If you’ve ever managed a WooCommerce store with hundreds of variations, you’ve likely hit the “variations wall.” I’ve seen sites where the get_variation_prices() call was responsible for nearly half a second of latency. In WooCommerce 10.5, we’re finally seeing a major refactor to WooCommerce variation price caching that addresses a long-standing architectural bottleneck.
Previously, WooCommerce used transient caching for these prices, but the way it generated the cache key was… problematic. It serialized entire callback objects. If you had a plugin modifying prices via an object-oriented hook, any change in that object’s state—even something as trivial as a logger property—would invalidate the entire cache. This caused massive overhead on complex setups.
The Shift to Stable Signatures
To fix this, WooCommerce 10.5 introduces the CallbackUtil class. Instead of serializing the whole object, it now generates stable signatures based strictly on class and method names. This keeps the WooCommerce variation price caching consistent across requests, even if your object state fluctuates slightly.
Furthermore, this update brings a significant performance win. In official testing with 800 variations, execution time dropped from ~500ms to just 40ms. This follows the trend of performance-first updates we saw in the WooCommerce 10.4 update.
Action Required for Dynamic Pricing Devs
If you build extensions that modify variation prices based on dynamic factors—like user roles, time of day, or cart contents—you need to pay attention. If you don’t account for these factors in the cache hash, your customers will see incorrect (cached) prices. Specifically, you must now hook into woocommerce_get_variation_prices_hash.
<?php
/**
* Example: Adding User ID to the variation price cache hash.
* This ensures different users don't see each other's cached discounts.
*/
add_filter( 'woocommerce_get_variation_prices_hash', 'bbioon_add_user_to_variation_hash', 10, 3 );
function bbioon_add_user_to_variation_hash( $price_hash, $product, $for_display ) {
$price_hash[] = get_current_user_id();
return $price_hash;
}Legacy Support and the WooCommerce 11.0 Roadmap
The team is being cautious here. A new filter, woocommerce_use_legacy_get_variations_price_hash, currently defaults to true. This means the old, slower serialization behavior remains active unless you manually opt-in. However, come WooCommerce 11.0 (August 2026), this will default to false.
Therefore, I recommend testing this early. You can force the new, faster behavior now by returning false on that filter, provided you’ve verified your dynamic pricing hooks are hash-aware. For more technical details, check the official developer advisory.
Look, if this WooCommerce variation price caching stuff is eating up your dev hours, let me handle it. I’ve been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Summary for Shop Owners
If your store feels sluggish on variable product pages, this update is your best friend. It significantly reduces the server load required to display prices. Just ensure your developer reviews your custom pricing logic before the 11.0 rollout to avoid any transient-related display bugs.
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