How Scalable Is WordPress?

Modern Web Hosting –

Web Hosting used to mean putting a person or company’s website files on a server and making it accessible over the World Wide Web, which is called a static website. Now, more and more websites store content in a database and create web pages on the fly, which is called a database-driven website. Because the content can be changed depending on the visitor and many other variables, database-driven website can have much more flexibility and interactivity than a static website. They also allow a lot more flexibility in design, development and managing content. It used to be that database-driven websites were the sole province of big corporations or programmers, but that all changed with the advent of the CMS (content management system), especially the free WordPress CMS. WordPress makes creating database-driven websites comparatively simple, fast and inexpensive with functionality that matches even the most expensive custom programmed sites.

WordPress is Open Source software that can be installed locally on a web server, hosted in the cloud, or on the WordPress.com website. WordPress is now far and away the most popular content administration system software in existence, powering 30% of the Web. So who all are using it? Are there any important brands/businesses using WordPress? And if so, which ones? We’ve put together a list of well over 50 leading/famous sites using WordPress: brands/businesses you’re probably very familiar with.

The Scale of WordPress –

As long as it has the necessary hardware and connectivity, WordPress has tremendous scalability. A WordPress installation can serve hundreds of thousands of logged-in users at a time and deliver many millions of monthly page views. While most people associate WordPress with smaller sites, it is actually a high-performance platform with powerful media management and high levels of security. WordPress can be profoundly customized through the use of themes, plugins, and custom programming. Many brands use WordPress to deliver a modern design with multiple architectures.

Websites built on WordPress –

There are many well known organizations, businesses and people who use WordPress for their website. These include:

Government/Country

Media

BBC America
Chicago Sun-Times
Facebook Newsroom
Fortune
MTV News
Microsoft News
New York Post
The New York Times Company
The New Yorker
9to5Mac
People Magazine
Quartz
Ripley’s Believe it or Not!
SAP News Center
The Sun
TechCrunch
Time Inc.
Variety
Vivendi (French multinational media company)
Vogue
The Walt Disney Company
Wired

Business Blogs

Business

Automobile

Educational

Media

It’s quite possible to start small and build up to a massive WordPress website, but once your site reaches a certain level of popularity it will start to slow down and you’ll need to increase the power behind it. Here are some common remedies:

Points for scaling up WordPress –

Horizontal scalability – Your site may start out on a shared server, then graduate to either a VPS (virtual server dedicated to your site within a dedicated server or cloud) or a dedicated server. When demand requires more, you can call on extra servers to handle the traffic – a dedicated database server and two or more load balanced web servers. Load balancers are dedicated hardware that distribute web traffic across multiple servers. All of this means that no particular server is ever overloaded and your site doesn’t suffer any downtime.
Search – For the very large sites having millions of posts, the WordPress search can be slow and is not able to give users the kind of experience they want. Although WordPress’s search feature is fairly crude, it is absolutely suitable for most websites. For more larger sites or more advanced search, there are many free or paid options to enhance search.
Caching – Caching is an indispensable strategy for intensified performance. There are several caching plugins available for WordPress that help up to a definite point. Caching refers to the temporary storage of data that allows future requests for that same data to be delivered more rapidly, but for the really large-scale sites, installed caching tools can mitigate server contents. A reverse agent collects and serves cached data to users without cross-examining the WordPress database and thus, acts as an intermediary. The contrary delegate simply serves a latent cache of data and also the need to accomplish code or process leadership.
Content delivery – A CDN (content delivery network) stores and distributes files separately from the WordPress installation, in locations distributed around the world. They can massively expedite delivery, providing guests with much faster page load speeds. In addition, a CDN acts as a protective wall between your server and hackers.
Custom Programming – You may need to develop custom programming to expand upon WordPress’s capabilities. For example, WordPress stores pages and posts, including custom post types, all within one set of database tables. While this offers a great deal of flexibility, if you have a huge database then using dedicated tables will speed up searching and displaying the content by 50 times or more.

How can you build your own WordPress Website?

Knowing about the above famous brands using WordPress for their website, you must now be wondering how you can build a WordPress website of your own. It might be a terrifying thought, but it’s not that difficult once you are aware of the steps to build a WordPress Website.

Here is a very basic step by step guide to developing a WordPress website:

First, you need to choose and buy a hosting account and a Domain name to assign to it.
Secondly, you need to select a WordPress Theme for your Website. WordPress has literally millions of free and inexpensive themes that not only set the design of your site, but often add functionality and customizability to it.
And lastly, create a list of pages and a navigation menu to link to them, and fill the pages with content.

You can get more information on getting started with WordPress in our blog, I recommend starting with a checklist for website design and development.