Thread

I have a few questions about using EE and what it can handle.

I am in the middle of purchasing a content site that gets about 20 million page views a month. I would like to bring over all the content and create a new site based on the EE engine and application.

1 - When I check a lot of the EE sites they load very slow. is this typical and why?
2 -Do you have examples of large sites that use EE and what are they?
3 - How large of site can use EE and can you recommend a company to do the work listed above?
4 - Can i bring over an entire database of content?
5 - Does ee have search engine friendly urls?

I appreciate any help you can provide on this subject.

Welcome to the forums.

1) No, this is not typical. That said, EE is a dynamic application, so you need a database server that is up to the task. For many shared hosts MySQL is more of an afterthought than a main priority, and this shows. If your web hosting provider is running decently tuned, not massively over-subscribed web and database servers your average EE site should load very quickly.

2) There is a Showcase section on our site. You might also want to check out this thread.

3) I’m not sure where this question is headed, really. We have some very large and very busy sites; it all depends on the developer to set it up properly. If you are looking for help, take a look at the Pro Network, or consider posting an entry in our Job Board.

4) Yes. Depending on the content, db structure and a few other details this can be easy, or require a little more effotrt. It will, in all probability, require some custom code.

5) Yes. Default URLs look something like:

<a href="http://example.com/index.php/group/template/entry_title">http://example.com/index.php/group/template/entry_title</a>

although there is a lot of flexibility there. That said, there are no weird url parameters and the like.

Hop studios recently published a list of high traffic EE sites - http://www.hopstudios.com/blog/the_10_largest_expressionengine_sites/ - you may recognise some of them 😊

I have worked with newspaper sites using EE that handle tens of millions of page views a month. In my experience, the main reason why many sites load slowly is either because they have a poor hosting environment or because they try to jam too much onto a page, i.e. large graphics, server calls, numerous scripts, video, etc.

Also, FYI, I recently transferred several thousand files from a Joomla site to EE. It didn’t require custom coding, just pulling the data out of MySQL from one site into a csv file and uploading it into EE. Another of my sites has 165,000 files on it and is doing fine.

That said, I don’t know the requirements of your site. I can only speak from my experience.

Hop studios recently published a list of high traffic EE sites - http://www.hopstudios.com/blog/the_10_largest_expressionengine_sites/ - you may recognise some of them 😊

Its weird every site i check using EE runs so slow.. does anyone else notice this?

Which sites in particular are you finding slow, jkdmedia?  I just went through a random assortment at that article and all loaded very quickly for me.