Hi Robert,

I am sorry to disappoint you, you won't be able to have a Table linked from Google Sheets which has so many rows (10k-25k rows).

 This is not a limit from our own Plugin, but it is a general limit from Wordpress combined with your Hosting server performance.

For example, if your Google Sheet has more than a couple thousand rows - you might be reaching the current PHP limits of the Hosting Server ( such as timeOut limit).

When you try to link a Table from a source file like a Google Sheet;

 During this process, the plugin needs to read the entire data set coming from the spreadsheet for the initial table creation.

For this, it takes a certain time interval ( depending on how large the data set is).

So, what you can try is to increase the max_execution_time and max_input_time ( or in other words, to increase the timeout limit in php.ini file),

in this way, it should prevent the table creation wizard from breaking until the table is generated.

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When the table successfully generates on the back-end, if you wish to have improved performance, you can try enabling our cache and auto-load cache , in the table settings, 

but the plugin needs to have enough time for the server to process everything/ to read the full data set of the spreadsheet and table.

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If you want to check what is the current configuration, you can do this from our Plugin's Dashboard, in System Info Tab.

And check the PHP Memory Limit.

 If it is only 128 MB, we recommend increasing it to at least 256 or 512 MB which should be enough for most websites ( depending how many other Plugins and data you plan to have on the site, etc).

Let me know if that helps.

Now, for tables up to 5 to 6 thousand rows, you can use the Cache and Auto Update Cache to improve loading performance;

Before wpDataTables v5.0, if the source file was larger than 3.000 – 5.000 rows, the page load and generation time was extremely slow, and in some cases, the pages with large linked tables would break completely. 

With this caching option, the load time is significantly lowered, but we still recommend keeping the data in these files down to around 5.000 rows.

If the table goes above around 6 thousand rows - in this case, you will need to move to SQL based Tables and import this Data; as you said, to use Manual Tables.

The reason is, for huge tables like that, we use server-side processing feature.

For non-server-side tables, all the rows load in the HTML of the browser, that is why it can be extremely slow or crash the page;

when compared to server-side processing, which uses AJAX to only load one table page at a time.

 If you import the file, the plugin reads the source file and creates a manual table. 

Once the table is created, it is no longer linked to the source file, so changing data in the table will not show up in Excel or Google Spreadsheet, and vice-versa. 

This table will be editable in our Plugin.

If you need quicker editing, you can either switch to the Excel-like view, 

and then select and copy the range of cells you want to paste from the source file, and paste it in the Excel-like view, 

or you can Update manual tables from source files (CSV, Excel or Google sheet) with three options :

• Replace data within an existing table.
• Or Add data to an existing table.
•  Or  Replace the entire table with new data.

I hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions.

Hi Robert,

You're welcome, I am happy to advise.

Just one more important thing to note :

When you try to import this data from the source Sheet to create an editable/Manual Table in our Plugin;

If you encounter a critical error during that import moment - that means that your hosting server can not handle so many rows imported via WordPress, but there is a workaround for this.

In regards to importing the data via  a file :

Data that has more than a few thousand rows can sometimes not be imported in this way directly via the plugin ( depending on the hosting server) - this is a limitation that is coming from WordPress itself combined with server performance.

But there is a solution.

What you can do is, if you get errors, and it does not work importing directly through our plugin, you can then import the file, in form of Excel, CSV, or spreadsheet directly in your database via your database management tool, such as PhPMyAdmin.

That will create an SQL Table in your Database.

And then you will be able to create a simple SQL query based table from this database table, by using this query (for example):

SELECT * FROM TableName

This should definitely work; for example, you can take a look at this very large SQL table on the Documentation we made; it has more than 2 million rows, but we first imported it into the Database like that and then called it via an SQL Query.

Let me know how it goes when you try importing your data set.

Thank you.