Hosting: Bluehost – Cloud Hosting (shared) WordPress Single Site
Users Base: Website is live with 40k+ visits per month and 4k accounts hosted on the site

Important Key Considerations:

• I am not a developer but I have learned to implement WP Solutions, some HTML, CSS, and a little PHP. It is not enough to build a custom-made solution from scratch (which I know is the ideal solution to the problem) but enough to take off the shelf solutions and do a little customization to make it a little more custom.
• The company I am doing this is a startup that is being bootstrapped (no funding or investment received), thus, we have extremely limited financial resources which is the reason why we are using off the shelves solutions to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product / Prototype).
• Once more capital is available we are planning on building a custom solution either in Vue.js or React, and bootstrap while hosting in AWS or GCP<.

Background:

We started a website that has grown from just displaying information (kind of like a news feed) that users can read to a more complex site where we use plugins such as Ultimate Member to host user accounts where they can interact with each other.

In addition, we have added other plugins to increase the site’s functionality. As the website grew more complex and we added more users (3K+) I started to noticed a huge decrease in performance and loading speeds. This is the reason why I am thinking about doing the split.

The Plan:

The Idea will be to have two subdomains (mainsite.com & app.mainsite.com) the mainsite.com will hold basic information about the company, like about us, pricing etc, and the app.mainsite.com will hold where the users create their account’s and interact with each other.

The Questions:

• Is this a best practice?
• How complex is this to implement?
• What are the possible downsize to implement that plan?
• Is there anything that I am missing or not taking into consideration?
• When I ask other developers they all suggest just to move to a different hosting provider, but I have seen much larger sites than ours running on WP and Bluehost and still quite fast. So I am not entirely convinced that the hosting is the issue. Any thoughts on this?
• Are there any other alternatives to this issue?

I know this is a hand full of questions, but I just wanted to make sure I cover all important aspects of this project.

Any advice is GREATLY appreciated.

Here are some screenshots to illustrate the plan.
Current Solution HERE
Proposed Solution HERE

If you are getting 40k visits per month, it might be time to look at a VPS or Cloud hosting plan or with Bluehost, one of their higher tier WordPress hosting plans.

All my best!