is not possible and the staging site does not exist please provide me with a duplicator package created with the duplicator plugin. Thank you, Bobby
December 30, 2025 at 8:38 pm #17697354
Bobby WPML Supporter since 04/2015 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-08:00)	Hi there, Thank you for the access details, I've reviewed this and can confirm that the performance is increased beyond what would be expected for a site with just 2 languages and not over 1,000 products. Load time fluctuates between 11s - 16s at it's worst. Running WPML optimizations and troubleshooting actions has no effect. Recommend next steps: 0. Update WC to it's latest version (done already) 1. Increase WP MEMORY LIMIT to 512M from 40M - 40M is below our minimum requirements. (done already) 2. Downgrade PHP version to 8.2 or 8.3 if possible. 8.5 is not currently fully supported by WPML and also in beta support for WordPress. There are numerous deprecated messages - these alone can cause performance issues. After downgrading the PHP Version let me know your results please. - NOTE that deactivating WPML causes a fatal error with WooCommerce, I am certain this is related to the PHP Version therefore I am not able to get the baseline performance to compare with WPML deactivated.
December 31, 2025 at 7:40 am #17698110
frankC-20	Hi Bobby - I changed PHP to 8.2. and deactivated everything but Woocommerce. The site loads within 4-5 seconds without WPML. So there is a significant difference in loading time due to WPML. Please advise! Frank
January 2, 2026 at 6:47 pm #17700940
Bobby WPML Supporter since 04/2015 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-08:00)	Thank you Frank and Happy New Year, I am reviewing now and will update shortly.
January 2, 2026 at 8:17 pm #17700989
Bobby WPML Supporter since 04/2015 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-08:00)	Thank you for updating me! With WPML there is an increase of roughly 4s. Below are the actions I did. #1 seems to have helped the most. 1. WPML->String Translation -> Auto Register -> set to " Disable auto register of untranslated strings\" 2. WPML_>Languages-> Make themes multilingual -> deactivate 3. WooCommerce -> WCML -> Status -> Troubleshooting Cleanup tools Remove unused custom fields from product and variation translations This action times out eventually. I am escalating this further and will update you as soon as I have feedback.
January 31, 2026 at 10:30 am #17779944
frankC-20	Hi again, so I followed your recommendations. Recommendation #2 led to my Ninja forms not working anymore which is why I had to file a new ticket with WPML. This is now resolved - so I cannot implement your #2. I implemented #1 and #3 but still loading times are not acceptable. I have everything disabled except WPML and Woocommerce. Loading a product (e.g. hidden link) takes 20 seconds longer with WPML (total 26 seconds vs. 6 seconds with WPML disabled) according to Query Monitor. Please look into it and present a solution. Credentials provided to website and ftp access are still valid. Thank you, Frank
February 2, 2026 at 6:11 pm #17784978
Bobby WPML Supporter since 04/2015 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-08:00)	Thank you for updating me! I have passed your updates to our team, while we were awaiting for your feedback our team has continued working on this ticket which has been escalated to our developers. Once I have further feedback, I will update you here.
February 18, 2026 at 3:32 pm #17833107
frankC-20	Hi there - I'm still waiting for feedback from you on how to prevent WPML slowing down my site. Please advise - your last post is already 2 weeks old!! Frank
February 20, 2026 at 8:46 pm #17839440
Bobby WPML Supporter since 04/2015 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-08:00)	We have found an issue with displaying active products that have a large ammount of variations. When combined with WPML + WCML + Redis caching the loading speed will be affected as you are experiencing. This is currently being reviewed by our dev team and we will be introducing a fix in the next release of the WooCommerce Multilingual plugin. In the meantime I will reach out to the assigned team and see if we can provide you with a patch until the next release.
February 21, 2026 at 8:08 am #17839818
frankC-20	That is great news - yes, I also think that the variations are the root of the bad performance as they aren't handled efficiently by WPML but there is no way to avoid them, and many other users suffer from bad performance when having many variations. I'm not using Redis though (I use WP Rocket for caching) - I tried object caching but it didn't really improve performance. The only real performance booster would be WPML handling products better with many variations. Please keep me updated and provide a patch. thank you, Frank