Wired spent the last year migrating 17 blogs, 12 databases, and 100’s of thousands of posts into a single WordPress installation. Here’s what they got: mobile first, responsive design; performance enhancements; improved search with Solr integration; and most importantly, they’ve freed up development time to satisfy their customer’s needs rather than maintaining a monolithic website structure maintained by 12 databases.
Here’s how their Director of Engineering put this last point: “In the past, our team was so small that we spent most of our time scrambling to fix bugs and keep the site from 503’ing. Now we have a diverse team of specialists who are devoted to making sure our site meets the growing demands of digital readers like you—people who know a bit about programming and what makes a good website.”
And so much for the scaling argument. Unless you’ve got a site getting more traffic on a daily basis than Wired.com, scaling shouldn’t be a concern as far as the WordPress architecture goes.
