You can stop worrying about Fluent Community + FluentCRM slowing down your site
The WP Manage Ninja team tells us all the time that it’s fine to run Fluent Community and Fluent CRM on the same site. This post is for those who still doubt it.
My husband’s job used to be a Staff Engineer at Reddit. He literally used to help make sure Reddit was well set up to not go down. This was in 2022-2023 right before Reddit IPOed and was extremely invested in high user numbers and high uptime. I don’t think forums get any bigger than Reddit. He was also an early contributor to Wordpress and writes plugins for me on the fly. So he knows what he’s talking about.
He has reassured me multiple times that it is totally fine to:
- run Fluent Community with a huge number of members
- run FluentCRM with a huge number of subscribers and send as many emails as I want
- run multiple Fluent products all on the same site
Also - let’s believe one another as well! I don’t see users complaining that Fluent slows down their sites either!
The Fluent team has told us so many times. Let’s focus on actually getting our communities and mailing lists to 20k people each rather than fretting it will slow down our sites.
Thank you for sharing Kaneisha G. Kaneisha...:)
I think most issues are due to using a shared server. You cant run a wp site with 20-30 plugins and think you won't have any problems and this is assuming everything was setup correctly from the start. Fluent has always recommended a vps from the start and there is no telling how much computer power that reddit needs, probably alot.
Linking to the Fluent team’s post with the recommended setup: https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/community-meta/post/recommended-server-configuration-for-fluentcommunity
Kaneisha G. Thank you for that link, Kaneisha.
What does your husband say about running FluentCommunity and FluentCRM on a site with 20K groups and 100K users? 300K users? 500K users? (We're talking non-concurrent users all in the United States, and I estimate that about a 10th of my user base will spend ~30 minutes logged in each day.)
I'm currently building a site whose user base almost certainly will grow to those numbers over the space of 5 years--and I'm naturally worried about site performance and about the cost of the hosting.
I do see your point that many people put the cart before the horse when they fret about site performance before they're sure their idea will attract an audience at all. However, my numbers-projection isn't naive arrogance or mere wishful thinking; I'm following a well-trodden path here and have a very good idea of how many users I can expect and at what rate those numbers will increase, because I'm building a site that will replace one that was bought by a large company and promptly killed off. That left a vacuum in the niche, so I'm filling that void. The potential user base is somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 million, though of course the site will never have that many users.
I've invested a year into this project so far, and I'm pretty optimistic, but having an expert like your husband reassure me about these kinds of numbers would soothe some of my anxiety. I'm a one-woman team, and I'm bootstrapping this and learning as I go.
A lot of users are coming from BuddyBoss which is notoriously bloated and slow, so Fcom is just lightning quick in comparison. I worry about overloading it with my addons but nothing has ground it to a halt yet!
Ross FCA Buddyboss was so slow! 😭😭😭 We’re all tech-traumatized.
Keep going, Ross!
Imagine you’re going on a hike.
You put on comfortable pants, a T-shirt, a jacket, and your boots. You pack a backpack with only the essentials. Everything feels balanced - you’re full of energy and ready for adventure. Looks like it’s going to be a good day.
That’s your website when it’s stable and well-tuned.
Now think about your physical condition - how far can you go with that backpack? Hopefully your knee isn’t sore from yesterday 🙂
Next, decide what’s really worth taking. A fancy guitar and two liters of soda probably won’t help.
If you overload yourself and your fitness is average, you’ll tire quickly - or even “collapse.”
The same applies to your server: load it wisely.
Even the most expensive plan can be overwhelmed if you install everything without proper configuration.
Don’t activate every plugin you know “just in case.” If you truly need them all, be ready to pay for powerful hardware, precise tuning, and ongoing maintenance.
If FluentCommunity and FluentCRM are enough for your setup, keep your stack minimal.
A lightweight site runs faster, stays stable, and delivers better results.
P.S.
You can always offload specific workloads to subdomains - it’s safer and far more efficient than stuffing everything into one backpack.