This article provides best practices for number of categories limit for Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud.
Best practices
The maximum recommended number of categories varies depending on Magento version:
- Starting with Magento 2.4.2, the maximum recommended number of categories is 6000.
- For Magento 2.3.x, and 2.4.0-2.4.1-p1, the maximum recommended number of categories is 3000.
Note: This article only addresses best practices for supported versions of Magento Commerce and Magento Commerce Cloud.
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