WordPress Pretty Permalinks vs Site Speed

[georgebounacos]

A couple of issues at play here as I wrestle with the best permalink structure for a site I'm toying with now.

1.  I know that WordPress wants a unique number in the post to improve performance and db calls.

2.  I know that for basic on-page SEO, most of us would opt for CATEGORY/POST or maybe even just post.  I constantly change those.  It's a bad habit, but sometimes you want the killer headline and a decent title in the post.

So here is the issue:

I can rewrite or use a plugin (anyone have a favorite) the permalinks to speed up site performance.  We all know Google wants that.  Maybe the permalink becomes /1234-foo

But you know, a number in front of the URL just isn't awfully user friendly.  If someone wants to read the foo post, it's nice to send them  directly there.

So would you trade off a slowdown in site speed for the prettiest permalinks for usability and SEO?

And since you're asking a WP question, has anyone heard of a hard cap on static pages where the database starts dragging?

The site I have in mind has 400 each posts and pages.  Would moving platforms to Drupal or Joomla allow handling that many pages more effectively?

Thanks for contributing and any help you can give.

George

[AlanBleiweiss]

400 posts and 400 pages is not very many pages or posts, not by any stretch of the imagination.  How much lag are you seeing in tests with the permalink URLs?  If it's significant, it's not a WordPress issue - more likely a database corruption or server problem causing the slowdown between the front end and database.

[RyanPurkey]

I agree with Alan.  Wordpress has been turned into a full blown CMS platform and is capable of handling well over 400 pages. A quick walk through some of the sites in the Wordpress Showcase (http://wordpress.org/showcase/) will reveal several sites that are well of 400/800 in page size.  And if you make the pages static there are going to be even fewer server calls.  Speed at that level will really be determined by server speeds, network bandwidth, connectivity, and up times.  Typically a slow site can be solved by a new host not a new CMS.

[robertdempsey]

For my sites I prefer to use user-friendly URLS so they look nice and pretty when a searcher sees them on the Google results. To keep my WordPress installs nice and fast I use a plugin called W3 Total Cache. Any time the server doesn't have to hit the database it will be much faster -this plugin helps with that. I also use another plugin called CSprites (or something like that) to put all images into a sprite file. This combination, plus a dedicated server, keeps my sites serving very fast even with some dynamic widgets on the page.