Statamic is great for simple sites but for larger or multilingual sites it has lots of problems. I have a 5000+ page website that the static site generator takes 3 hours to build and there's been no improvement since v3 launched. You can use their "Static Caching" as an alternative to static generating but for my project requirements I need a purely static site. I'm busy doing a huge rewrite and switching to using Statamic in headless mode with NextJS in the front... which takes just a couple of minutes to generate the static sites instead.
I'm also still waiting for RTL support for languages in the CMS and multi-site permissions which has probably been on the roadmap for over a year but keeps getting delayed. I've submitted many ideas and bug reports on how to improve the multilingual experience but I don't think it's a priority for the team.
A very big German newspaper (https://www.spiegel.de/) runs on Statamic and they probably have an order of magnitude more pages. But not sure what kind of improvements/custom implementations they've done.
> Curious about how SPIEGEL’s stack works? Here’s their high level approach, keeping in mind this is running on v2. Upgrading to v3 streamlines even more of their stack.
> A huge flat file content store organized with each entry inside its own subdirectory (you can’t have more than 10k files inside a single directory, an operating system limitation)
> The content store is using a cloud storage solution.
> Statamic’s control panel pushes entries into the content store, and then into an ElasticSearch instance via message queue.
> ElasticSearch runs as a content API with blazing fast response times and is consumed by the control panel and front-end
> The front-end is built in Go.
> User accounts are connected with an Office 365 Active Directory integration with OAuth.
Serious: you should run a profiler on the generation step (or like... for a minute of it and the CTRL-C out). Often times degenerate cases like this exist but are more or less invisible to maintainers, and just saying "the generator takes forever" is not nearly as actionable as "here's the first 60 seconds of the generation process, does anything look weird?"
I've incidently just completed a headless statamic project that used Astro for the frontend. I'd recommend you check out Astro if you haven't already as dev experiece was great and generally feels a better fit for this usecase over next.
I'm also still waiting for RTL support for languages in the CMS and multi-site permissions which has probably been on the roadmap for over a year but keeps getting delayed. I've submitted many ideas and bug reports on how to improve the multilingual experience but I don't think it's a priority for the team.