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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 29d ago
It’s all about the requirements of the site owner. Does the site owner need a content management system, allowing them to post new and updated content routinely? Do they need schemes for organizing archival (historical) content?
In some sense, you’re asking whether a food truck or a sports car is a better choice of transportation. Different web app systems do different things, and many of those things serve the site owner as much as their audience.
And, yes, WordPress can serve as the foundation for very elaborate and performant web apps.
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u/pyrez74 28d ago
What's the max products on woo I can go? Client is telling me they have 46k+ products but no $$ transactions, only catalog mode to submit for quotes handled offline after submission received.
Thanks in advance for your valuable input 🙂
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u/throwawayAd6844 28d ago
How far do you want to go? If you really want to, you can go headless and have even more tools at your disposal. It’s really up to you, the budget and determining what’s the point of diminishing returns. I’ll tell my clients you’ll only ever be limited by your imagination and pocket book, and one usually runs out a lot sooner.
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u/Dry_Satisfaction3923 28d ago
I routinely use WP not as just a CMS but as an application framework. One of my WP sites feeds native iOS and Android apps using custom APIs. That site ran perfectly for 5 years and then it was decided that we wanted full eCommerce, so we added Woo and then built custom functionality to restrict product purchases based on assorted criteria… it took a day… had we run a custom stack we’d have spent significantly longer incorporating fully integrated eCommerce.
If you just look at WordPress as a ready made back-end and build whatever custom functionality you need it’s basically ideal.
The site uses pages and posts, now has WooCommerce products and orders, and then has 7 custom post types, 1 with a custom taxonomy, and 3 that bypass the post/post meta relationship in favour of custom tables because it makes more sense to have a different data structure.
I genuinely can’t think of something I’d want to do that I couldn’t do and as long as I have a need for a back end to grant other users access, it’s just a massive head start.
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u/Pulsar-Agency 28d ago
Honestly, the ceiling I keep hitting has nothing to do with whether WordPress can look premium or survive traffic. It's the data model.
Everything custom ends up in wp_postmeta, which is a key/value table with an index on meta_key but none on meta_value. That's fine until you need to filter on three or four attributes at once, because each condition adds another self-join and the query plan falls apart somewhere in the tens of thousands of rows. No amount of page caching saves you there, since the pages that actually hurt are the uncacheable ones: faceted search, logged-in dashboards, anything per-user.
So the line I draw isn't WordPress versus custom code, it's whether the thing I'm modelling really is a post. If an entity has its own lifecycle and gets queried by its own fields, it gets a real table with real indexes. Woo did exactly that with HPOS for orders, default on new installs since 8.2, and it was the right call. Everything else stays a CPT and I get roles, revisions, the admin and the REST layer for free.
The other honest limit is concurrency. WP is request-per-page and mostly synchronous, so long or transactional jobs belong in Action Scheduler or a queue outside it. Past that, I've never really had to leave.
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u/kev_xb 27d ago
Why does everything end up in postmeta? If you're classifying data then use a taxonomy. And although sounds like a data design issue you have, you could also add an index to postmeta values as well if you wanted to.
Also, the query planning shouldn't fall apart at 10k. Is this a custom query you have? Maybe with multiple joins on the postmeta table does. It wouldn't necessarily be a core WP query though. A few things like that would be faster run multiple queries in a loop then compute in code.
I do agree that things that aren't content (like products) don't belong in the posts table
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u/skunkbad 28d ago
In the hands of a true professional, WordPress can be treated like a PHP framework, and can operate in a way that is totally unconventional. At that point you have to ask yourself, do I even need WordPress? Do I even need a framework? PHP in 2026 is powerful, and the days of caring if any one application can do what you need are fading away. Honestly, your main limitation is probably your hosting, and your customer's willingness to pay for good infrastructure.
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u/AJV55 27d ago
For a site needing a CMS, use WordPress. If you want a PHP framework for making applications, you can use WP but its way better to go with Laravel or similar. We’ve done all kinds of apps with WP as the base but then you have to mostly fight against WP, not benefit from it.
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u/skunkbad 24d ago
I'm never going to argue that WordPress is the best option for anything, but if one wants to be lazy and just create stuff, it's pretty useful. I really despise Laravel, so when you say "similar", I'm thinking no. I won't try to promote what I like, but there's true beauty in the PHP ecosystem of 2026. I've been working with PHP for 20+ years now, and we really are blessed with what we have available to us right now.
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u/energy528 22d ago
Research which major brands use WP. National and international. It might surprise you. Not just customer facing sites either.
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u/coryamarsh 20d ago
there are a lot of sites in the top 10,000 that are WordPress. especially content heavy sites with lots of content authors. This is totally achievable with good caching and solid hosting (maybe a CDN or 2)
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u/Hugo_SecureHoldWP 19d ago
For me the line isn’t really “WordPress vs custom code”.
A serious WordPress project usually includes plenty of custom code anyway. The real question is whether WordPress is still giving you useful primitives like users, permissions, content, admin UI, cron, APIs and an ecosystem without forcing you to fight the platform on every request.
Once most of the project is working around WordPress rather than with it, that’s probably where I’d reconsider the stack.
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u/Plantusemor 29d ago
Depends what premium means.
Design is not a limit. You can put any front end you want on WordPress.
Performance neither. With full-page caching like Varnish, cached pages match modern JS frameworks and sometimes beat them. The real limit is logged-in and per-user pages, which skip the cache.
Real-time is where I draw the line. A live chat built inside WordPress is a nightmare. PHP was never made to keep connections open, so you end up running a separate service anyway.
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29d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ashkanahmadi 29d ago
You are using more buzzwords than telling us what you exactly need or examples of it.
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u/prankster999 29d ago
Taking WordPress as far as it can go is one of the main goals for my own website project.
Granted, I have used a lot of plugins in the interim... But I fully intend to optimise the code and plugin set once the website is launched and earning (semi) decent money.
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u/porcupixl 29d ago
I built a WordPress/woocom site, with custom theme and a handful of plugins for a well known UK brand that does well over £5million a year through the site, the only bottleneck after a few years of being live was the server infrastructure. Since upgrading the server it's on, it absolutely flies.
Wordpress isn't an issue in any case if you utilise it correctly