Best practices for Adobe Commerce product attribute options

This article provides best practices for product attribute options in Adobe Commerce. Our recommendation is to have not more than 100 attribute options per attribute, as performance can be affected.

Many product options lead to an increase in data retrieved for each product on all read and write operations resulting in:

• Increase in SQL queries traffic and heavier JOIN operations affecting database throughput.
• Increase of Adobe Commerce indexes size and full-text search index.

Potential site impacts can include:

• Long request time and rendering times on product details and category pages containing complex products.
• Admin product save operations response time increases above optimal performance targets.
• Increase in Product Edit form rendering time.
• Slow checkout.

Affected products and versions

• Adobe Commerce on-premise, all supported versions
• Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure, all supported versions

Best practices

Reduce the number of product attribute options by:

• Leveraging different variation mechanisms: complex products, custom options as a source of product variations.
• Building specific product templates with targeting attributes and options, avoiding generalized product templates and option containers.
• Maintaining a list of actual attribute options.
• Managing products info through external Product Management System (PMS).

Related reading

Refer to:

• Create products > Configurable Product in our user guide.
• Product Attributes > Best Practices in our user guide.
• Best practice for attribute SET in Adobe Commerce in our support knowledge base.
• Best practice Adobe Commerce product attributes in our support knowledge base.