Can WordPress websites get too big?

There isn’t an actual limit to how big WordPress can get, but the bigger it gets the more you need to optimise it.

Do you need to archive everything forever? I don’t think it’s a case of “should”, it’s whatever’s right for your site. You could prune old news if it’s no longer useful/relevant. Check your web stats – does anyone look at old news much?

How big has your MySQL database grown? Do you optimise it on a regular schedule? A plugin can do that for you, or you can do it manually in phpMyAdmin.

What about media attachments? Are they piling up? When you do a backup, what’s the filesize?

How good is your hosting? On a poor host this site could struggle.

What caching system are you using?

Google for articles on “scaling WordPress” because other site owners have dealt with this problem and written about it.

4,000 posts is nothing. ??

As an example, I’ve got one site that’s got 7 custom post types that are all interlinked, and a total of (so far) around 195,000 posts, and adds anywhere from 10 to 100 new posts every day. That site is running fine on a semi-decent VPS server that’s also hosting various other sites at the same time. As another example I’m also looking after two sites that have around 1,000 to 1,500 posts each, and these get hit so hard that they need to be on their own grunty VPS as they’ve completely outgrown any shared hosting account available.

As Jason said, there’s a lot of steps that you can take to ensure that things run more smoothly, but there’s never any guarantee that your site will fare better or worse than another site as everything is completely different between sites. Optimisation can help a lot, and it definately a first port-of-call. There’s also a lot that can be done with hosting if your site does get bigger, from load balancing servers to multiple redundancies, to multiple end points… lots of things.

Crikey! 195,000!

Thanks for the info… need to have a look and digest info..

“What about media attachments? Are they piling up? When you do a backup, what’s the filesize?”
Need to look at that…

apart from website load time bot my partner and I are experiencing loss of connection when editing posts and updating pages etc…

Maybe need to look into our own internet connection…

A few days ago moved to Siteground…