Right before this article we discussed the advantages of wordpress and it's popularity. We also compared wordpress among Joomla and Drupal. In this article we'll discuss about the wordpress known issues and how should you use wordpress if you're going to launch a successful site in the long run.

What's the problem of wordpress?

You might be surprised to see there's some problem for wordpress. Don't worry, it's not security related, here we're talking about the website marketing. What we want to express is, if you're going to put up a big website with lots of traffic, wordpress is not the right choice. Why? Let's see below.

The wordpress bottleneck

When wordpress was firstly released, it's designed specially for personal blogs. Although many people are favorite of it's clean design and powerful article management and you may get all kinds of suggestions to use wordpress, it's never advised if you're going to launch a big wesite with high traffic. The problem is on the mysql database, frequent queries will hang up the server and cause high cpu/memory usage. The wordpress official support also stated this:

"In high-traffic situations, many simultaneous connections to the database can cause excessive load on the server. In this case, connections to the server may not complete, causing the typical "Connection timed out" response in the visitor's browser."

So the basic idea is, wordpress is designed for personal blog purpose but not any others. Who will write blogs up to thousands and even millions of articles?

Why wordpress is still used by some high traffic websites?

Although wordpress is not the right choice for high traffic and large size websites, you still found many famous website use it. why there's no problem? The answer is they configured Load balanced Servers. What does that mean? It means there're multiple servers to balance the website traffic from the backend. If there's not so much dollars available, why should you use multiple hosting servers to support a single wordpress website?

The basic conclusion for wordpress is

1. The bottle neck for wordpress is on mysql database.
2. wordpress is only the best for personal blogs

High Traffic Website Choice

well, there're many choice available depends your detailed requirements on the website. For content management system, joomla should be the best since it's user friendly to both end users and web developers. Tons of free joomla skins and components will guide you in every way about how to running a successful website.

UPDATE: Above issues can be solved easily by web server configurations such as Varnish for apache and litespeed or nginx efficient web server solutions. You can feel safe to design your site via wordpress platform.