How I Used Server-Sent Events to Cut a 3-Hour WooCommerce Job Down to 25 Minutes

Key Takeaways

• Server-Sent Events (SSE) let the server push real-time progress updates to the browser without repeated AJAX polling overhead.
• Restructuring a WooCommerce batch order job around SSE-driven chunked processing cut total runtime from 3 hours to 25 minutes.
• SSE is simpler than WebSockets for one-directional server-to-client streams and works natively in all modern browsers without extra libraries.
• The PHP implementation uses ob_flush() and flush() to stream chunked responses directly from a WooCommerce background process.