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I am thinking of switching our 500+ static page site over to Expression Engine but have a few concerns i need to address first. One of them is speed. Does the use of EE serve to slow down the display of pages? I have been experimenting with the Core version and the pages I have created, for some reason, seem slower than normal. Is this because it takes time for the server to pull the data from the database and serve it up? Any info somebody can provide that would make me less nervous about this? Thanks!

A dynamic site will usually be slower than a true static site. That said, the speed of an EE site depends somewhat on how you set it up, how many queries a page, the server speed/optimization, etc…a lot of variables. EE has various types of caching you can set if your content doesn’t change much. Check the docs and Wiki for caching related info. Some very large sites run EE effectively but they do employ optimization. If you optimize, you probably won’t notice much difference on a small 500 page site I wouldn’t think.

I think the reality is that if you’re going to be managing your site’s content with a cms/database, you’re going to see a slower page load than you would with static pages. I don’t think there’s a way around it. I’ve developed sites with several web cms systems, including a $10,000 system, and they aren’t much different when it comes to this issue.

There have been some complaints in the past about EE’s page load time, but there are a LOT of things that you can do to optimize the speed. Just for starters, the “disable=” parameter. Here’s an EE Wiki article on optimization.

But there are dozens of factors that affect load times: server load balancing, javascript, images, connection speed, etc. You likely know this, but I think that all these things considered, EE is easily one of the best in its class and you DEFINITELY won’t go wrong if you choose it as your platform. Just have a look at some of the sites that run EE. It’s an impressive gallery.

Keep in mind that all cms systems can’t be ALL things to ALL people, but you get pretty damned close with EE, especially considering its cost. Massive value.

Hope this inspires some confidence.

You could also use a hybrid approach.  Caching probably gets pretty close to static files but if some of those static files don’t need to be in the CMS then you could leave them the way they are.  Much of the ExpressionEngine documentation is made up of static HTML files.

Keep in mind the biggest part is that static html is pushed out from the server to the browser the instant the request is processed by apache.  In the case of dynamic systems, like EE, is that the coding in your templates has to be fully processed before the html is handed over to apache, to then push to the browser.  Think of the fact that any portion of your templates may have coding that will affect the html to display.  Things like conditionals, embedded templates, EE query tag results and so on.  I have never seen a CMS system that did not work in a similar manner, as again you need to fully know all of the data to serve before you can start to serve any of it.  So everything from your html/css, and template coding, to the servers you use for your site, will all play an important role in the delivery of content from fully dynamic systems.

Thanks all of you for the great replies. Makes me feel alot more comfortable. Speed aside, I think the advantages of a CMS like EE look too great to continue on with this static site.

I’ve listed few things to speedup expressionengine sites. They are -
1. Enabling Cache - query cache, temaplate cache, tag cache
2. Query disabling in weblog loop for unnecessary stuff
3. Enabling GZip compression
4. Data pruning
5. Include js/css raw file instead of template
6. Saving template only on database
7. Disable tracking
8. Javascript compression
9. Avoid template embedding
10. Use cookie instead of session

For details - see the full article here
http://bit.ly/3fxfXa