What are the design constraints of WP pages?

[Laurens]

My Prepressure site currently contains about 400 pages and not a single post - I am using WP strictly as a CMS, not a blog. I am thinking of expanding the site but worry whether it could cope with an additional 1000 to 2000 pages. I am afraid some fairly basic functions aren't designed to handle this.

• Take for instance the drop-down menu where you select the parent page for any given page. It is already awkward to use with 400 pages. Will it still work at all if there are 1000 pages sorted in a hierarchical tree structure?
• Will plug-ins like the fold page one that creates a collapsible navigation tree of the upper 2 levels of pages freak out after being asked to handle 1024 pages?

Does anyone have any idea about the design constraints of WordPress when it comes to handling pages? Are there any WP sites with over 1000 pages (not posts)?

[JLeuze]

You shouldn't be limiited by WordPress, only your webhosting. A large website with lots of content and presumably lots of traffic, might run into problems with their resources and be in need of a more powerful webserver, but WordPress itself should not hold you back.

If you browse through the showcase, you should find some websites with a large number of pages.

I would almost say that a large number of pages should be less bogged down than one with a large number of posts. You will never load more than one page at a time, but you could have 10 or more posts on a page at ones on a category or archive page.

2,400 links in your menu could bog things down whether they are pages or posts though. However, I would be more concerned about your users freaking out than WordPress.

If you were to examine your navigation, you could find ways to limit the links in the sidebar, which would make it faster and easier to use. For example, on the Dictionary page, listing out the letters below that looks odd and is not very handy for users. Having the letters in a row at the top of the content as you do is much easier to use, so I would just exclude them from the side.

Also, for usability, labeling your navigation as "Site Map" is a bit confusing. A site map is generally a separate page that lists out all of the site's links. On a large site like this, it could be handy to have an actual site map. But if you label your navigation as anything, I'd label them as "Navigation".

But if you style them to look more like buttons, the label might not be needed. I would basically think about making the navigation more modular, and serving it when and where you need it. This will make the site easier to manage and navigate successfully.

I would also look at some of the navigation and menu plugins that are available. You should be able to find one that is a good fit for the amount of content you have.

[Ryan]

A dropdown menu with 1000+ pages is overkill and the page loads will slow, but that's not unique to WordPress, that's just because you're loading too much junk on the screen (unless you loaded the dropdowns with Ajax which I wouldn't normally recommend).

WordPress itself certainly shouldn't have any trouble with it though. And if you did, there is always WP SuperCache which can reduce the extra server load issue down to nothing as it will load almost as fast as a raw static file.

[Otto]

WordPress does pretty badly with large amounts of Pages. I'd avoid using more than 50 on any given site.

[JLeuze]

WordPress does pretty badly with large amounts of Pages. I'd avoid using more than 50 on any given site.

Why is that, are Pages stored differently than Posts in the database?

[Ryan]

WordPress does pretty badly with large amounts of Pages. I'd avoid using more than 50 on any given site.

Interesting, I assumed it treated them just like posts. What specifically is different between the two? Obviously WP can handle massive numbers of posts with no problems, so I automatically assumed pages would be handled in the same fashion. It seems kinda odd that they wouldn't be.

Any ideas if there are plans in the pipe line to fix whatever the problem is?

[JohnM]

@Otto

How does WordPress do pretty badly with pages, and why the limit of 50 ? With a decent server why not 200 or 500 as the limit ?

[andrea_r]

Why is that, are Pages stored differently than Posts in the database?

Not really. Just the post_type field says page, rather than post or attachment. At least that's the only difference I noticed.

I *think* (and this is just as guess as I haven't gone to look) that the reason hundred of pages with children and grandchildren bog the system down is the relationship isn't set up the same between them as it is with posts.

I find too many pages is more a user-created retrieval and organizational nightmare. For instance, people wants a "page" of information, and yet want to categorize, classify, group, add a feed etc... to them as if they were posts, yet they use Pages in the backend. Because that's the term for what they think they want.

I am 99% positive that any site using WP as a CMS would be better off using posts rather than pages, and have more flexibitly, and the visitor would notice no difference in navigation (well, I bet it'd be a LOT faster).

I think it hasn't been "fixed" as there's the feeling that WP wasn't meant to be used with a lot of pages like that. In other words, it only acts broken cuz you're using it wrong. :D

And yes, I have a specific instance in mind - worked on a site that had a section with multiple categories of information and posts within it. But in the backend it was all doen via Pages. It was a ngithmare to work with, and manage, plus the use of pages made maintenance ten times more work for the owner.

[dancole]

My Prepressure site currently contains about 400 pages and not a single post - I am using WP strictly as a CMS, not a blog.

Why not use posts instead of pages... It's not like using posts is going to make your site a "blog". Think of post and pages as different ways of managing web pages. I think of pages as key pages that should be one click away, while posts are articles that become less important with time when compared to newer articles. The benefit to doing this is that you don't have a crazy number of links in a menu.

[andrea_r]

It's not like using posts is going to make your site a "blog".

Exactly.

As soon as I tell people they can make the link on posts have no dates in them, a lightbulb usually goes off.