How big a site can WordPress readily handle?

  • I have a 14 year old magazine site with 850 + or – pages. I want to convert this site to a WordPress site for ease of editing and extending. because there are so many pages, it’s my idea to lock down the existing site and reference is from a single Index (as in book index, not index.htm) page that I already have. New material would be deployed in WP and archived at the end of every year. This is a literary magazine with a fairly high readership (250,000 individual visits per year; 1.25 million hits) currently at https://www.mississippireview.com.

    I’ve done a quick partial mock-up of the new version at https://tc4w.wordpress.com/

    I don’t expect the blog part of the site to be especially active, and once each “issue” of the magazine is posted (it’s a quarterly mag) I don’t expect those to change.

    I have a couple of questions, foremost among them is whether WordPress is the appropriate tool for this job–can it handle several hundred pages, for example? I know it’ll be fine with existing archive, because it’ll be calling the old site which works fine, but what about after a couple of eyars when there are two or three hundred new pages not in the old site, but purely in wp?

    Next, I’ve set the individual stories in the WP mock-up as “sub-pages” in WP, which makes them list in the Pages section and It’s might be better if I could make each quarterly issue appear on the home page as just a single link to a Table of Contents Page (Jan, April, July, Oct) with each of these contents pages showing the story, essay, and poetry pages for that issue–is this possible?

    Also, is there a better way to do this in WP? Someone on another forum suggested using Categories, but I could not figure that out.

    Finally, considering that the main purpose of this move to WP is to simplify publishing the magazine online, so that when I pass the mag along to someone else (soonish) they will not have any trouble editing existing new pages, posting, and so on, do you still feel I’d be better off sticking with the currenet web design software? I’ve been using Frontpage (w/o extensions) and could readily change to whatever the current remake of FrontPage is called.

    Of course, that would mean the editor following me would have to learn FrontPage or some other Web design & publishing system, which is one of the things I’m trying to avoid.

    Thanks for any help with this.

    rick

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  • I have about 330 pages in WP and 300 odd blog posts so far and I don’t have any problems. The main issue for me is that it’s not always easy to find and edit pages even with the Pages+ plugin, but I’m guessing in your case you won’t be editing pages that much so I can’t see any problems.

    I’m not sure why you need Frontpage? Editing pages and posts is done in WP admin panel anyway, and most of the rest of the work with themes and plugins can technically be done through the admin panel as well. I’d just stick to Notepad and an FTP program for anything else, Frontpage is terrible ??

    What you might want to do re the display is to have it set to 1 blog post on your homepage, which is your current ‘issue’, and then have links to your categories. Your categories would be Jan, April, July, Oct etc. Either that or you could do manual links but that would be more effort. It really depends on how your magazine is set up, for example how many posts/pages one issue takes up.

    If the Wall Street Journal uses WordPress, your site can too.

    https://magazine.wsj.com/

    Thread Starter fbx

    (@fbx)

    jennikitten– you’re right that once “published” there’s not much future editing to do per page. The reason Frontpage is used at all is that the current 800 page site was done in FP and certain header adn footer elements are, I believe, products of FP. I do not want to have to fix 800 pages of stories and poems to attach new headers and footers. So I thought I’d just leave them as they are, access through a single “Archive” page that I already have, and then in the furture go with WP.

    Each issue is 10-20 pieces, each a page (shorter for poems and short shorts, longer for full stories). Maybe I need to read more about Categories.

    My though was that the front page would be news and announcements (we run some contests, sell back issues, etc.) and then One link each for each “Issue.” So far, having done something like this with Pages and sub-pages, the sub-pages always appear in the Pages widget/list, so after a year I will end up with between 40 and 80 stories and poems listed in the Pages widget, adn this seems unworkable.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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