Reply To: Is using 250+ custom fields on a page okay or is there a better way?

• John Huebner

• March 5, 2021 at 4:48 am

When a post is set up WP does (or should) a single query to get and cache all of the postmeta fields for the post. These queries are based on the Post ID which is an indexed column in the DB. The number of queries should not be increased by the number of fields unless there is something else going on.

Additional fields will increase the time it takes to do this one query but that time should not effect a single query more than a few milliseconds depending on what kind of content is being returned. It is possible, but it would be an extreme case. For an example of something that could effect performance here think about a page with 250 WYSIWYG fields with several paragraphs of content in every one of those fields. Let’s say that fields average of 1000 characters that equates to 250 X 1000 = 250,000 characters being returned by the DB and this can mean anywhere from 250K to almost 1MB of UTF8 data. Of course this is an exaggeration to make a point.

There are things in ACF that will increase the number of queries, but this has to do with the formatting of the returned values. For example returning an array from image fields and galleries. Or returning post objects from relationship type fields.