Structure site with thousands of pages?

3000 records should not be an issue for modern servers. however 3000 pages can be overwhelming for users to navigate. have you thought about storing some of the records as a custom post type with custom taxonomy?

Hi VisualData! Thanks for your reply, I appreciate it.

I am aware of the usability-aspect. But the site exist today on an very old CMS. The customer just want to move the contents to WP. I am more on the technical side.

Even if defining custom post types and custom taxonomies you need to set hiericies = true for the post type. WP seems not being able to calculate the tree without fetching all the pages (with this custom type), on top of this happens for each request as far as I understand it. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Post/pages without hiericies I would not hesitate that WP can handle.

I guess the customers will be willing to listen, and happy to have a fast loading website with easy user interface. they will appreciate it in the long run.

If you don’t really need taxonomy, you may create a custom post type with pods without assigning a taxonomy. most likely users will be searching for articles from the 3000+ articles rather than using navigation menus. I have coded a plugin CIO custom fields importer which is available for free download. It may help you to import data to custom post type with custom fields created with pods, if you choose pods for your project.

Thanks again Visual!

Hypotecially, if you do want a post/page type structured with hierarchies and parent-children relationships it’s not recommended with more than 100 pages?

Can Pods solve this? Categories will be “flat” even if using pods.

(The site is not that bad. It’s a site for a museum that is doing a lot of research so there is a lot of information. Most user’s will not dig down so deep into the site’s structure, just browsing the homepage. The structure is there for making the site manageable for the staff also.)

it is not uncommon for popular wordpress websites to have thousands or more posts. Posts are handled efficiently, even with taxonomy.

I use pods to manage more records without taxonomy (the records don’t really need taxonomy), and use relationship fields to drill down and filter these records and show a list of relevant records, similar to how taxonomy works. there are some tricks in running an optimised query with relationship fields. pods is able to handle thousands of records with ease. if you use many custom fields, you may consider table storage to reduce the number of joining queries.

Here is a travel agency website with over 150 pages in navigation menu. It was built with WordPress on shared hosting. pods was not used on this website.

The best way to find out whether pods works for you is to try on a test server, or local dev environment.

There can be 3000 pages and only 1 template used – this is how PHP works with WordPress. The “Template” is key. https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Templates

Thanks Andrew, I am well aware of the concept of templates. ??

I guess WP’s blogging heritage there is no obvious way to structure pages in a site tree with parent-children relationship, like other CMS (Drupal, Joomla or ModX) are doing right out of the box. That’s confusing me.

VisualData, the site looks good and very snappy!

Curious, are you using categories (china-tours, city-tours, special-interest-tours, /special-interest-tours) and subcategories (/special-interest-tours/minority-culture/) for the pages?

Just to make things more complicated the site is going to be multi lingual …

these are just pages. WordPress stores parent/child relationship in the table posts. with WordPress you don’t need to create a site tree beforehand. when you create pages, if you choose a parent page from the existing page, the relationship will be created for you, WordPress is much easier to use.

Thank for you replies VisualData!

I think I have the picture now.

(That parent relationship of articles is quite nice, you have the “samish” functions in Modx.)