How Much Content Can a Craft Site Have?
People often ask how much content Craft CMS or Craft Commerce can handle with specific numbers in mind for entries, users, orders, assets, and other element types.
Craft’s license doesn’t put any limitations on your content, but the number of elements it can ultimately support depends on how your site is built, optimized, and hosted.
There are Craft CMS and Craft Commerce sites in the wild running smoothly with tens of millions of elements, and we’ve seen smaller sites struggle to keep up with modest amounts of traffic. The answer is usually “yes, Craft can handle that,” but you should take care with a few things that maximize your site’s ability to handle a growing body of content:
- Utilize smart caching strategies on the front end of the site, which balance how the site is built and deployed with how it needs to be used by each visitor or customer.
- Eager load your data wherever possible to maximize database query efficiency.
- Make sure you’ve got adequate infrastructure with enough resources for PHP, the database, Redis, etc.
- Tune database indexes specifically for your site. Craft provides a reasonable set of indexes for the most common types of queries a site might use, and on modestly-sized sites any missed opportunities for index tailoring will probably go unnoticed. Those same issues, however, will gradually be amplified as larger datasets grow.
- Be cautious with information architecture. Content modeling complexity comes with more database queries. These queries may need more time to execute and closer attention to measure and optimize. A Plain Text field, for example, will be vastly more efficient than a Neo field inside a Super Table field in a Matrix field. Your site’s intended scale and resources should factor into content modeling design decisions.
- Mind your site count. Every site you add to an installation is generally a multiplier for the number of queries that need to be executed. A site with complex information architecture may trigger 200 queries for a single site that total 800 queries for a four-site installation. Consider your content modeling and propagation along with however many sites you plan to use.