Let’s start with a distinction in what a “large” site is.
If the site is large in terms of the number of pages it has, that is not an issue. Independent Analytics will run just as quickly for a site with five pages as one with 50,000 pages.
What matters is the volume of traffic the site gets. The analytics won’t slow down your site for visitors, no matter how much traffic you get, but the Analytics menu itself can get slow.
We occasionally get users with sites that receive more than 1 million views per month, and the analytics reports do not perform well for these sites. We would not recommend using Independent Analytics if your site gets this much traffic.
While it is technically possible to scale your database resources to make the analytics load quickly, even with millions of visitors, WordPress hosting is not typically designed to scale in this way. It scales to serve pages to larger numbers of concurrent visitors, not to handle increasingly large database queries. For this reason, the analytics will likely become sluggish even with great hosting because it hasn’t scaled as needed for the database queries. We put great effort into optimizing Independent Analytics to query data as efficiently and quickly as possible, but at certain scales, a WordPress plugin becomes an inappropriate solution for serving analytics.
Sites that get fewer than 100,000 views per month will not have these issues and will enjoy 2-4 second load times for the analytics. For sites with 100k-1m views per month, there may be a significant delay when loading analytics over longer date ranges, like the past 12 months.
