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Can WordPress Handle the Exponential Growth of Your Website?
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Can WordPress Handle the Exponential Growth of Your Website?

By Mainak Biswas January 22, 2013 - 673 views

Everyone loves WordPress because of its stability, features, customizability, and ease of use. Of course, when you need WordPress to outperform itself, there is always a plug-in that can be used to overcome its shortcomings. But, what can one possibly do when your website grows exponentially and sees thousands of visitors each second during occasional spikes? Surely, WordPress is not designed to perform under extreme duress. It certainly works, but cannot perform well when it comes to huge traffic figures. You must always bear in mind that eventually your website will grow and you will need to consider what might happen when there is that occasional 1000+ traffic per second a few times a week, or few times a day or even an hour.

Why WordPress May Not be Suitable for Every Website Out There

Back in the days when we started to use WordPress over Joomla or Drupal, it seemed easier to use and was certainly less clunky with an easy learning curve. However, many of us grew like Frankensteins and didn’t expect our own success to reach such levels. While our success has mostly been attributed to our dedication and expertise, it is also because more people actually need our services than we earlier thought. It is almost like a store owner rents a small space in an upscale district only to realize the footfalls are so much there is no space to store goods in the store anymore. Then, he decides to rent a larger space elsewhere in town, sacrificing many advantages of having an address in an upscale district. WordPress certainly is the most convenient and easiest of all CMS software.

We could write pages about its use and its advantages over other CMSes. However, we need to admit that it sometimes cannot handle traffic-heavy ecommerce websites and online publications. This is when we need to get programmers to write our own codes, and design our own websites or at least customize our WordPress websites to handle traffic spikes. The ideal scenario is to retain the WordPress site as a blog and move the main site to a custom coded website with the help of professional web designers and programmers. Programmers and developers not only understand the strengths of WordPress, but also know its few weaknesses. This is one of the reasons why it is important to hire a programmer as we get more successful in our business.

Medium to Large Companies Need a Second Opinion about WordPress

If you are a small company, WordPress is a great tool. However, when you are a medium sized company and are seeing traffic growths that often interfere with your bandwidth and website performance, you certainly need to think beyond WordPress, as it just cannot handle that kind of traffic. It was meant to be a blogging platform but it excelled at not only at blogging, but also at regular websites. Asking WordPress to perform well in a site that receives staggering traffic figures is a mistake that is yours, and not WordPress’.

WordPress Still Rules

On the flipside, WordPress continues to run some of the largest publications in the world. They receive huge traffic too. In spite of all the complaints against WordPress that it can’t handle traffic, it seems to be doing just fine for online publications. The key here is what sort of information a website holds. If the website performs complex operations that include purchases, identity verification etc, you might want a programmer to write codes. However, if it is a large publication with tons of comments, there may be a few things that an accomplished programmer can achieve right within WordPress. WordPress is certainly one of the best content management systems around and it will continue to be.

What Must Website Owners Do Finally?

The bottom-line is to get an expert programmer’s opinion as to what is right for your website. If the programmer thinks there is enough scope for your website even after 5-6 years of growth, you may actually want to stay with WordPress than go through a lot of complications. However, if the website is far too complex (can only be decided by an accomplished web developer or programmer), then it is a good idea to get your code written.

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