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Any advice for running a Wordpress site with thousands of pages (such as thousands of localized pages)?

I scraped a website that listed all the counties, cities, and zip codes across the US, into a spreadsheet. I'm trying to do a test run on one of my sites, to create individual pages for all these cities, as well as pages by county and state. There are approximately 20k pages in total.

My first attempt at uploading everything was a disaster - after a few thousand pages, Wordpress just gave up importing and stopped. Worse yet, the site was insanely slow, and I could barely do anything on it, including visiting it or editing it.

I tried adding the "pages" as "posts" instead, which seems to have helped, and the site runs reasonably fine - but I still cannot uploaed all 20k entries at once - I'm doing about 1000 at a time, which seems to be working but is slow.

Are any of you rsuccessfully unning Wordpress sites with like 10k, 20k, or more pages/posts on a basic shared hosting package? I'm currently using Bluehost btw. If so, I would love to know how you are pulling it off, if you don't mind sharing some advice. Thanks!

A page and a post are the same thing. The only difference is that posts have a category option.

Your killer is memory and cpu speed on the hosting site. You are asking a lot - 10,000 SQL entries and indexing.

Move to a business class host with a lot of memory and a fast cpu.

Wordpress is perfectly able to handle the load (there are sites there with 100k of pages) just don't stuff it too hard. Slow down or upgrade the hosting.

It depends on your site design - If you are running a real estate lookup service, WP is not the best CMS as your requirement is heavy on database search and image serving. If it's just a simple directory site with 1 result per visitor, WP is fine.

Put this line of code:

define( 'WP_MAX_MEMORY_LIMIT', '3000M' );
just before (!) the line
define( 'WPINC', 'wp-includes' );
Additionally I put these two lines
define('ALTERNATE_WP_CRON', true);
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '3000M');