Splitting One Big WordPress Site into Multiple Small Sites

Question

I have a very big WordPress site and I am facing speed issue and server resources issues. Specially numbers of MySQL records are so high. So, I want to split the big WordPress site into multiple small sites.

I have URL structure like this

1. http://example.com/this-is-first-post.html (category1)
2. http://example.com/this-is-second-post.html (category2)
3. http://example.com/this-is-third-post.html (category1 and category2)

I want to separate the WordPress according to category, I am thinking about two solutions

1. Either I create two DBs for each categories, e.g. db_cat1 and db_cat2 and I divide the data using some logic.

2. Or I create subdomains and install different WP instances like this:

   • http://category1.example.com/this-is-first-post.html
   • http://category2.example.com/this-is-second-post.html

My questions are:

1. If I try the first logic, then how can I divide the databases into different categories db?
2. If I try second logic, then how can I manage the URL structure and keep SEO juice there? How can I divide the common tags and categories?
3. How I will manage resources such as image etc after splitting the WordPress?
4. Is there any better way to do this job?

I don't want change the server or work on server because I already tried different types of server and all servers have the MySQL resources issues. I prefer second logic because it is easy to handle.

Answer 1

If the content is interconnected, and your content is as you have posts in both categories, you can't split it without losing some of the capabilities that you have now (search will be one of them).

4.- Yes, improve your server settings or use more servers.