A catalog with real volume puts real strain on a storefront, and BigCommerce is upfront about two things that make the biggest difference: how you paginate, and how deep your categories go.
Infinite scroll feels modern, but it loads more data into the page the longer someone browses, and on a catalog with real depth that adds up fast. Standard pagination, the kind with actual page numbers, keeps each page lighter and faster, even though it feels slightly old-fashioned next to infinite scroll.
The other factor is category structure. A deeply nested category tree, categories inside categories inside categories, means more queries running every time someone navigates, and that adds latency that compounds as your catalog grows. A flatter structure with fewer layers performs better, even if it means rethinking how products are organized.
Neither of these is a quick toggle, and neither is something we leave to chance. We've already structured catalogs with over 130,000 live products to stay fast at that scale, and the same pagination and category-depth decisions get made correctly from the start on every store we run, not patched in after a customer complains the site feels slow.
If you just migrated your store to BigCommerce, this is one of several things that tends to surface in the first few weeks.
Catalog slowing your store down? Let's fix the structure.
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