This article provides best practices for number of categories limit. The maximum recommended number of categories is 300.
Affected products and versions
- Magento Commerce, all supported versions
- Magento Commerce Cloud, all supported versions
Best practices
The potential site impact of exceeding the limit is:
- Tangible increase in response time on non-cached catalog pages
- Long execution/timeouts during managing categories in the Admin Panel
- Increase in size of corresponding DB tables
- Growth of indexation time [category/product relation index]
- Heavier operations on categories tree building, menu retrieval, and category rules management operations.
Recommendations to reduce the number of categories are:
- Managing unique product features through attributes and custom options
- Removing inactive categories
- Optimizing catalog depth