Large Sites 5000 pages run, super slow – Any Tips?

I have approx 50 pages. I’ve never had sites with large amounts of pages.
Wordpress argues they are very similar (https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Pages), yet goes on to note there are key differences as well. So, my assumption would be that a large amount of pages shouldn’t slow things down (but your experience suggests otherwise).

I can definitely agree to jarvisonline. I have exactly the same backend issue with add/edit of pages proceeding very slow even starting with 1K+ pages. My biggest site has 1800 pages right now and add/edit is almost a pain. Hosted on a 12 core dedicated server with 2x i7 intel CPU and 32GB RAM ! I have looked around for plugins but they all just give you a CMS like view, no edit or quick edit workaround. The best one is called ‘advanced page manager’. You can even check subpages in bulk but that’s it. After checking there is no edit possibility, just delete or change templates. I guess it really is a page’s issue only. Posts are not affected.

Any news?

You first need to find the performance issue. Guessing and throughing hardware at it wont solve the issue, unless that is the issue.

Get something like Newrelic on the server and maybe a benchmark plugin.
You need numbers, stats.

I dont have anything that big. I could mock it, but that wont help if the system is not the same, services, plugins, theme, etc..

While I do not have a solution, I have a potential cause. One key difference between posts and pages is that pages have the ability to have a “parent” page assigned to them. This is displayed as a drop down list when adding a new page and is also used to order the pages on the page list view (all pages). For a site that has 5000+ pages this could be a feature that takes allot of resources to render. Not only does the system need to actually load the data into the drop down list but it also has to recurse through the list of pages to determine their proper hierarchy. Both of these things take time and resources on the server.

I am further convinced this may be your issue since this feature is only used when displaying the list of pages or adding a page (and a few others). It would not be executed on the front end which you indicate there is not a reduced performance on. One other page that would need to process your entire page database would be the ‘menus’ page on the backend. Do you notice slow performance here? If so, I think we have identified our issue.

As far as correcting, this may be a bit more difficult and would require modifying the wordpress core. Or you might be able to define a function that overrides the default function for collecting this page hierarchy list. Or you could try to track down the page within wp-admin that brings up the page editor and simply comment out the part about parent id. Then see if your add new page feature starts moving faster.

Note, I ran into similar issues on a custom developed POS system that had thousands of subcategories for products. It is a hard issue to get arround.

I have modified the config.php file to disable all revisions and cleaned all former records of these. This helped me out of the slow loading ‘all pages’ section for quite a while. Everything worked normal. But reaching 2k+ pages it resulted in a white screen of death suddenly out of the blue. I tested this issue on another website with almost the same configuration on the same dedicated server with exactly same result. Loading ‘all pages’ remains on white screen of death.

Adding pages is not affected at all. Runs fast and editing pages is not affected too. I have configured almost any memory and max limits stuff to an excessive amount that should be sufficient. No way. Loading ‘all pages’ is not possible anymore.

At this point Plesk Panel Health Monitor showed an increased CPU and memory usage for the Apache webserver suddenly increasing like a rocket. I’ll try to get a workaround to eliminate collecting hierarchy list etc. which are pretty nested on my sites. Maybe it helps.

The domains are running through Cloudflare CDN and I still have to configure the Varnish cache software. But on the frontend there is no problem at all. Pages get delivered properly.

@ GliffenDesigns

Seems like you are right. It is a hard issue to get around.

Did you get any more resolution on this. I have discovered that one of my sites with 3,000 pages grinds slowly in admin. My server is massive and everything is optimised to death, but it does seem to be a pages related issue. It doesn’t seem to occur with a large number of posts.

I may actually rethink the design and use ‘posts’ as ‘pages’, or maybe create a custom post type of my own for ‘pages’ to strip it down, if I can’t get a resolution.

So any resolutions would be good.

No, I have never been able to get this resolved, I have worked with multiple hosting companies that have attempted many changes. Almost every host promises on the front end that they can fix this and then are left puzzled by the issue even with making server modifications.

I believe that there is an issue with wordpress specific to pages with large websites. I have several large sites over 5000 pages and they all run super super slow. I use the permalink – postname structure and have tried all of the different formats without luck, my assumption is that this is a specific wordpress issue that requires customization in php that is beyond by skill set.

I’ve given up to be honest

It seems to be pretty sure a specific wordpress issue related to the large data loaded with increasing numbers of pages when clicking the ‘All pages’ section. I am running 10K+ pages on each of my sites right now and I have optimised everything on my server massively but it needs additional memory that is given to wordpress in the settings.php. I put this line of code

define( ‘WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘3000M’ );

just before (!) the line

define( ‘WPINC’, ‘wp-includes’ );

Additionally I put these two lines

define(‘ALTERNATE_WP_CRON’, true);
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘3000M’);

into the wp-config.php file after the description of the base configuration of wordpress and before (!) the section of the database values.

The 3000M value for memory limit should be sufficient for quite a while. And assuming the server has some 32GB RAM in total it should leave enough resources for regular memory handling.

That way the list of all pages loads acceptable now. It still takes about 30 seconds to complete but at least you can act with the list afterwards like you are used to.

For just editing a bunch of pages I would highly recommend to install a premium plugin named ‘pronto’ and start editing just the first page which will work quite normaly. You are then able to choose the next page you want to edit within the plugin’s metabox in the column of the editor and jump directly to edit the next page instead of going back to the full list.

Hope that helps.