Best practices for category configuration

For best performance, do not configure more than the maximum recommended number of categories for Adobe Commerce sites.

  • For Adobe Commerce version 2.4.2 and later, configure a maximum of 6000 categories
  • For Adobe Commerce version 2.3.x and 2.4.0 to 2.4.1-p1, configure a maximum of 3000 categories

Affected products and versions

All supported versions of:

  • Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure
  • Adobe Commerce on-premises

Reduce the number of products

Use the following strategies to reduce the number of categories:

  • Manage unique product features through attributes and custom options
  • Remove inactive categories
  • Optimize catalog depth in the navigation

Potential performance impacts

Having more than the recommended maximum number of categories can affect site performance in the following ways:

  • Tangible increase in response time for non-cached catalog pages
  • Long execution and timeouts while managing categories from the Admin
  • Increase in size of corresponding database tables
  • Larger index tables increase time required to complete indexing operations for the [category/product relation index\]
  • Increased processing time to complete categories tree building, menu retrieval, and category rules management operations

Additional information

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