How Big a site can WordPress handle as a CMS?

[elmalak]

I am considering using WordPress for a client’s site and he expects the site to be as big as 10,000 pages.

Is that something WordPress can handle smoothly or not?

also, what plugins would you suggest could make this possible in terms of managing pages and content.

thanks for your time.

elmalak

[TheDoc]

In short, no, I don’t think it would work that well.

On another note, there is absolutely no way a website should be 10,000 pages unless it is showing 9,900 products, each with its own page.

[elmalak]

Thank you to everyone who replied to my question above.

I think now I am convinced that for a very large site WordPress might not be the optimal solution, I believe if this is the case it might be better to use Joomla which will be superior in handling sites with large number of pages efficiently.

http://www.103graphics.com/joomla-beats-wordpress/

hope you agree with me.

elmalak

[rudynorman]

Personally, I disagree that Joomla is superior to WordPress for running large sites. I still have faith that WordPress can handle any kind, and any size of site. When you say "10,000 pages" obviously you’re not talking about going into "pages" and creating 10,000 posts. WordPress is some of the best web engineering available today – and if you’re going to be running products, Wp-Ecommerce is right up there with the same state of the art engineering that can handle pretty much anything you can throw at it. Something like this is more so going to depend on your hosting and hardware rather than the back-end software you’re running.

If you feel comfortable with Joomla, then go for it – but I definitely wouldn’t pick it because its "better suited" to host large sites. Look at WordPress Mu – the software behind WordPress.com and its ability to run millions of pages and posts all over the web. I think WordPress can definitely HANDLE a large site – but your ability and competence as a developer, and your hardware to run the dang thing are the things that really should come into play.

Hope it all works out of you.

-Rudy

[seomyblog]

I know this is an old discussion but I have a client asking me whether WordPress can be used to create & handle something similar to this site: http://bit.ly/AFaxd1

The site has close to 24,000 pages. It has many sub pages which I may need to have many sub categories for the WordPress posts as well.

Can WordPress handle this or WordPress MU is a better choice?
I’m also looking into Joomla as well but WordPress is preferred for the user-friendliness.

Thanks.

[davidlab.be]

@elmalak that article is a year and a half old. WP has gone under many changes since then that voids that article completely.

[jamygolden]

Wordpress can handle pretty large sites just fine. 10k pages is an insanely large site though. People seem to love the thought that wordpress can’t handle large sites for some reason. Perhaps it may have had trouble 5 years ago, but I think it’s perfectly capable right now.

@robskiwarrior “By the power of greyskull!”… Best… evar

[TheDoc]

I still don’t think it’s suitable for a site that large, at least not out of the box. It’ll require a few plugins.

Now, I simply cannot believe a site would require 24,000 pages!

[sliver37]

Yeah a Government website tends to have 1000’s of redundant/outdated pages.

On the topic, I don’t see why WordPress wouldn’t be capable.

The main factor in using WordPress is how clever you are at customizing content input, and sorting the large number of pages/posts you will need (so it’s not a huge mess).

Actually I think one of the recent updates to WordPress fixed that issue with custom permalinks, which would have been my main concern with large-scale attempts.

[Vistronic]

I am working on a wordpress Bible site
This is an attempt to bring the KJV bible to wordpress format.
Chapters Verses
TOTAL 1189 31,103
Old Testament 929 23,145
New Testament 260 7958

In order for search to work right that would be 32,292 pages to search to each verse. Showing it on its own page, a subpage of that chapter and book.

Or 1189 pages if each page is a chapter at min.

In this case 32,000 pages. I plan on exporting it as a download for others.

It is rather labor intensive at this point (:

[asawyer13]

I have about 20 million businesses that I want to load into a WP site. I want to be able to search on them and show the businesses. I am NOT concerned about the search itself, except right now I have one record per business, not sure if that can really be used that way in WP. Could WP handle this assuming my query is a simple one, like all businesses in Tucson, AZ…

[Alen]

@asawyer13, IMO this can easily be done with Laravel (PHP) Framework or the like; or Ruby on Rails. Since all you’re doing is setting and getting information from the database. This way your application would be super lean and faster compared to any CMS out there.

[mroyal]

You can look at the WordPress code — it’s free. There are good reasons WordPress can’t handle sites that large. The main reason is that it tries to pull all posts from the database when you list pages in the admin (i.e. the pagination is done after the database is queried). Once you hit thousands of posts, you will likely start noticing major performance problems and maybe hit memory limits while trying to get to the post list in the admin.

I learned this the hard way after developing a large site in WordPress and having to back out.

[__]

Just to put a thought into people’s minds… you really need to start considering what a “page” is. 32K Bible verses or 20M business listings is not 32K/20M “pages.” It’s one page, with 32K/20M different results that might be shown on it.

You might think, “whatever, that’s just semantics”: no, it’s not. It’s a completely different way of thinking about the problem. Having a different, unique page for each business is like having a different phone for each number you might want to call.

Using WP (or any cms, or any whatever at all) to author 20 million individual pages is completely absurd. It’s asinine. Authoring one page that will ask a database for one out of 20 million rows, and then display it, is beyond simple.

[mroyal]

Well, different people have different use cases. There are sites with hundreds of thousands of pages that are very successful. One size doesn’t fit all. The question was, if you need (or think you need) thousands of pages, can WordPress handle it. The answer is no (and maybe rethink the problem). :)

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