Importing Listings? It’s CRITICAL that you upgrade to the EPL Importer Add-On

If you haven’t yet encountered any website issues, you may soon due to inodes limits and/or running out of space usage on your hosting.

We made importing listings into your WordPress website using a process that was good but not as easy as I wanted to make it. What worked for a while has become a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up your site.

Perhaps not that dramatic…

Why it’s critical you implement the import add-on, ASAP

Before we created the import add-on, each time a listing was changed it was re-imported into your website as a new entry along with all the images even if they were not changed. This was okay to a point, but each listing can have up to 25 images.

You see when an image is added to WordPress, your theme and plugins create several versions of that image to optimise speed. This can lead you to having 5-15 files for each imported image.

There are limits you need to be aware of that hosting companies today implement, two that can cause your site to stop working.

It’s easy to increase your storage gigabytes but often they will increase your GB but not your inodes limit.

Inodes Explained

Hosting companies implement inode limits to prevent server abuse and each file on your hosting server can count for at lease one inode toward your limit. And because real estate websites can have a lot of listings and images you can quickly reach your hosting inode limit. Once your limit is reached you will no longer be able to add more files to your website and boom, someone is not going to be very happy.

For example:

  • 300 listings x 15 images per listing x 6 image sizes = 270,000 inodes.

To make matters worse, as listings are updated and changed several times during a sales or rental campaign, you can easily reach this limit in a few months resulting.

When you hit your hosting limit it will result in a broken website, missing listings and angry agents.

Not good.

We had to improve the listing import process to support any format, minimise server usage and most of all only update images if they actually change

Around August 2015 we made the decision to create an importer add-on that would maximise import speed, minimise image processing and allow users to import any CSV, XML and Excel format into Easy Property Listings.

Importing data is extremely complex and a huge challenge for us to create because of the actual complexity of real estate formats like the Australian REAXML and the WP All Import Pro plugin needed some changes for this to work.

Our goals were to implement image skipping when unchanged yet be able to still update listing details and maintain the WordPress post ID.

We reached out to Soflyy the team who created WP All Import Pro and asked them to add some code to their plugin to make ours work.

After 8 weeks and several challenged we finally solved the problems and released the advanced importer Add-on for WP All Import Pro for free to the WordPress plugin directory and the WP All Import team gave us some feedback:

I have been following along on GitHub – this add-on is by far the most advanced and comprehensive third party add-on that anyone has made for WP All Import.

Joe Guilmette – Soflyy

Happy days!

How to check if you already have the importer add-on installed

Login to your website and visit your plugins page and look for the Easy Property Listings Import CSV, XML WP All Import Add On plugin.

Easy Property Listings Import CSV, XML WP All Import Add On - Installed

If its installed and activated you are site is good to go. Just keep listing more properties to sell and lease!

However if you do not have the importer add-on installed you must upgrade to the new importer ASAP. The last thing you want is to hit your space or inode limit when you lease expect it and your website stops working.

This is even more critical if you are a WordPress developer creating websites for customers.

How to upgrade and use the importer add-on

Due to the old process using the listing UniqueID + the modified date, the easiest way to upgrade is to delete all your listings and re-import them from scratch.

Save time, let us upgrade the importer for you

What we can do is take care of the upgrade process for you.

This upgrade can take a few hours depending on how many listings you have and old images that need to be removed and we want to make this as easy as possible for you.

We’ve put together upgrade packages that you can order and we will take care of everything for you. All you need to do is click here and select the Upgrade to Importer for your number of listings and we will upgrade your imports and remove unused images that minimise server usage, increase import speed and make your site performance better than ever.

Comments

Leave a Reply to Gerhard Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.