WordPress, Joomla and speed

Huge sites run on WordPress. In fact, the company behind WordPress provides fully-managed WordPress for many of these big sites: https://vip.wordpress.com/

I’ve never had a big enough site to warrant it, but Caching is one of several techniques to handle high traffic sites. I’ve even attended sessions at WordCamp by WordPress employees who have talked about the kinds of optimization they perform for their largest clients of these services.

As a retired I.T. guy who began programming in 1971, I think you are at a decision point on whether to buy or acquire the expertise on running high traffic WordPress. By “buy”, I mean searching out companies that provide hosted managed WordPress for huge sites.

You’ll see some famous clients listed on some of the different companies’ sites, including the link at the top of this post.

Thanks, Jon. I have had a look at VIP WordPress but the project I’m involved in doesn’t have the money to afford it. I take your point about using hosting companies, but for the time being I can’t see my site getting much larger than ‘medium’ (however that’s defined) and having daily page views in five figures.

I suspect that the high traffic hosting sites use pretty hefty server-side kit and connectivity, so their WordPress installations might be lightning fast for hardware rather than software reasons, although I am in complete ignorance so am very happy to be corrected.

Caching will be the key for you then. WordPress runs a lot of PHP code and does a lot of database activity for each “site visitor hit”. 7-15 seconds to flip from one Admin page to another on a Raspberry Pi. Without Caching, even the very low end of Medium Traffic can cripple a low-end (512-1024MB RAM) VPS.

As an example of a WordPress site with a lot of content here’s one that I’ve prepared earlier – https://www.playgroundcentre.com

That site is running 5 custom post types, around 2,500 items of content, and a whole lot of custom behind-the-scenes coding. It’s a lot bigger then what you’re talking about there. It is also running on a fairly standard shared hosting platform, without any major caching being done. That site still runes pretty fast compared to others that I’ve seen around. We’re also currently running about 10 other sites that are about 2/3 to 3/4 that big as well, all on the same sort of platform.

It all comes down to how powerful your server is. I’ve seen people say “my site is slow” when they are on a free hosting account with next-to-no resources available, but the same site gets turbo charged by just moving to a new decent hosting platform. Servers need to be optimised as a server. Throwing up a site on a low-powered system that’s not made for the job is never going to get you the results of a real built-for-purpose hosting server.

Just to clarify, I was referring to the amount of Traffic (“site visitor hits”) your site sees, while catacaustic more correctly refers to a large site as one with lots of Content, without any discussion of Traffic.

Caching is essential for high volumes of Traffic. WordPress sizes well and performance is not much of a problem as your site gets bigger.

If you want traffic as well, that site is (over the last 3 months) averaging about 12,000 to 15,000 visits and 50,000 to 75,000 page views every month.

And I do agree that caching can help, and on most sites will give a speed boost. But there are some circumstances where caching either isn’t available or desirable (imaging caching things like sale prices, weather conditions, etc). Some things just need to be dynamic. Its not a one-stop solution for everything, but it is a very good part of a total solution.

Thanks for clarifying, catacaustic. Just wanted to avoid an “Apples versus Oranges” situation…..

Thanks very much for the replies, which are interesting and helpful, and indeed encouraging. That Playground site loads pretty quickly, and I’d never have twigged from the speed or interface that it was running on WordPress, so that’s encouraging. I’d like to stick with the WP platform if possible, if only because I know it so well now that I’ve spent years on it. Plus I’ve written a fair bit of user documentation which I’d like to recycle, and content editors are usually ok with the editing interface once they’ve got over their initial trepidation.

I take the point about servers. My WP sites run off standard general-purpose hosting accounts at Titan and Namesco. I believe that there are hosts that claim to be ‘Worpress-optimised’ but I’ve tended to take such claims with a pinch of salt. Are there some such hosts that really are what they claim? I’d expect that a fast server would need a pretty speedy MySQL server as WP runs stacks of queries per page.

I’m sure I’ve seen something on the Codex or on wordpress.com listing WP-specific hosts, so I’ll hunt that down when I get a bit of time over the holidays.

I’d like to comment, but the Moderators quite rightly suggest that hosting recommendations lead to endless arguments and are best avoided on these forums.

In general terms, business-class Linux-based shared hosting with MySQL as the database and per-user PHP memory limits of at least 128MB are a good starting point. As I said, VPS can be trouble.

Automatic daily backup can be helpful. And, if you know what you are doing with it, SSH access is useful for both command line Linux commands and, more important, SFTP access via FileZilla or equivalent FTP client.

Finally, the key for me has been using Pingdom or equivalent free monitoring set to one minute, to determine if I am really getting reliable service for my site visitors. And keeping an eye on it over the long term as I have run into so many cases where a Server or even a Hosting Company will be excellent for a year or two, then completely fall apart.

Jon, I see what you mean about hosting leading to barneys – I just searched the Codex for ‘hosting’ and got scads of hits and more than a few threads that were summarily closed by moderators. There’s a page on hosting which lists just the three hosts, which I’ll investigate. The thread “Is WP optimized hosting worth it?” is interesting, and managed to survive the moderator guillotine.

Automatic daily backup can be helpful. And, if you know what you are doing with it, SSH access is useful for both command line Linux commands and, more important, SFTP access via FileZilla or equivalent FTP client.

Yep, I’d agree with both SSH and SFTP being highly desirable, but it can be easier to get blood from a stone than to get SSH access, at least with commercial hosts I’ve dealt with.

ICDSoft offers SSH, but you have to ask.