Today we will talk about high load websites: especially about planning high load startup with WordPress CMS (Content Management System). The questions I plan to cover in this article are as follows:
- Can WordPress be used for high load websites or not?
- What are the pros and cons of choosing WordPress?
- What are the potential issues I’m likely to face when my traffic hits the ceiling?
Can WordPress be used for high load websites or not?
Currently, WordPress is the most popular free content management system available on the Internet. As builtwith.com states, there are 4,488,777 websites using WordPress. 317,253 websites are among the most visited sites on the Internet.
If you look at the statistics closely, you will find that business and entertainment websites have the highest share. This means that there are many successful websites running on WordPress and surely a large part of them have high traffic and high load.
The most amazing example to me is CNN Political Ticker. But there is more.
So the answer to the first question is quite clear. Yes, WordPress can be used to create high load websites!
What are the pros and cons of choosing WordPress?
…advantages and bottlenecks of this decision
advantages It’s free! It’s easy to customize and there are armies of freelance WordPress coders out there to help you customize or add a new feature to your website.
It has a very large community that keeps track of bugs and regularly updates WordPress core, which again is free and you can update your website core for free.
There are many free and non-free plugins written for WordPress. I guess the most important plugin for non-english websites is a multilingual plugin. I have personally faced this problem many times with other CMS systems. Currently, none of the free CMS systems have good and stable multilingual support except WordPress. The plugin is called WPML. I personally purchased this plugin for two of my clients who requested a multilingual website.
Truth be told, this was the only determining factor in choosing WordPress for these websites. Because I wanted something light and stable. So you can set up this type of website in a couple of days. For a small and undemanding website, this is really important.
Cons: WordPress is an open source CMS, which means that everyone can see the PHP codes of the system. From time to time, people find bugs in the system and post them on public forums and bug trackers. Later, the WordPress team fixes the bug and releases an update that will fix it. And if for some reason a critical update has been missed, your website becomes vulnerable to attack.
Therefore, you or your webmaster should always follow bug tracking and timely updates to keep your website up to date and secure. As I mentioned, updates are free. Goal! Not all updates can be installed without additional headaches and pain. Some upgrades must be carefully planned and tested in a test environment. Some plugins may crash due to WordPress core update. Some updates could not be applied automatically and you need a smart guy to hack the code and do a manual update and great fix.
All other drawbacks I will list in the second section: potential problems.
What are the potential issues I’m likely to face when my traffic hits the ceiling?
First: WordPress default settings are not optimized for high loads. There are many reasons for this. By default, nobody knows what plugins you are going to have on your website. This means you have to manually perform optimization tasks like combining CSS, JavaScript files, serving compressed content with static object caching.
Second: no one knows how many different blocks of content you want to use on your website. Which means you may need three and sometimes four different sizes of the same photo to display it in different blocks. This means that you must have the same photo scaled and distorted for different blocks or you must upload the same photo with three or four different sizes. or… you’re going to hack WordPress core and make this scaling process pragmatic. So, in any case, you have to do a lot of homework to achieve this.
Third: No one guarantees that your WordPress will continue to serve pages when your traffic reaches 200 or 300 visits per second, even if you have purchased a dedicated server. WordPress core needs serious optimization to be able to survive under high load.
conclusion
I don’t want to scare you. You can opt for WordPress, but remember to hire a good consultant who understands your future needs and can define the action plan or a list of changes that must be implemented on your website to ensure that, at least in the nearest future, you will not have performance issues
Read about optimization in general. And if you have more specific questions, just ask me in the comments. Thanks for your attention.