Magento configurable products & categories

Question

I have a large number of products on my site and every product is a configurable (parent) made up of a number of simple (child) products (color/size). On the category listing pages I only ever display the configurable products however I have all the simple products associated with the same categories as the parent.

My question is do I need to have the simple (child) products associated with these categories in the first place as I do not need to display them on the category pages?

Considerations I have: Will removing the simple products from the categories affect the filters (e.g. the colour & size filters)

The reason for my doing this is because when re-indexing category-products in full or in part (when saving) the process takes a large amount of time because of the sheer number of products.

Answer 1

My question is do I need to have the simple (child) products associated with these categories in the first place as I do not need to display them on the category pages?

You don't need to associate those simple products with categories, to display them as options in configurable product.

So you disassociate simple products with categories. Moreover in the product settings there is such thing as Visibility. You could put it to

Not visible individually

P.S. You should take those notes to consideration if you don't need to display simple products on frontend at all.