A dealer site is a database that rewrites itself every night. The feed, not the shoppers, is what breaks it.
Inventory arrives as a file at 3am and has to be live by opening. That import is the workload, not the browsing.
Feed runs get their own long-lived process with raised time and memory ceilings, so a four-thousand-vehicle update completes in one pass instead of dying halfway and leaving your listings half-updated.
When a vehicle leaves the feed its URL redirects to the closest remaining match in the same model family rather than returning a 404, so the inbound links and paid clicks that page earned are not thrown away.
Twenty-odd images per vehicle are resized and converted in a background queue, so an import never occupies a PHP worker generating thumbnails while shoppers are browsing the lot.
Make, model, trim, mileage and price filters run against indexed columns rather than serialised meta, so a filtered search does not slow down as the forecourt fills.
Part-exchange and finance forms bypass the cache and are stored with the same encryption as any other customer record.
The failure a dealer site has is silent: the feed ran, half the records updated, and nobody noticed until somebody called about a car that sold last week.
Shoppers filter before they browse. That first filtered result is the page that decides whether they stay on your site or go back to the aggregator.
These are the settings that differ from a standard WordPress site on the same plan. Every one is a consequence of inventory arriving as a bulk feed rather than being typed in.
| Setting | What we do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Feed import process | Runs on the CLI with its own time and memory ceiling | A four-thousand-vehicle import cannot finish inside a web request, and retrying it through a browser tab is exactly how half-updated stock happens. |
| WP-Cron | Platform-driven, scheduled against your feed window | The import has to run at 3am whether or not a single person visited the site overnight. |
| Sold-vehicle URLs | 301 to the nearest model match, 410 once the trim is retired | A sold listing that 404s discards the advertising spend and inbound links that page accumulated while it was live. |
| Image derivatives | Generated in a background queue rather than on upload | Twenty photos per vehicle multiplied by a nightly feed is thumbnail work that would otherwise land on shopper requests. |
| Inventory filters | Indexed columns rather than serialised postmeta | Meta queries across four thousand vehicles turn every filter click into a full table scan. |
Every plan includes free migration, daily backups, SSL and 24/7 support.
Free migration, an import that finishes in one pass, and sold stock that keeps its search value.