product category vs shop page

Hi Mike –

I took over a site that was set up to sell jewelry with woocommerce. The permalink settings page has ‘Product category base – product-category’ and Product tag base – product-tag’ and the custom structure is /%category%/%postname%/.

So for our sale each month of one-time items not available in the regular catalog, I have been giving each product the “First Friday” category and then launching the sale on the product category page —

https://coreencordova.com/product-category/first-friday/

We otherwise are not using a “shop” page on the site. All products are listed by categories. Are we doing it wrong?

On this subject, I cannot find a way to limit the number of products on the page, so when the sale launches and we get hit by modest traffic, all visitors are being served 100 images at once. Would prefer to limit that to 20 products per page as an immediate fix and then address whether to change the way we sell.

Then on a different matter, I did update to 3.1 and it did cause numerous problems – mainly when our sale launched yesterday, the checkout feature was broken for most of the day. After trying so many different fixes I’m not positive what actually worked.

Currently, customers can buy products, but you saw my earlier problem with thumbnail sizes and that’s still an issue. Also, for whatever reason, since yesterday I’m not able to update the products that I’ve created this week for the sale. I am able to update older products. Very weird and frustrating.

Status –

### WordPress Environment ###

Home URL: https://coreencordova.com
Site URL: https://coreencordova.com
WC Version: 2.6.14
Log Directory Writable: ?
WP Version: 4.7.3
WP Multisite: –
WP Memory Limit: 256 MB
WP Debug Mode: –
WP Cron: ?
Language: en_US

### Server Environment ###

Server Info: Apache
PHP Version: 5.6.30
PHP Post Max Size: 8 MB
PHP Time Limit: 90
PHP Max Input Vars: 1000
cURL Version: 7.53.1
OpenSSL/1.0.1e

SUHOSIN Installed: –
MySQL Version: 5.6.35
Max Upload Size: 8 MB
Default Timezone is UTC: ?
fsockopen/cURL: ?
SoapClient: ?
DOMDocument: ?
GZip: ?
Multibyte String: ?
Remote Post: ?
Remote Get: ?

### Database ###

WC Database Version: 2.6.14
: 
woocommerce_sessions: ?
woocommerce_api_keys: ?
woocommerce_attribute_taxonomies: ?
woocommerce_downloadable_product_permissions: ?
woocommerce_order_items: ?
woocommerce_order_itemmeta: ?
woocommerce_tax_rates: ?
woocommerce_tax_rate_locations: ?
woocommerce_shipping_zones: ?
woocommerce_shipping_zone_locations: ?
woocommerce_shipping_zone_methods: ?
woocommerce_payment_tokens: ?
woocommerce_payment_tokenmeta: ?

### Active Plugins (6) ###

MailChimp for WordPress: by ibericode – 4.1.0
All In One SEO Pack: by Michael Torbert – 2.3.12.2.1
Autoptimize: by Frank Goossens (futtta) – 2.1.0
iThemes Security: by iThemes – 6.2.1
WooCommerce: by WooThemes – 2.6.14
WP Super Cache: by Automattic – 1.4.9

### Settings ###

Force SSL: ?
Currency: USD ($)
Currency Position: left
Thousand Separator: ,
Decimal Separator: .
Number of Decimals: 2

### API ###

API Enabled: ?

### WC Pages ###

Shop Base: ? Page not set
Cart: #5 - /cart/
Checkout: #6 - /checkout/
My Account: #7 - /my-account/

### Taxonomies ###

Product Types: external (external)
grouped (grouped)
simple (simple)
variable (variable)

### Theme ###

Name: eStore Child
Version: 0.1.0
Author URL: https://coreencordova.com/
Child Theme: ?
Parent Theme Name: eStore
Parent Theme Version: 5.0
Parent Theme Author URL: https://www.elegantthemes.com
WooCommerce Support: ?

### Templates ###

Overrides: eStore/woocommerce/archive-product.php
eStore/woocommerce/content-product.php
eStore/woocommerce/content-single-product.php
eStore/woocommerce/single-product/related.php
eStore/woocommerce/single-product.php

Thanks