I’m building it from scratch and probably a 100 or so of those pages will be ecommerce.
I would like to create meaningful, normal looking permalinks for aesthetics and SEO.
I would really love to use WordPress for this but I’m concerned about performance issues with this volume of pages.
There are some issues in WP permalinks implementation that introduce scaling issues for large amount of pages and some specific permalink configurations, see Category in Permalinks Considered Harmful.
Other than that it is business as usual – use decent hosting, keep plugins setup efficient, add caching and you will be fine.
My advice is to heavily invest a lot of their time in caching your site. I am using WP Super Cache and DB Cache Reloaded on a site that is getting around 15,000 hits a day and it is not struggling whatsoever. WordPress can handle surprisingly large amounts of traffic with ease.
It’s usually the database calls the kill everything on a WordPress site, so good database and asset caching are essential and achievable with those two plugins.
The amount of pages is unlikely to be a problem.The amount of users accessing the website is. If you have a lot of traffic, make sure you use static cache plugins and set the garbage collection to a very long time. Only use plugins that you really need, less code means less render time.
I use the category/postname permalink structure and my site contains over 1200 posts and around 100 pages.
It loads in around 1 second on average and i have thousands of images and Javascript for Github Gists on most posts.
There’s 2 areas i think are amongst the most important for performance and efficiency.
In my opinion, the best solution to solve performance issues is to host on managed servers. Could never get my site to load in less than 3.5 seconds using different levels of VPS.
I have also found that theme framework selection can make a big difference. After moving many sites over to a more efficient parent theme framework from inefficient themes it was clear choosing a good parent theme framework can make a big difference in many cases.
Poor quality custom coding in your theme and plugins can also cause problems.
It doesn’t matter how many posts your site includes, its how many are being loaded, what the page contains, like images, Javascript etc and how your servers handle this as far as how they are managed and configured.
Caching
Based on my experience using the most popular caching plugins for WordPress, they don’t perform nearly as well as a Managed Proprietary Caching System which includes:
I don’t think it will be much of an issue. I have several sites with hundreds or thousands of posts.
Just to clarify though, you’ll likely have fewer issues if you use WordPress “Posts” rather than “Pages.”
Maybe you know this, it’s in the codex, but just in case… Posts and Pages are different in WordPress. Posts will show up in the RSS feed, you can assign categories and tags to them. Pages are meant for your contact page, about page, etc. This is generally how WordPress is designed to be used.
I wrote briefly about this here but it’s in the context of creating artists portfolios.
There’s a video (recorded a while ago) by someone here. The key thing I would add to the video is that posts show up in reverse chronological generally, but the way you display content can be changed however you like.
And here’s an especially good article about it by Lorelle
Good luck…
Some of the WordPress sites I manage have more than 50,000 posts. So handling 500 pages should not be an issue at all.
However, website performance depends on factors including: