Has anyone else been experiencing slow to failing pages in the Shopify admin recently? We have had trouble with creating products, duplicating products, creating barcodes and even printing packing slips and shipping labels. We have done all the things such as clear cache, disabling browser extensions etc. Our internet has recently been checked by our tech person as well. Am I crazy to think that it could be that Shopify has not quite caught up to the capacity of our stores product list? We are constantly adding new products and I wonder if that could be causing the sluggish to failing responses we are getting. Just a thought. But really any help trying to narrow this done is appreciated!
And also just today our Shopify website seems to be down? How do you go about reporting that? I assume that is a Shopify issue? When I check my status it says everything is fine.
i don’t think you’re crazy for wondering about the catalog size, but the fact that you’re seeing it across completely different admin actions makes me lean more toward a Shopify-side issue than your product count by itself. creating/duplicating products, barcode generation, packing slips and shipping labels all failing or timing out is a pretty broad spread, especially if you’ve already reproduced it across browsers/devices and your connection checks out.
i’d test one of the affected actions from the Shopify app or a different connection just to rule out anything local, then start logging the exact time + action + error for a day or two. if the storefront is also intermittently down while the admin is acting up, that makes the Shopify infrastructure angle even more likely. Shopify’s own guidance says to check the status page when the admin isn’t loading, but if status says everything is operational and you can reproduce it across multiple devices/connections, i’d contact support with those timestamps and screenshots rather than just reporting it as a generic “slow admin” issue.
as for the huge product catalog, i’d mention that to support, but i wouldn’t assume it’s the cause yet. if you can show that the same action gets slower/fails consistently on the larger stores while a smaller test store works normally, that would be a much stronger clue that catalog size is involved.
I think you’re absolutely crazy for thinking shopify could be slow. Shopify is lightning fast how dare you!. I can’t believe you would say such a thing! Surely you have enough common sense to at least consider that you may in fact belong in the loony bin…
The spread of what is failing is the tell here. Product creation, duplication, barcodes and packing slips do not share a bottleneck that scales with catalog size - if the catalog were the cause, the product list and search would degrade first and gradually, not four unrelated actions at once.
When we chased the same shape on our own backend it turned out to be one shared thing going stale, not data volume - everything that touched it got slow together, and it looked exactly like “the system stopped keeping up with us”. The clue was that it started on a date, not at a size.
Two checks that separate the cases: try the same actions on a fresh dev store with a dozen products, on the same network - if they crawl there too, it is not your catalog. And write down when it started; a hard onset on a specific day points at an incident or a change (an app install, a theme update, a platform-side rollout), while growth pain never arrives overnight. status.shopify.com only shows global incidents, so a clean status page does not clear store-specific trouble - that is worth a support ticket with the exact timestamps.
had the same thing last week, admin was crawling on product edits and label printing. for me it cleared up after i disabled a couple of apps one by one, one of them was hammering the admin in the background. also worth trying an incognito window with no extensions before you blame the catalog size.
Hi @carriec228 Welcome To Shopify Community So The Large catalogs alone generally aren’t the cause of admin slowness, Shopify’s admin is built to handle very large product counts (many stores run into the hundreds of thousands of SKUs without this kind of degradation), so it’s unlikely your product list size specifically is the bottleneck, though it’s a reasonable thing to have considered.
For the status page showing “everything fine” while you’re experiencing issues, that’s actually common, Shopify’s official status page only reflects platform-wide incidents, it doesn’t capture regional or account-specific slowness, which is a real gap between what merchants experience and what gets shown there. A more reliable secondary check is a third-party tracker like StatusGator or IsDown, which aggregate real-time user-submitted outage reports even when Shopify’s own page hasn’t acknowledged anything yet, worth checking those when this happens again to see if others are reporting the same thing in the same window.
For reporting it properly: go through Shopify Support directly (chat/ticket) rather than just the status page, and specifically mention which actions are failing (product creation, barcode generation, label printing) with approximate timestamps, that specificity helps route it to the right team faster than a general “admin is slow” report.
One thing worth ruling out on your end: check if this correlates with any recently installed or updated apps, especially ones that hook into product creation or fulfillment (barcode/label apps specifically), since app-side script conflicts can sometimes look exactly like platform slowness but are actually local to your store’s app stack.
Yes, I’ve experienced similar issues with Shopify admin, especially when doing bulk product-related tasks. Creating/duplicating products and generating labels can become noticeably slower, so I wouldn’t immediately assume it’s your internet or browser.
That said, I’m not sure the size of your product catalog alone would cause Shopify admin to fail like that. I’d also check Shopify’s status page and the Shopify Community to see if other merchants are reporting the same thing. Sometimes everything shows as operational while a specific admin function or region is still having issues.
For the storefront being down, I’d first test it from a different network/device and check whether the issue affects everyone or just you. If it’s happening across multiple networks, I’d contact Shopify Support and provide the exact time, affected URLs, and screenshots/errors.
If other store owners are seeing the same admin problems right now, I’d be interested to know how large your catalogs are and whether the issues started around the same time. That might help narrow down whether it’s catalog-related or simply a Shopify-side problem.
Catalog size alone usually does not make product creation, labels, packing slips, and the storefront fail together.
- Test the storefront on cellular data and open both your custom domain and the store’s myshopify.com address. If only the custom domain fails, check DNS or the domain provider. If both fail, it is likely Shopify-side or store-specific.
- In Chrome DevTools, open Network, reproduce one failure, and note any 429, 500, 502, or 503 response plus the exact time. Save the HAR file if possible.
- Send Shopify Support 2 or 3 exact examples with timestamps, affected URLs, screenshots, and error codes. Ask them to check store-specific logs and recent platform errors, even if the public status page is green.
- Temporarily pause recently added product, barcode, fulfillment, or inventory apps one at a time and retest.
Hi there @carriec228
Extensive product catalogs may lead to slower admin interfaces, particularly when using bulk actions, duplication, inventory and fulfillment workflows, but this should not cause the admin to fail entirely. I’d run performance comparisons on a different browser, device, or network to verify if it is isolated to your store. For the storefront problem, check Shopify’s status page and try your store on a different network or with your mobile connection. If status says operational but you still have the issue, capture timestamps of your specific failing actions so you can check if it is isolated to a particular part of a workflow.