Comment on WordPress Theme Development by SEO Dave.

Stallion Responsive WordPress Theme My recipe site has over 60,000 posts and doesn’t struggle anymore :)

Had a problem with a plugin that made the Category menu ‘fold’, reduced the Category links from all of them shown all the time (as it is now, hundreds of Categories!) to only the top parent Category (about 30 Category links all the time), you would click a Parent and the Child Cats open (resulting in 30 to about 70 Category links opening on the menu).

This plugin resulted in 600-1000 database queries if I recall correctly for every page loaded at a time where the site was getting over 10,000 visitors a day not including search engine spiders and this caused my server to STRUGGLE (crashed a few times) and surfing the site was slower that swimming through sand!

Before realising it was the plugin I bought a second dedicated server and only added the recipe site to it, still had problems (not as bad), realised it wasn’t the server to blame (the other server had all my other sites on it as well, millions of pages indexed in Google).

Removing the plugin reduced the queries per page loaded to a more normal 30 queries and now it runs smoothly. So without using a poorly written plugin WordPress can at least handle 60,000 posts with no problems.

I have other sites with, 5K, 10K, 20K, 30K posts on them with no issues. Many of these are datafeed like sites and so don’t get much traffic, but Google etc…. still spider the CRAP out of them most days and my servers memory (not that high) is doing fine! A case of 20,000 real visitors a day and the equivalent of another 100,000K visitors a day in the form of search engine spiders!

Added the WP Super Cache plugin to the recipe site as well, but don’t think it’s needed, especially as the site has a Google penalty which has the site at about 1,000 visitors a day right now. Just before the penalty looked like it was going to break into the 15K visitors a day region as added 30K+ new recipes that had just been indexed and started to rank! Tried selling text links from it, despite removing the two links sold the penalty remains other than a 7 day period when it was lifted.

So unless your site is on a really badly overloaded server I think WordPress can cope with it. 1,000 pages is nothing for WordPress.

BTW I enjoy giving SEO advice.

David Law