I’m currently using the ListingHive theme along with the HivePress Membership, Claim Listings, Messages, Favourites, Reviews plugins (with plans to use Social Login, Geolocation, in future) to build a listing-based website. I’m now planning ahead for growth and scalability, and I’d really appreciate some insights and clarity from your end.
I am currently using basic tier of NameCheap Shared hosting. Here are a few questions I’m hoping you could answer or guide me on:
Key Questions:
What’s the maximum number of users and listings a standard HivePress installation can support before performance becomes noticeably affected (e.g., slower page loads, timeouts, etc.)?
Are there any known benchmarks from your clients or internal testing?
For example, are there any current HivePress-powered websites running with 50,000+ users or 100,000+ listings?
Knowing these real-world examples would help me plan infrastructure needs and whether I need to consider a custom solution in the future.
What are the recommended server specs for different stages of growth?
For example:
Up to 5,000 users & 1,000 listings
Up to 50,000 users & 10,000 listings
Beyond that (e.g., heavy traffic, large marketplace scale)
I’d love to know your recommended RAM, CPU, and hosting type (shared, VPS, cloud, etc.).
Database and caching best practices you recommend for large HivePress sites?
Is there anything we should proactively implement (e.g., Redis, Object Cache, optimized MySQL setup, etc.) to avoid issues as we scale?
Why I’m Asking - I dont want to be caught off guard.
I want to understand how much my current server setup can handle and understand at what point I should plan for an upgrade. Having a clear idea of HivePress’s limits will also help me make the decision between:
Scaling my current site effectively, or
Starting to explore a custom-built platform if I hit those upper limits.
I totally understand that performance can vary based on content, plugins, server stack, and user behavior — but even approximate benchmarks or rough guidance or largest known case studies would be incredibly helpful.
Final Ask
If you have any clients with large setups, you can share real examples (even anonymously), that would give a great perspective. Many of us are building platforms that may go from 100 to 100,000 users — and we’d love to know how far HivePress can go before major customizations or tech shifts are needed.
Thanks again for all your work — looking forward to hearing your insights!
There are no limits set in the code, this depends on many aspects like hosting plan, caching, optimization, ratio of active users/listings etc.
Yes, there were websites with about 100,000 listings shared via support tickets but unless customers willingly submit their website to the Showcase unfortunately we can’t share these publicly.
This also depends on many aspects, I recommend starting with the basic plan, preferably VPS-based hosting (not shared one), and you can upgrade once you see that memory usage and/or CPU is close to the limit.
There’s no specific CPU/RAM recommendation, but I recommend a VPS-based hosting because you’ll have more control of scalability.
If you have basic server setup skills I recommend DigitalOcean, they have a ready-made installation of the OpenLiteSpeed server. If you use it along with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin, then object cache and other optimizations will be available by default. Then you can go through the LiteSpeed settings to set up the image optimization, cache, minify and merge JS/CSS, etc. This should be enough unless there’s really significant traffic, along with tens of thousands user profiles and listings. If you don’t have basic server setup skills you can also check managed hosting providers if they claim to use VPS (e.g. Cloudways, it uses DigitalOcean servers).
The main issue that may arise is related to the search performance, due to the WordPress database schema each additional search filter (if it’s not a selectable value, e.g. number of text) slows down the search because it’s performed on the same database table. We plan to resolve this by adding “lookup” table that’s in sync with the core tables, this should resolve the issue, but even with tens of thousands of listings and few search filters it should be ok with the current version.
You can start with the existing setup and customize or replace specific parts of the website if they cause issues (you’ll notice this in the server or hosting graphs), e.g. messaging (you can move it to a third-party API or platform), if there’s no rapid traffic growth there should be enough time to act accordingly.
Nice reply, if anyone has a site with more the 20,000 listings i would appreciate if they can share their link
Also is there any timeline for the lookup feature?
Key Questions:
Final Ask