WordPress at Tens of Millions of Requests: postmeta, indexes and other bottlenecks

WordPress has a reputation for being slow at scale. It isn’t — but its database layer punishes you for ignoring it. In this talk I’ll walk through real bottlenecks from an enterprise media platform serving tens of millions of HTTP requests a month: why wp_postmeta becomes the number one suspect, how EAV design turns innocent meta_query calls into multi-second JOINs, and how to diagnose this with EXPLAIN and Query Monitor before your client notices. You’ll get a practical ladder of fixes — from indexes and query rewrites that work on any shared hosting, to custom tables and object caching for high-traffic projects — each with before/after numbers. No theory you can’t apply on Monday.