WordPress is slow for big sites? Yes, it will be if you have poor hosting or a sloppily built website.
We at KGN Technologies love WordPress and it is one of our core expertise. We have been building WordPress websites since 2009 and worked on many challenging bespoke WordPress websites that required high end customization with proper client communication and project management skills.
WordPress is rock solid piece of technology innovated and with good and expert development team. It can easily be customized to suit nearly any industries web project. However, sometimes we have come across the silly statements that WordPress is slow, especially for large websites.
The Bottom Line – WordPress is capable to handle big websites, if you do it right.
It’s surely possible to develop better performing website by creating it from the scratch and avoiding unnecessary features. It’s more dependent on the skills and expertise of your WordPress developer to prepare the site for future risks and with optimum performance. Our suggestion is to value the expertise and pay for it rather than doing cost cutting and invite the risks – which happens most of the time. Just think that you wake up in the morning and trying to access your login page and you see, “Your Website Is Hacked”. This is really a creepy moment for you especially when your business heavily relies on your website. Your revenue and reputation both are at stake.
There is no issue at all with core WordPress but the actual problem comes from too many third party plugins and themes that are available. It is not that difficult to see how the problem starts: a designer builds a new theme and to makes it out of the box adds extra rings and bells (not considering the performance). This pattern gets repeated over and over again until the themes become cumbersome, slow and pain to deal with.
Other issue arises when the implementation is done wrongly. Even if you select good quality plugins and themes but haphazardly implementing them will certainly create issues and slow down your website. And if your website is slow and built scruffily then you are going to have bad time and worst of all your potential users are going to have bad experience about your website which ultimately spoils your reputation.
With cautious implementation, plugin bloat can be diminished. This might include having expert WordPress development team involved who can check resources, check error log on the server, check if one plugin conflicts with other and installing only necessary plugins. WordPress is great and is extremely flexible. All you need to do is involve right people to do the job especially when your website is a serious part of your business.
When it comes to speed and performance, luckily WordPress has something better available: a crowd of excellent options for caching and other speed boosts (like gzip compression, CDN options) that can easily offset a little bit of server-side burden.
One major caveat
If you are going to build a massive website with Facebook-sized ambitions, it doesn’t make sense to use WordPress. If you are a serious WordPress web developer considering a big project, you probably already know this. With due respect to other massive CMS platforms WordPress is an indisputably scalable and flexible platform. That’s why it’s been so successful and there are several large enterprise businesses already using it as their CMS. We love it too and use it for most of our web projects.