Can Wordpress websites get too big?

[Gemini23]

I have recently been experiencing problems with a Wordpress hosted website - which has daily niche news items - which prompted moving hosting - which made me ask the question... Can Wordpress websites get too big? or is there a limit to how many posts you could or should go to as an optimum?

We currently have just over 4,000 posts...

and what to do about older posts that were news items/or reviews...
host them on other domain/servers as 'archives?

Thanks for input...

[tangor]

Do you do general clean up and optimization on the database? Do you keep all revisions? Doing just those two things can make a large difference is both size and speed.

[Gemini23]

Do you do general clean up and optimization on the database? Yes
Do you keep all revisions? No

[lucy24]

and what to do about older posts that were news items/or reviews...
host them on other domain/servers as 'archives?

It doesn't really matter where it's hosted, so long as you can remove it from the server-intensive WP loop. (I think it was iBill who once looked into it and found that building a single WP page involves something like 30 separate server calls. Not for supporting files, for the page itself.) Anything that's archived and will never again changed should be saved in some static form so your server doesn't have to rebuild it from scratch on every request. Better yet if you can achieve this without the !f ("check to see whether file exists") call that's such a feature of WP.

[ergophobe]

There are a few things that traditionally can slow down wordpress a lot, though they have worked on these and I believe they are not so much of a problem now.

The big thing is that if you have a lot of pages (in particular) and posts and the URLs do not begin with a unique numeric identifier, you can incur some serious overhead.

Last I looked into this a year ago, one of the top Wordpress guys said that had largely fixed this and you shouldn't run into problems, but I still find people reporting it

Do you have a lot of pages (not posts, pages)?

Do you have URLs like
1. example.com/my-blog-post
2. example.com/123456-myblogpost
3. example.com/2015/10/17/myblogpost
4. example.com/123456
5. etc?

#1 will be the slowest.

Also, I've seen the metadata table (not revisions) bloat to be gigantic and that can start to slow things down too.

[KaseyM]

@ergophobe - how does the URL structure affect speed? Is it down to how it routes through?

My advise is to keep page revisions down to a minimum. Delete unwanted/unused tables (why plugins can't delete them when deleted is beyond me) and use a plugin like this to clean up anything else : [wordpress.org...]

[ergophobe]

As I say, I believe this has been substantially improved. It used to be a known thing and was mentioned in the Wordpress Codex, but they have taken the warning away.

Chris Coyier has a good writeup, but note that this post is FIVE years old
[digwp.com...]

[ergophobe]

Pretty sure this was mostly fixed when this issue was fixed in 2011

[core.trac.wordpress.org...]