AgentPress Listings Plugin – Query Performance Limitations and Optimizations

[ItsPhipps]

Hi,

I'm currently in the process of looking into several different solutions to rebuild my real estate website. And the more and more I think about the advantages of using WordPress and having the listing information in my database, the more I feel like I want to try it out. I'm really tired of switching between different providers, and feel like having full control over my site and data is best (obviously).

So, I have a setup that can push all the listing data from my market into my WordPress database. While it sounds like a slam dunk, I know that it's never as easy as it looks on the surface.

THE PROBLEM

The biggest thing that concerns me is the performance limitations of using CPT's in WordPress, and querying the listings in a search. Currently, my market has about 7,500 active listings. I know that 7,500 can probably easily be handled by WordPress, but this number can easily grow into the several hundreds of thousands of listings if I add sold data, and branch into one or two markets close by.

FIRST QUESTIONS

So what are the limitations of using AgentPress Listings for this?
When can I expect to run into problems with slow searches?
How can I optimize my setup to run everything as efficiently as possible?

TAXONOMIES VS META

One more thing.

As I understand it, WordPress is more efficient when using Taxonomies to query large sets of data than it is with using Postmeta. If this is true, does that mean I should use taxonomies for the data most commonly used to search with, and just use postmeta for other misc data and anything I want to order results by?

Here's my thoughts on this:

Taxonomies

State
City
Zip
Bedrooms
Bathrooms

Postmeta

Price
Address
All other listing details

FINAL QUESTIONS

Is this the best way to structure things, and is this the way AgentPress Listings works out of the box?
Is AgentPress Listings and WordPress capable of sufficiently handling this task?
Or should I do the extra work and use something like Pods so I can build a new set of database tables specifically for listings?

Thank You for the help in advance!!!

https://wordpress.org/plugins/agentpress-listings/

[ItsPhipps]

Maybe I was off base with the thought of using Taxonomies for bedrooms and bathrooms. Here's what Ron Rennick said on the wordpress support forums for the plugin:

Taxonomies and terms are strings and aren't suitable for range queries.

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/selecting-a-range-of-taxonomies-manually-enter-range

[JayM]

This reply has been marked as private.

[ItsPhipps]

Seems like a small world we're living in Jay!

I was hoping we could get an opinion from Carrie Dils (hopefully she has Google alerts set up lol), or somebody else who is familiar with the AgentPress Listings plugin to chime in with a little guidance.

[2fivedesigns]

I am looking into the same thing right now for a client and was wondering the same thing. Have you came up with a solution as of yet? Will you be using any type of IDX search plugin?

[Author]

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