Is WordPress Scalable? How Do We Use it to Build Large Scale Systems?
Is your WordPress website scalable? There are many examples of large-scale wild WordPress installations. WordPress.com: Create a Free Website or Blog, for example, is a huge multi-site installation that gets tens of millions of page views each month. We also serve thousands of users at any given time. Is WordPress Scalable or not?
Other examples include Time, TechCrunch, and CNN. There is no mistake. As long as you create the right environment, you can be confident that you can build a scalable website with WordPress that is powerful enough to handle any amount of traffic. Configuring to extend the installation can be complicated, but it is a worthwhile investment for site owners. This post describes some areas that you can focus on to ensure scalability and provides tips on how to set up a scalable environment.
What does scalable mean?
What is the reason for making your WordPress website scalable? A scalable WordPress website has the ability to scale up or out to increase capacity.
Scale Up
Increase the power of your hardware (more RAM, more powerful CPU).
Scale-Out
Add nodes to increase capacity (spread the same copy of your site across multiple machines).
Doing so gives you the flexibility to grow. Basically, you need to be able to grow your site without any problems. With WordPress, you don't have to worry about the software. The WordPress core implements layered software architecture rules, such as separating markup (HTML and CSS) from data (MySQL database). The following describes some of the ways you can ensure maximum scalability.
So how scalable is WordPress?
With the right infrastructure, services, and resources, WordPress is extremely scalable. It can serve tens of thousands of logged-in users at once and provide hundreds of millions of page views per month. It can process page requests immediately and generate very fast results for search queries. It's flexible, upgradeable, and ultimately powers all kinds of websites, from the largest and most visited websites.
