Our clients are SMEs and fast-paced startups generating between $5M and $100M in revenue, with some popular enterprises generating over $10B.
We have worked with most managed WordPress providers such as Flywheel, Kinsta, WP Engine, Media Temple, SiteGround (to name a few).
Over the past couple of years we’ve migrated several of our customers to Pagely. Pagely are a managed WordPress hosting vendor for high-scale solutions hosted on top of the AWS infrastructure. They provide a set of security and performance layers on top of their platform framework that have been optimized for speed and reliability.
Our websites hosted there generate between 250,000 page views and 20,000,000 monthly views.
We have seen performance improvements when migrating from other hosts right after the migration. Our agency provides ongoing development and performance improvements in our retainer plans but it’s not uncommon to gain about 20% performance gain just from moving to Pagely before we start refactoring the codebase. We’ve had a couple of websites loading for 14 seconds dropping down to 6–7 seconds after a migration as well.
We’ve hosted a couple of WordPress multisite networks, several magazines, a membership website and an WooCommerce shop there as well. Pretty solid uptime and overall great load times as well.
Some of our clients have tried other vendors before moving to Pagely as well. We’ve had various problems with uptime, handling a large number of concurrent visitors, supporting some third-party scripts or extensions, or integrating services that run seamlessly on top of Amazon Web Services. Handling automated deployments through capistrano are also a consideration which requires ssh (which some vendors don’t really offer).
In terms of reliability, we’ve been pretty happy with Pagely so far. They handle the initial migration and onboarding in order to fine tune the server setup in an optimal manner suitable for the type of website. We’ve managed to setup staging environments for multisites, offloaded media to S3, integrations with dozens of 3rd party service providers and more.
WordPress could be a solid foundation for a site like TripAdvisor – and probably Airbnb. Read the complete overview and our relevant experience below.
No off-the-shelf solution or a framework would work right away for a platform of a similar scale. And even the best practices on building a product from scratch or using a lightweight framework will be redefined once you grow beyond a certain scale.
The High Scalability Model
One of my favorite performance blogs is High Scalability. It cover case studies from some of the top players out there. You can read how some notably minor changes have had a massive impact for companies like Instagram or Pinterest. Netflix’s architecture overview is also available on their blog:
Airbnb is branched into 65,000 cities, presenting over 3M listings and having accommodated over 200,000,000 total guests.
Each of those massively successful businesses has innovated continuously on the technical spectrum as well. Large brands face high-scale problems all the time.
Which also requires a more platform agnostic approach. The larger the technical solution, the more likely is relying on different programming languages, database engines, hosting environments, and hundreds of helper tools and libraries in-between.
Is WordPress the ideal solution to power another Netflix? Probably not. The thing is, Netflix is less of a CMS and more of a streaming company. The core logic of the business is video streaming. The CMS aspect isn’t as crucial and core WordPress components such as Media or Comments will simply carry technical debt.
Can it handle Airbnb?
Probably yes. We’ve scaled listing platforms to tens of millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of entries, both as a single site with venues, and a multisite environment. It’s somewhere between 10% and 20% of Airbnb’s scale and we could have accommodated more at a fairly affordable recurring cost for hosting and maintenance (within the low five figures/month).
In fact, Placester is a massively successful business serving nearly half a million real estate agents. To the best of my knowledge, their hundreds of thousands of sites are still WordPress based – as seen in their Developers section or some featured resources back in 2014 (most of which are still hosted with them).
TripAdvisor can actually fit a WordPress environment fairly well.
After all, you’ve got venues and comments, some registered users, and attachments for some of the venues. Sounds familiar?
WordPress.com serves over 400 million monthly views – more than TripAdvisor and probably more than Airbnb. Both websites rely on structured content in a CMS-alike manner, utilize media actively, and welcome a percentage of registered users. Using WordPress as a core framework may be acceptable.
It would still require a massive team, include a revamp of the WordPress life cycle, and depend on tons of 3rd party solutions and applications as well. But that would be the case regardless of the choice of a core framework or platform.
Netflix simply doesn’t seem like a perfect match for WordPress. A lightweight CMS and a better focus on streaming and video hosting/management seems more applicable here.
Here’s a slide from a WordPress.com presentation for a talk held by Iliya Polihronov back in 2012:
A lot has changed over the past 5 years and the numbers are significantly higher now – without having up-to-date stats publicly available now.
Millions to Billions of Views With WordPress
While Automattic maintainс a massive distributed server infrastructure in order to handle tens of millions of blogs for their hosted blogging platform, a comparable amount of traffic could be handled for a single site install at a more affordable fee.
Some of our customers serving over 100 million page views monthly pay $5,000 – $10K a month on hosting fees. Scaling up to 500M and higher would require a more notable investment. Handling tons of concurrent users, a multisite network, some resource-heavy components (say, video streaming or image management) would definitely contribute to the hosting costs.
WordPress Can Scale a Lot
A simple blogging or magazine website running a lightweight theme and a few simple plugins can serve tens of millions of page views a month easily. The vast majority of the content can be cached in multiple layers (through object caching and page caching) which will decrease the impact on the server.
However, most websites tend to be much heavier. They do integrate a number of 3rd party services and solutions. Or integrate heavy premium themes. Or install complex and cluttered plugins affecting both the stability and the scalability of a website.
Combined with the higher traffic and larger content volumes, hosting charges can be quite demanding.
WordPress for Real-Time Data Broadcasting
Serving real-time data is also a challenge. The more you could cache for all of your visitors, the lower the server consumption.
Scaling a WordPress website goes through the same brainstorming process for scaling any web-based application.
Certain areas that require attention are:
Database load
Handling a large volume of concurrent users
Storing data in the most efficient manner
Dealing with various HTTP requests triggered from each page load
Implementing the right caching layers
Handling media assets
The more a WordPress platform grows, the more considerations and opportunities there are to optimize specific areas.
With the popularity of cloud-based services, a web application can grow steadily even without having to restructure the entire platform and split it manually across different physical services.
WordPress in the Cloud
An optimal network diagram, credit: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/how-lucidchart-makes-it-easier-to-diagram-your-infrastructure/
AWS is a great example offering its Elastic Beanstalk solution dealing with load balancing, automatic scaling of instances, provisioning capacity on demand, monitoring application health, offloading traffic to replicated instances in case of failover.
improper server management or a cheap infrastructure
lack of decent caching
incorrect data management
overusing heavy plugins
dealing with large media assets
loading tons of scripts and styles across the entire website.
Quick Tips to Scale a WordPress Website
Taking performance lightly is a recipe for disaster. Scaling a WordPress site quickly is only possible with a solid investment of time and resources — paid traffic, PR campaigns, news appearances, and leveraging key events for maximum impact.
All of this requires professional development help for optimizing database queries, reducing the number of HTTP requests per page, compressing and minifying assets, lazy loading images or ads, to name a few. That said, some best practices are easily achievable and often recommended before the development team jumps in.
A generic hosting provider may be your biggest pitfall while scaling your website.
Generic hosting providers aim to support all sorts of web applications. In the PHP ecosystem, we have phpBB and Invision Power Board as popular forum solutions, Gallery2 for galleries, a bunch of content management system like Drupal and Joomla, analytics tools and plenty of ad-hoc systems and frameworks.
If your WordPress agency employs DevOps experts and system administrators and can provide 24/7 support, a barebone cloud hosting solution will be a great asset. Otherwise, most WordPress professionals work with managed hosting vendors like Pagely. Managed WordPress hosts optimize their infrastructure for WordPress, disabling unnecessary components and modules, trimming down the setup, and optimizing for performance and speed. It’s a worthy investment in the long haul.
2. Image Compression
Using tinypng to compress 1.6MB image to 258KB
Compressing images uploaded in your WordPress media component is really valuable and not as complicated.
Large and bloated images take forever to load, which is unbearable on a mobile network. This slows down the website, increases the bandwidth to your server, drops your SERP rankings in Google, and increases your bounce rate. Nothing good comes out of slow website images!
First off, always resize your images before uploading to a reasonable size, unless you only use thumbnails and predefined image sizes. It takes under a minute to resize an image and you avoid cluttering your server space.
Second, use a 3rd party solution for compressing them. Kraken.io, EWWW, Imagify, TinyPNG are several popular solutions that squeeze the most out of your image. This may reduce the size of a generic image with 70% on average.
Some of the image compression tools have WordPress plugins. Consider signing up and adding one which would compress every image uploaded to your WordPress media folder.
3. A Lightweight WordPress Theme
Most premium themes are quite heavy as they cater for every type of business. From photographers through eCommerce to large media sites or social networks, they support a load of features that increase the complexity of the platform tenfold.
Sticking to a basic (yet beautiful) WordPress theme will ensure you don’t load dozens of additional scripts, styles, and fonts that add up to the load time of your site.
4. Simplified WordPress Plugins
Same goes for WordPress plugins that act like a Swiss Army knife.
Instead, shoot for simple plugins that solve your job — nothing else, nothing more. This will get the job done without triggering a hundred additional conditional workflows to get the same job done.
5. A Content Delivery Network
Content delivery networks will distribute your static assets (HTML, scripts, styles, fonts, images) to hundreds of nodes around the world. A website visitor will fetch these assets from the closest node (geographically) and won’t hit your server every single time.
This is a common optimization approach that brings additional perks, too. CDNs tend to include additional protection measures against DDoS attacks or other loopholes across WordPress websites. CloudFlare and Sucuri are two of the popular options, the first one known as a CDN first and the latter — an established WordPress security vendor with an integrated CDN.
Note: Most managed WordPress hosting providers offer an in-house CDN or integrate with a popular one — double check before signing up for a separate provider.
6. Minifying/Combining WordPress Assets
A bit tricky as side effects are not uncommon.
Minifying scripts and styles results in smaller file sizes. Variable names are trimmed down to a character or two. Whitespaces are cleared up, and the resulting file is easier to fetch and parse from the browser.
Combining these assets means fewer HTTP requests to fetch each one of them. Instead of loading 150 scripts and styles for a large magazine page, you can bring these down to 50, massively decreasing the load time of your page.
Sometimes, regressions may occur — especially for opinionated browsers like Internet Explorer. Complicated scripts may be parsed wrongfully, or loaded in an incorrect order. This tends to work fine for simple pages but when in doubt, only test on staging before consulting with your WordPress vendor.
If your application can benefit from using a CMS, WordPress is a legitimate choice. You can leverage numerous APIs out of the box. Whenever you require a different set of data which isn’t suitable for the default schema, you’re free to create your database tables and design a lightweight data framework on top of what WordPress provides.
Basically, you can only go wrong if your application doesn’t need a CMS. If you don’t deal with logged in users, media, comments, or store a unique set of data that doesn’t resemble WordPress posts or pages (or extend them), a plain solution may work better.
If you target a heavy and bloated theme and tons of convoluted plugins, that will also affect your performance and stability big time.
Otherwise, WordPress can easily scale tens of millions of monthly visitors. You can stretch it past the 100M mark with the right setup and careful consideration of business needs vs. technical limitations.
Before I made the switch to full-time freelancing, I had three years of full-time Java development experience and several years of dabbing into and extending different PHP and Python-based platforms.
My initial grande idea was selling websites with my custom built proprietary JSF CMS. It took me 2 weeks to discard my ludicrous business plan for three main reasons:
My Java CMS was significantly heavier and eating up at least 256MB of RAM for a brand new project
Building new features was taking me weeks (or more) as compared to 5–10 times shorter when replicating these in PHP
The available Java hosting providers were drastically more expensive compared to their PHP equivalents
PHP Ranked Higher Than Java
My plan had no added benefits to small businesses and I had to jump back to the PHP stack.
After building PHP solutions for another 2 or 3 years, it was easy to recognize some of the areas that required a lot of time. Most were related to bugs showing up in our own frameworks or the additional layers on top of CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Kohana (which we’ve used at the time).
After all, we were actively building that ourselves. We had a limited number of customers testing different scenarios. Edge cases were popping up at all times.
WordPress as a Continuation of PHP
WordPress was the logical choice progressing forward. With over 70,000,000 websites out there nowadays, the QA process is offloaded to third parties who have already cleared out all sensible scenarios.
This is still our “tool of choice” for everything that falls under the CMS category. And the vast majority of the projects out there rely on different types of content, user management, admin dashboards, extensible UI, media assets, great SEO and other perks of WordPress provided out of the box. Let alone the ability to use existing third-party solutions out there or even fork and upgrade them as needed.
We Still Do Full-Time Development
The difference is in using a stable framework covering the default use cases and focusing on business logic and developing custom plugins, services, integrations for anything new.
What is the main purpose of your website and do you aim for career growth as a developer yourself?
If you are a business owner looking for a small business website, WordPress will probably suffice for starters.
If you are a developer looking for the right programming stack, then it depends on your incentive and the expected results after the website is live.
In case you want to promote any services of yours without focusing on development too much, WordPress is also a logical choice. Easy to set up, a good portfolio of available templates, massively extensible.
If you want to study programming along the way, figure out whether you want to profile in WordPress. The WordPress industry is fairly broad and the platform powers 29% of the web. But it’s a competitive space known for its “race to the bottom” in terms of pricing services and products. It may take a while to gain experience and reputation in the space in order to price your services and generate decent margins.
Teaching Yourself Programming
For studying purposes, I’d focus on studying computer science first – this entails algorithms and data structures, operating systems, networks, computer architectures. Those are crucial for a developer eager to build professional software solutions.
Whatever web platform you build, it runs on a set of a web server and a database server handled by an OS. They consume resources from your physical or cloud server – such as CPU, RAM, or I/O operations. There’s the bandwidth that goes in transferring data back and forth. Failing to understand what’s going on under the hood would result in a non-productive code that won’t scale in the long run.
Thus, you can start with the basics first and teach yourself some PHP programming. Then you can build platform-independent solutions or develop on top of the WordPress Core.
Starting With WordPress Development
If you pick WordPress, make sure your background lets you extend the platform indefinitely – through custom plugins, 3rd party integrations, scaling the infrastructure whenever needed. Installing a bunch of plugins isn’t professional programming and won’t help you rank as a proficient developer in the space.
Short answer: stick to PHP and JavaScript for extending the core platform.
Long answer: Technically, it makes sense to rely purely on PHP and JavaScript for features directly related to the core WordPress platform. WordPress websites are built with backward compatibility in mind. That said, you are not limited to those choices for several reasons.
WordPress REST API
WordPress has integrated a REST API in its core. As a result, you can create a headless application or a purely HTML-driven flat CMS that talks to WordPress for dynamically fetching data or inserting real-time information.
That said, WordPress could be installed separately and you could use the platform as a separate solution connected to different software applications.
Alternatively, there are additional callbacks that let you connect to other services – including smartwatches or other smart devices. Just familiarize yourself with the general code architecture of WordPress.
3rd Party Services
WordPress supports thousands of different 3rd party services. Usually, most external solutions create a bridge plugin that connects a SaaS or an external solution to WordPress. Another alternative is including a JS snippet communicating with the platform (a popular example being Google Analytics) or even an iframe in certain cases.
You can implement additional features that could be queried via HTTP requests.
Internal Tools
If you run WordPress on a VPS, a dedicated server, or in the cloud (having root access), you can build various scripts that run directly on your “physical” server.
As a result, running helper tools built in Ruby, Python, Java – or anything else – can be connected to a WordPress app as well.
We use a bunch of Ruby and Python tools for deployments, resizing images on-the-fly, processing data to various ERPs, providing various forms of authentication, etc.
WordPress on C# And .NET
While I wouldn’t risk going there, WordPress could technically run on a .NET stack.
I have some hardcore .NET friends who have managed to pull this off and it seems to work (for the most part). There are certain MVC Frameworks for traditional WordPress projects, too.
As a rule of thumb, sticking to PHP and JS would be your best bet. Large applications on top of WordPress regularly utilize 3rd party solutions and tools built in other languages as well.
WordPress would still be a leading force in the web field 5 years from know. Despite its contradictory codebase (which is quite intriguing once you spend the time to study it), there are objective factors adding up to its success.
Numerous markets see WordPress as a go-to solution. Bloggers and online magazines being the obvious choice. eCommerce is often implemented through WooCommerce. LMS is becoming more mature daily.
It’s easier to extend as compared to other CMS and programming framework.
It’s easier to find manpower for simple projects (and usually cheaper).
Also, it’s easy to start as a DIY project and hire help once you get some traction.
Then, scaling to tens of millions of page views or hundreds of millions of entries is quite feasible.
Being self-hosted is a major benefit for data ownership, privacy, integrations – a trade-off when using Wix or Squarespace.
There are over 50,000 free plugins available for the platform.
Being the leading CMS, almost all product startups and SaaS providers aim for a formal integration with WordPress.
Backward compatibility is a major priority with WordPress. This assurance is important for most business owners, bloggers, creators, entrepreneurs.
WordPress is built on top of PHP which powers nearly 83% of the web.
Virtually every hosting vendor out there supports PHP (including $1/mo hosts).
WordPress is actively supported by Automattic – the company that owns WordPress.com ran by the co-founder of WordPress.
As an old-school software developer, I had a hard time getting used to the WordPress codebase. That was strengthened by the influence of MVC (and its flavors) being the “de facto” standard in almost all frameworks and other CMS.
That said, these paradigms have to deal with other design and architecture problems that have been solved in WordPress for particular use cases.
If I have to sum up the ones I heard or read pretty much every week:
“WordPress is a simple blogging platform” – not really. It’s an application framework on top of a mature Content Management System. It had started as a blogging platform and evolved over the past 14 years – just as we, humans, evolve and get smarter and wiser with time.
“WordPress can’t scale” – some popular websites built on top of WordPress successfully generate hundreds of millions of page views a month. WordPress.com itself is already in the billions.
There’s no reason it won’t scale – but yeah, you can’t expect it to fly with a $5/mo shared hosting account.
“WordPress is inherently insecure” – the Core platform is quite secure. There are certain vulnerabilities every now and then – but compared to its popularity and utilization, those would be a fraction of what an average dev team will introduce when developing a new CMS. Most vulnerabilities are due to external factors.
“WordPress is built on top of PHP – therefore sucks” – PHP powers about 83% of the web. Facebook and Wikipedia are two popular examples. WordPress itself powers 29% or so.
PHP is not the most elegant or consistent language itself – but neither is JavaScript which is used in 99.999% of the websites out there anyway.
“A serious business should stay away from WordPress” – a number of Fortune 500, Inc 5000, enterprise companies rely on WordPress. Celebrities use WordPress proactively. Most blogs and magazines online use WordPress.
A small WordPress website can grow and handle a solid amount of traffic. But your technical team should be capable and knowledgeable of the platform. Gluing plugins together will certainly not work – and same goes for a Swiss Army knife premium theme.
Confusion around WordPress dot com vs. dot org – the fact that Automattic named their hosted blogging platform WordPress.com is a delicate matter and users keep confusing that. Media doesn’t help when they mix up terms occasionally.
Sure, Wix is not the only site builder out there. Squarespace and Weebly are popular alternatives, too.
Shopify had started with the eCommerce space, yet small businesses, including bloggers and photographers, have switched to Shopify for their own web platforms, too.
The professional web development industry won’t see any notable impact due to generic site builders filling out the space. But that doesn’t account for site builders who set up WordPress with a premium theme for $200 or less (I believe that you can order a similar package for $50 – $150 off of Envato’s market).
Bloggers, solopreneurs, small businesses running a 5-page business website may pick Wix for their needs. And that’s fine – they rarely need to stand out when they just start out.
The more they keep growing, the more likely it is to outgrow the platform. Think of integrating a modern marketing automation platform, a CRM, a powerful eCommerce platform handling shipping across different countries – anything that a slightly larger website has to support.
But shifting away from web development for small businesses is not a new trend. Facebook took the initiative by introducing Facebook Pages back in the day. Coffee shops, small restaurants, other local venues report higher engagement and lower ad costs when supporting their page as a main website.
The website of a local coffee shop really has to include their address, working hours, a shiny profile photo, and some daily/weekly promotions or “packages” (think of ordering a croissant with an orange juice for a dollar less every morning). A Facebook page does that, along with their entire audience, reviews, shares, and then some. Add Google My Business to the mix and you are good to go.
This is rarely the target of web developers. Those who specialize in building complex web solutions will keep doing so. They may prefer a specific framework – or a CMS – but custom development isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon.
Free themes distributed by the official WordPress.org Theme Directory are safe due to their reviewing policy. A theme cannot be released or updated without going through a detailed and thorough manual code review (combined with a few additional automated steps).
The free directory is also quite limiting in terms of features. Themes are only meant to be used for presentation purposes – everything else is plugin territory. That’s common sense but premium theme markets have been trying to change the rules of the game. Therefore, themes listed in the directory are fairly simple as well, which makes them somewhat safe and pretty lightweight as a starting point.
Free themes from other sources (random online sites and blogs) could contain whatever (they decide) – including different forms of malware. They are probably free – but the author may also use them for a spam network or a channel for ad distribution.
Premium themes that you happen to find at no cost online are most likely (I’d say 95%+) injected with various forms of malware. Not only is piracy wrong but it’s outright dangerous for your site as well.
