How big can Kirby 3 website be?

Hi, finishing my first project on Kirby and hope to continue, as I like cms and community a lot. Also so glad to see website load fast and nice over 90% results in Google Speed Test, that is so hard to achieve with other systems.

To be confident for future, would like to learn, how big can Kirby website be? I mean, because it works without database, probably after some amount of pages or total content (pages, images, files, let’s say - nodes), there might be some performance issues? Like more powerful server needed? Or not? I know, Kirby can work with database too, so when it’s worth connecting it to database? Until when website without database on standard shared hosting can work perfectly?

Also is it easy to connect database after files-only website has a lot of content?

It really depends on your content structure: the more nested the better.

Kirby is quite mighty and can handle more than you might think. There are many sites with thousands of pages out there performing like a charme. But as you mentioned, being based on a filesystem has implications, so its much easier for Kirby to handle a content structure where thousand pages are nested, so that each page only has a couple of subpages - compared to one where all thousand pages are subpages of a single parent page.

However, even in these situations, caching can go a long way to achieve great performance.