WP Engine Performance and Stability Guidelines
In this article, we’ll be discussing some of our guidelines and limitations on our WP Engine platform. These changes are broken down into 3 sections: domain limits, multisite subsite limits, and database table limits.
Domain Limits
The number of domains added to an account can cause a performance impact that isn’t readily apparent. Over time, the number of domain entries can cause delays when updating or saving changes on a server environment. Due to this, we’re recommending a limitation of 3,000 total domains per server environment, including subdomains, to prevent degraded performance.
| Domain Limit | 3,000 |
Multisite Limits
Multisite is a native feature of WordPress® that allows for the creation and management of a network of multiple websites (subsites) from a single WordPress installation.1 Multisite can be powerful and effective when managing franchises, organizations with multiple departments or teams, schools/universities, etc.
Multisite can also lead to scaling and performance issues if the number of subsites, domains, and size of the database grows beyond the capacity of your plan level. With that in mind, we have performed rigorous testing to ensure that we’re finding the appropriate levels that can be utilized before performance issues may crop up. The recommended limits are based on numerous tests and reflect our commitment to ensuring your site is operating as smoothly as possible.
Please note that the established subsite limit is a plan level limit. This means that the total number of subsites across all environments (Production, Staging, Development) should not exceed the listed numbers. Exceeding this limit may result in a poor experience or degraded performance.
At WP Engine, we want to ensure site stability and server performance for all of our users. This means applying limits to multisite configurations to maintain optimal operation across our infrastructure, as follows:
| Plan Type | Multisite Subsite Limit |
| Shared Plans (Startup, Professional, Growth, Scale) | Startup – does not support Multisite Professional – 35 Growth/Scale – 40 |
| P0 | 100 |
| P1 | 125 |
| P1.5 | 150 |
| P2 | 175 |
| P3 | 200 |
| P4 | 300 |
| P5 | 450 |
| P6 | 550 |
| P7 | 700 |
| P8 | 800 |
| P9 | 900 |
| P10 | 1000 |
Database Table Limits
An excessive number of database tables has been noted to cause issues with scaling and reboot times during maintenance. Keeping this number low is recommended to ensure functionality like Copy Site or Backups/Restores remain performant and stable.
Our database table limit is 100,000 tables per server environment.
| Database Table Limit | 100,000 |
In cases where these thresholds are exceeded on a server environment, we may reach out in order to assist in reducing usage or facilitate upgrading to a more suitable environment.
Thank you for reviewing our guidelines and limitations. If you have any questions or require further assistance, please contact WP Engine Support.
