Best Practices for Implementing a Scalable WordPress Site

The WordPress codebase powers some of the largest websites on the internet, which includes sites with millions of pages, users, or visitors. WordPress is extremely scalable, but not all WordPress websites are designed for growth. This means it’s important to account for scalability from the start, especially if your end goal is to build a large-scale site that can handle high volumes of traffic and transactions.

The term “large-scale” refers to websites that handle significant volumes of traffic and transactions. If your website processes hundreds of transactions per hour or manages thousands of visitors at once, then you’re running a large website, and it’s important that your infrastructure can handle this demand.

While some may assume that scalability is focused on WordPress enterprise websites, they would be mistaken. Growing e-commerce stores and content-heavy platforms also need to think about how managing lots of content and traffic peaks.

Scalability commonly comes into play for:

• Viral content: When social media or press coverage causes traffic surges.
• E-commerce: Handling peaks during major sales events or product launches.
• Seasonal spikes: Accommodating predictable traffic growth during industry-specific busy periods.

We’re going to explore the importance of WordPress scalability, the role hosting plays in optimizing site performance, and best practices you can implement. With the right strategies in place, you can make sure your site runs smoothly, no matter the traffic demand!

Why Scale Matters to Your Business

Incorporating scalable web hosting can greatly impact business success. Scalable hosting prevents downtime, improves user experience, and directly aligns with business growth by ensuring consistent performance across multiple websites.

This is absolutely critical for growing businesses because, without it, you’ll start getting punished for your website’s success. For example, if you’re on a hosting plan that isn’t scalable – either due to capacity or price tier limits – and your website suddenly goes viral, your website can easily surpass your plan’s limits and become unavailable.

This means no one can find you, right at the instant you’re most discoverable. Your 15 minutes of fame can turn into a hit to your reputation, and by the time your website’s back in order, the moment may have passed.

Scalability spares you that fate. It also enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty while driving revenue growth. It also reduces IT costs, allowing resources to be reallocated. With flexible pricing and compatibility with popular Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, scalable hosting ensures businesses of all sizes can optimize their online presence for growth and success!

Recognizing Issues

Businesses facing scalability issues might need a better hosting provider, but if you’ve never stopped to consider it, you may not even be aware you have scalability issues. This can really hold your site back and stop you from reaching your goals. Fortunately, having a sense of the signs can empower you to find a better provider if needed.

Here’s a look at some common signs of website scalability issues:

• Site running slow or running slower than usual: One of the most evident signs is when your website begins to operate sluggishly or slower than its usual speed.
• You’re about to deliberately grow marketing: When you’re gearing up for a significant marketing push or planning deliberate growth strategies, it’s essential to assess your website’s scalability.
• Your website gets high traffic: If your website consistently experiences high traffic volumes, it may be nearing the visitor limit for your current hosting plan.
• You’re experiencing increasing security concerns: As your business grows, so do the security risks associated with managing sensitive data, such as payment gateways. A scalability issue may manifest as difficulty in maintaining good security measures, leaving your website vulnerable to breaches and compromises.

Recognizing these signs allows you to proactively address scalability issues before they escalate into more significant problems.

After identifying you have a problem, it’s important to understand what’s causing them. Many of these issues are technical, but they can often be solved by upgrading your managed hosting plan rather than relying on DIY fixes.

Here’s a look at the most common causes of performance issues:

• Autoloaded options: too much bloat: WordPress stores a lot of settings in the wp_options table, and over time, this data can pile up – especially from old plugins. Even if you uninstall a plugin, its settings might remain, slowing down your site. To fix this, regularly clean up your database using optimization tools or by manually removing unnecessary entries.
• Running out of storage: Just like your computer slows down when its hard drive is nearly full, your WordPress site will struggle if it doesn’t have enough storage. When your site grows, upgrading to a hosting plan with more storage (especially SSDs) can keep things running smoothly.
• Slow queries from custom post types: If your site uses custom post types or taxonomies without proper optimization, it can lead to slow database queries as your content grows. To make sure this doesn’t happen, queries need to be optimized, and you need to simplify your content structure where possible.
• Managing too many logged-in users: Handling multiple users logged in at once can strain your site, leading to performance issues. As your site scales, it’s important to make sure your database and session handling can keep up.
• Inefficient transients: The transients API is great for caching data temporarily, but if not managed properly, it can lead to database bloat. Cleaning up unused transients can prevent this and boost performance.
• Object cache overload: Object caching speeds up performance by storing data that would otherwise be loaded repeatedly. However, if the cache becomes overloaded, it can actually slow things down. Make sure your cache is optimized and not overfilled with unnecessary data.
• Poor database structure: An unoptimized database – such as one with missing indexes or inefficient table structures – can become a bottleneck as your site grows. Regularly review and optimize your database to keep things running smoothly.
• Heavy WordPress hooks: Themes and plugins that overuse actions and filters can add a lot of extra weight to your site, slowing it down. Audit your hooks and reduce unnecessary ones to improve site performance.

Considering Vertical vs Horizontal Scaling

When scaling WordPress, you have two options which include vertical scaling and horizontal scaling.

Vertical scaling involves adding more resources – like CPU power or memory – to a single server. It’s great for small to medium-sized businesses that rely on resource-intensive plugins or complex database queries. Optimizing database queries, implementing object caching, and upgrading to a higher PHP version are important steps here.

For high-traffic sites or those with frequent content updates, horizontal scaling is a better fit. This method distributes the load across multiple servers using techniques like load balancing and database replication. It’s ideal for large websites experiencing traffic spikes or frequent updates, ensuring smooth performance even under pressure.

Things to consider when determining the right approach:

• Traffic patterns: Are you dealing with steady growth or sudden spikes in traffic?
• Content type: Are you using static pages or dynamic content? Personalized content affects your performance and you will need to plan for this impact.
• Budget: While vertical scaling may have lower immediate costs, horizontal scaling provides better long-term scalability.

For many WordPress users, auto-scaling provides the best of both worlds. Auto-scaling automatically adjusts resources in real time, removing the need to choose between vertical and horizontal scaling. This means your website can handle changing demands without manual intervention, offering a flexible solution as your site grows.

Pro Tip: Think about how your site’s architecture might change over time. A monolithic structure may benefit from vertical scaling initially, but a modular setup is often better for horizontal scaling as your needs increase.

A Caution on DIY Solutions

When WordPress users face scalability challenges, many choose DIY solutions. While these can work in certain cases or short-term, they often fail as your site grows. Upgraded managed WordPress hosting is designed to address these issues efficiently and reliably, offering solutions that go beyond what DIY fixes can achieve.

Common DYI solutions:

• Relying on caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Rocket, especially for complex configurations. These can help optimize your site’s caching, but they require constant tuning and updates, especially as traffic increases.
• Adjusting database queries and implementing query caching. This can enhance performance, but it requires technical expertise and can be difficult to maintain as your site grows.
• Setting up a content delivery network (CDN). This can help offload traffic, but configuring and managing it manually adds complexity to your workload.
• Manually fine-tuning server settings for performance. This can make a difference, but this is time-consuming and requires ongoing maintenance.

Limitations of the DIY approach:

• Managing these solutions requires constant attention and can eat up valuable time.
• DIY solutions may conflict with WordPress core, themes, or plugin updates, creating additional headaches.
• Sudden traffic increases often overwhelm these setups, causing downtime or slow performance.
• When issues arise, troubleshooting complex technical problems can be difficult without specialized knowledge.

Selecting the Right Hosting Plan

While we have written at length about how to choose the best WordPress hosting for your needs, it is worth covering a few topics that are directly related to high performance websites.

Upgrading your managed WordPress hosting solves these challenges by providing an infrastructure tailored to handle high-traffic sites and scalability concerns.

Consider core hosting features that help manage performance:

• Purpose-built infrastructure: Managed WordPress hosting is designed specifically for WordPress, ensuring your site can handle increased traffic without sacrificing performance. The servers are optimized to run WordPress at peak efficiency, reducing the need for constant tweaks.
• Advanced caching: Server-level caching mechanisms, such as object caching and page caching, are automatically implemented and managed by your host. This eliminates the need for complex caching plugins and ensures that your site is always running optimally.
• Automatic scaling: With managed hosting, resources are automatically scaled up or down depending on traffic demands. This means your site can handle sudden traffic spikes without you having to manually adjust anything, ensuring minimal downtime and consistent performance.
• Proactive security: Managed WordPress hosting provides built-in security features, including firewalls, DDoS protection, malware scanning, and regular updates. These features are continually monitored and updated to protect your site from evolving threats, something that is often overlooked with DIY setups.
• Optimized database performance: Managed hosts optimize database configurations to handle large numbers of queries efficiently. Advanced database tuning ensures that your WordPress site remains responsive even as the content and traffic grow.
• 24/7 expert support: One of the biggest advantages of managed WordPress hosting is access to expert support. Managed hosts provide round-the-clock assistance from WordPress specialists, allowing you to troubleshoot complex issues quickly and effectively.

Additional factors that must be carefully considered to ensure peak website performance:

• Learn how to interpret and understand a hosting provider’s scalability claims.
• Learn how they approach and ensure elasticity – the servers’ ability to adjust their resource levels to match the need at a given moment.
• Investigate where and how the potential provider uses vertical and horizontal scaling. A provider that primarily or exclusively uses vertical scaling will be better suited for smaller websites, such as hobby sites or very small businesses that don’t have high-tech needs for their sites.
• You should review the provider’s use of auto-scaling

Additional factors to keep in mind when evaluating potential hosting providers:

• Security measures: Ensure SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates, daily backups, and DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) protection.
• Cost considerations: Understand billing cycles and hidden costs like data transfer fees.
• Customer service and support: Choose a provider with responsive support for quick issue resolution.
• Website migration: Consider the ease and speed of migrating your website.
• Money-back guarantee: Reduces the risk associated with trying out a new service.
• Security: Offers the assurance needed to find the right fit for your website without significant hassle or financial burden.

Going Beyond Hosting

Beyond hosting solutions, there are several advanced techniques that developers and site owners can implement to further improve WordPress scalability. These strategies will push your site’s performance to the next level and ensure it can handle growing traffic demands.

Here’s what you need to think about.

Choose Your Theme Carefully

Not all WordPress themes are equal. Look for a lightweight theme that will scale well for a high-traffic site. Avoid themes that are poorly coded or overloaded with features you won’t use. While multi-purpose themes might seem attractive for their versatility, they often come at the cost of efficiency. Each unused feature adds unnecessary data and CSS, which increases the time it takes for your site to load.

For example, if you’re not using a theme’s built-in sliders, custom post types, or animation options, you’re still loading those elements on every page, which eats up valuable resources. Instead, go for a streamlined theme that focuses on speed and simplicity, and consider adding only the specific features you need via plugins or custom code.

Minimize Media Files

Don’t overload your website with video, images, and interactive elements. Make sure you optimize images and other media for the web. Use an image optimization plugin or utilize the newer formats to reduce image sizes.

Along with this, consider usingresponsive images that adapt to different screen sizes. By serving smaller images to mobile users, you can further reduce loading times and improve performance. Implementing lazy loading means that images and videos are only loaded when the user scrolls to them, which decreases the initial load time of your pages.

For sites that rely heavily on visuals, such as photography portfolios or e-commerce stores, these optimizations are a must. Large, uncompressed media files can drastically slow down your site, hurting both user experience and SEO rankings. Combining image compression tools with modern formats like WebP and strategic loading techniques will keep your media from becoming a bottleneck in your site’s scalability.

Reduce Trash and Clutter

Got a bunch of draft pages, trashed-but-not-deleted posts, and other WordPress clutter? It’s time to let it go. Extraneous data makes it more difficult and time-consuming to find the data your site needs.

Beyond this, excess clutter in your WordPress database – like old revisions, spam comments, and unused media files – can also impact your site’s performance. Over time, this unnecessary data builds up, leading to slower query times as the database has to sift through more information to find what it needs. Regularly clearing out unused items not only helps with organization but also optimizes database efficiency, which is essential for scalability.

Keep Code Up to Date

Keeping your code up to date is essential for maintaining performance and scalability. For experienced developers,implementing a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for your WordPress site can streamline code maintenance. With CI/CD, updates are tested and deployed automatically, reducing the risk of issues while ensuring your site stays current. Tools like GitHub Actions can automate this process, testing changes in a staging environment before they go live, helping you catch potential issues early.

Additionally, Pressable’s hosting environment supports these workflows, making it easier to integrate CI/CD pipelines with your WordPress site. Whether you’re automating plugin updates, theme changes, or core WordPress upgrades, this setup ensures that your site is always running the latest, most secure code without manual intervention.

Remove excess JavaScript and CSS. If your page speed test results show you have a lot of render-blocking resources, extra script and CSS are the cause. An optimization plugin can help condense and remove unnecessary code.

Limit Plugins

Plugins are the top cause of bloated code on a website. Choose your plugins carefully and delete and uninstall any you aren’t using.

While plugins can add valuable functionality to your WordPress site, having too many – or poorly optimized ones – can slow down performance and hinder scalability. Each plugin adds extra code to your site, and some may load unnecessary scripts, stylesheets, or external resources on every page, even if the plugin’s functionality is only needed on a few specific pages.

To mitigate this, audit your plugins regularly to identify which ones are essential and which can be removed or replaced by a more efficient alternative. For instance, if multiple plugins perform similar functions, look for ways to consolidate those features into a single, lightweight solution.

Additionally, use plugins that are optimized for performance and are regularly updated by their developers. Be cautious of outdated or unsupported plugins, as they can introduce security vulnerabilities and performance issues.

Finally, delete and uninstall any plugins you’re no longer using – not just deactivate them. Even deactivated plugins can leave behind orphaned data or still load some resources, contributing to unnecessary bloat.

Keep Software Updated

Always keep your WordPress core files, themes, and plugins up to date. Without updates, you could miss out on vital security patches, performance enhancements, and important optimizations that help your site scale effectively.

Each update – whether it’s for the WordPress core, a theme, or a plugin – often includes performance improvements, bug fixes, and new features that can enhance the scalability of your site. Missing these updates could leave your site vulnerable to attacks or lag behind in terms of speed and function.

For busy developers and site owners, automating updates using tools like WP-CLI or enabling automatic updates for minor releases in WordPress can save time and ensure your site is always up to date. However, for major updates, especially for themes and plugins, it’s essential to test updates in a staging environment before applying them to your live site. This helps prevent compatibility issues or potential site downtime.

Managed WordPress hosting solutions can simplify this process by offering automated backups and update management, ensuring your site remains secure and fully optimized for scalability. You can also take advantage of Pressable’s staging environments to test updates before pushing them live, minimizing any risk of conflicts.

Ensure Your Site is on the Latest Version of PHP

Using the latest version of PHP can lead to significant performance gains. Each new PHP version offers improvements in speed, memory management, and security, which directly impacts your WordPress site’s ability to handle increased traffic and scale efficiently.

For instance, newer versions of PHP introduced major performance improvements over previous versions, including just-in-time (JIT) compilation, which boosts execution speed, and better memory management, resulting in faster load times and lower server resource usage. These optimizations are essential for sites that need to scale, as they allow your server to process more requests simultaneously without additional strain.

Upgrading PHP requires careful planning. Some older themes or plugins may not be compatible with the latest PHP version, which could lead to site issues if not addressed. To avoid this, use a staging site functionality to test your site’s compatibility with the latest PHP version. The staging environment allows you to safely identify and resolve any conflicts before making changes to your live site.

Optimize Images Beyond Compression

Go beyond basic compression when it comes to optimizing images for your WordPress site. While compressing images is a good first step, implementing more advanced strategies can significantly improve performance and scalability.

Start by using responsive images, which adapt to different screen sizes. This ensures that users on mobile devices aren’t downloading unnecessarily large images, while desktop users still receive high-quality visuals. In WordPress, you can enable responsive images by making use of the srcset attribute, which automatically serves the correct image size based on the user’s device.

Going beyond basic compression and incorporating these advanced techniques, will mean your site is better equipped to handle media-heavy content without compromising performance, allowing you to scale effectively as your audience grows!

Regular Site Testing

As your WordPress site grows, regular site testing becomes essential to maintain optimal performance and ensure your site can handle increased traffic. Implementing enterprise-level performance monitoring and load testing allows you to proactively identify bottlenecks and potential issues before they impact user experience.

One of the most powerful tools for this is New Relic, which provides deep performance insights into your website’s behavior. With New Relic, you can monitor key performance indicators like database query times, server response times, and memory usage. It also enables you to trace slow transactions and pinpoint the specific plugins, themes, or external resources that might be causing slowdowns. This level of insight allows developers to make informed decisions on where to optimize their code or adjust server settings to improve overall site speed and efficiency.

Load testing is another aspect of ensuring your site can scale effectively. By simulating high traffic volumes, load testing tools allow you to see how your site performs under stress. This is especially important for e-commerce sites running sales events or membership sites that may experience spikes during key login periods!

How Pressable Delivers Performance

Scaling a WordPress site can be a complex process, but managed WordPress hosting solutions like Pressable simplify it by offering the infrastructure and tools to meet growing demands. These hosting providers tackle common scalability challenges with advanced features designed to ensure your site performs well, even under heavy traffic.

Here’s how Pressable makes your WordPress site scalable:

• Auto-scaling: Auto-scaling dynamically adjusts server resources as your traffic grows. This means your site can handle unexpected spikes in visitors without experiencing downtime – whether from viral content or a major sales event.
• Load balancing: Load balancing, on the other hand, spreads traffic evenly across multiple servers to prevent any one server from becoming overwhelmed. This means your high-traffic site runs smoothly, even during periods of intense demand.
• Cloud-native architecture: Cloud-native architecture is designed specifically to harness the full potential of cloud computing so your WordPress site operates efficiently and scales effortlessly. It breaks down traditional monolithic applications into smaller, more flexible components, allowing your site to dynamically utilise cloud resources such as storage, computing power, and networking. This enables better performance, resilience, and scalability. Our use of WP Cloud allows for quick scaling and efficient resource allocation, meaning that as your site grows, it can dynamically scale to meet demands without requiring hardware upgrades.
• Unmetered bandwidth: For high-traffic websites, unmetered bandwidth is a must. It means your site can serve large amounts of data, such as images or videos, without incurring extra costs or facing bandwidth restrictions. Our unmetered bandwidth allows you to grow your site freely without worrying about overage fees.
• Improved storage: Fast, reliable storage is critical in how quickly your website loads and responds to visitors. Every time someone accesses your site, data is retrieved from storage – whether it’s images, content, or database information. If your storage isn’t fast enough, it creates a bottleneck, slowing down your site’s performance. This is especially important for large sites with high traffic and vast amounts of data, where delays in loading can negatively impact user experience and even SEO rankings. Pressable uses SSD storage, which is significantly faster and more reliable than traditional hard drives, ensuring your site can handle growing content and traffic with consistently fast load times.
• Redundancy: To prevent data loss and protect your site’s availability, Pressable employs redundancy and replication across multiple servers. Redundancy means having backup systems in place so that if one server fails, another can take over without any disruption.
• Replication: Replicationinvolves continuously copying your site’s data to multiple servers in real-time. This way, if one server encounters an issue, your data is still available from another server. Our Free Automatic Failover ensures continuous uptime by automatically switching to a backup server during any failures, keeping your site live and operational at all times.
• Monitoring: Continuous monitoring is crucial for maintaining scalability because it allows you to monitor your site’s performance in real-time. By tracking key metrics such as server load, traffic patterns, and resource usage, advanced monitoring tools can detect any potential bottlenecks or performance issues early on. This proactive approach helps you address issues before they escalate, ensuring your site remains stable and performs smoothly as traffic increases and resource demands grow.
• Increased security: As traffic increases, so do the risks of security breaches, making it critical to have strong protections in place. One key feature is the Web Application Firewall (WAF), which acts as a shield between your site and potential attackers. It monitors incoming traffic, blocks malicious requests, and prevents common threats like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
• CDN: Along with this, our global Content Delivery Network (CDN) not only speeds up content delivery by distributing it across various global locations but also helps mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. By spreading traffic across multiple servers, the CDN reduces the chances of any single server being overwhelmed by a surge in traffic, whether from legitimate users or malicious actors. These built-in protections ensure your site can scale securely, handling increased traffic without compromising safety.

As your WordPress site grows, having a hosting solution that can handle increasing traffic is a must. Pressable offers scalable WordPress hosting designed specifically to manage high traffic and unexpected spikes without sacrificing performance.

If this all sounds great to you, explore our hosting plans and see how we can support you and your site today!

Obatarhe Otughwor

Obatarhe is a WordPress enthusiast, a community volunteer, and a tech advocate. He is dedicated to providing exceptional support that exceeds expectations, consistently earning him 5-star ratings from customers. His approach involves understanding each customer's unique needs and delivering tailored solutions that effectively resolve their issues. With a background as a product expert for Google, Obatarhe possesses extensive technical experience gained from working remotely across diverse areas of computing, including technical support and basic programming with PHP, Laravel, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript. His years of experience have honed his ability to delight customers with his skills and expertise. When he's not working, you can find him traveling and taking beautiful landscape pictures.