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A website is defined as “large-scale,” depending on how much traffic and transactions it handles. It is a large-scale site if it processes hundreds of transactions an hour or gets thousands of visitors at once. An example of one is Woothemes, with over 5.2 million hits a month.
Your website doesn’t have to be that huge to qualify as large-scale, though. Even 1,000 visitors a day is a large-scale site. If the database doesn’t run optimally, you could have issues.
Avoid bottlenecks
The most common issue is ending up with a bottleneck when your site experiences a surge in traffic. A bottleneck is when your server can’t handle the number of visitors making database requests.
You must make sure you have sufficient resources. Your host should be capable of handling high-volume websites. Consider upgrading your plan to get more memory and bandwidth. For 1,000 visitors per day, you would need 2,000 MB of bandwidth a day and 60 GB of bandwidth a month.
In terms of your storage capacity, your site needs more than memory. You must upgrade your hosting plan when your available disk storage is low.
Your Options table shouldn’t be overloaded. This table (wp_options) often causes low website speed. Even after uninstalling a plugin, remnants of its settings can linger on in the Options table. Assess the table as a part of your efforts to optimize your WordPress database performance. More information about plugins is available in this WordPress tutorial for beginners.
Implement database replication
This is where you create and maintain copies of a WordPress site’s database across multiple servers. This practice is crucial for enhancing performance, ensuring high availability, and providing disaster recovery solutions.
There are two types of database replication: Master-Slave replication and Master-Master Replication. The Master database is the main one, where all write operations happen (insert, update, delete). The Slave database is a copy of the Master database, primarily used for read operations.
This setup helps distribute the load by directing read operations to the slave databases, thereby reducing the burden on the master database.
In the Master-Master replication setup, there are multiple master databases that can handle both read and write operations and changes in any master database are replicated to the other masters. While this setup is more complex, it provides higher availability and redundancy.
You must choose a database management system to implement database replication in WordPress. MySQL and MariaDB, both of which WordPress uses, support replication.
Set up the master and slave databases. Configure the master to log all changes and the slave databases to apply those changes. Adjust the configuration settings properly on both slave and master servers. They are my.cnf for MySQL.
Finally, modify the wp-config.php file to direct read operations to the slave databases while keeping write operations on the master. You can do this using custom scripts or plugins that handle read/write splitting.
Plugins such as SharDB or HyperDB can help with database replication. They assist in managing multiple databases and distributing queries appropriately.
FAQ
Is WordPress suitable for large sites?
WordPress powers some of the largest websites. Evidence of its scalability is that almost 45% of all websites are built on it as of 2024, compared to 32% in 2018. Considering that a third of all sites don’t run on any known CMS, WordPress’s market share comes to 64.3%. You need to make an effort, though. The site won’t scale by itself.
How do I reduce my database size?
- Delete plugins
- Delete trash posts
- Delete spam comments
- Delete trash pages
- Run DB optimization via phpmyadmin
- Turn off autosave.