Can WordPress Scale like other Content Management Systems (CMS)?

In the age of “Big Data” and seasonal spikes in traffic, many question whether WordPress can step up to the plate  and scale like other CMS packages such as Joomla and Drupal. AN Hosting offers a robust WordPress hosting plan that is sure to meet your needs.

According to the site eMusic, the answer is yes. With traffic exceeding 6 million monthly visits and billions of HTTP requests, eMusic decided to migrate a large chunk of CMS infrastructure to WordPress from Adobe Day CRX.

They almost went for Drupal, but many within their IT team had a yearning to test drive WordPress, which has reputation for simplicity and great user features.

Hard-core developers have a natural inclination to doubt WordPress’s capability in terms of scaling, complex data types,  complex user roles, and complex marketing tools.   The general consensus is that WordPress makes a great blogging platform but may be limited when viewed as a fully-fledged CMS.

According to eMusic , WordPress can overcome these concerns with extensive planning, sitemaps, xml schemas and strategizing a modular import process to making the migration a success.

“Don’t import unless you can re-import or update,” said Mr. Scott Taylor, lead PHP developer at eMusic.   Planning for failure, like any migration, was a major reason for the successful migration to WordPress.

Taylor’s team relied extensively on plug-ins to help make the WordPress instance more robust and scalable.

These included:

• Batcache (caching aka speed)
• bbPress (message boards)
• BuddyPress (social features)
• Askimet (anti-spam)
• JetPack

One plug-in that needs special mention is Gravity Forms. This form plug-in literally takes the pain out of form creation by as much as 90%.

Taylor was careful to stress both the benefits and dangers of relying upon plug-ins. He noted that while there is a qualification process to get a plug-in listed on WordPress.Org, it is not bullet-proof and does not put a huge amount of pressure on the creator to keep the plug-in updated and secure.

Taylor wrote some custom plug-ins to solve some of these concerns, including allowing a user to update his image directly into the admin section. Other plug-ins he wrote included “Slot Machine” which allowed users to schedule content on specific sections of the site, including the home page.

By the way, he is thinking of releasing two of his custom plug-ins, including Avatar and Minify on WordPress.Org.

Thus, it seems WordPress can scale but it does require some careful planning, robust commercialized plug-ins and probably some homegrown custom plug-in programming.

Taylor also mentioned the ability of the New York Times to handle in excess of 10 million page views per day during the recent Tsunami. He believes the reason this was possible is largely due to the scalability of WordPress in general.

Filed under: Industry Trends, Tips & Tricks, WordPress by creeves