Using multiple sections VS a single section with entry types

Question

I'm just planning ahead for a project and was hoping for a second opinion.

I'm going to be making a site that will have about 7 different types of entry - all of which have different fields/URL's; however on the front-end they will all behave as if they are part of one channel. I will have a single page that lists all of the entries and I will also be giving end-users the ability to perform searches/filtering.

For the sake of easy dashboard management I have currently set them up as separate sections instead of one section with multiple entry types (because using individual sections gives me a nice separated 'Entries' page in the dashboard - it's hard to sort/view by entry type at the moment).

Question: Seeing as I can get the site to work the same regardless of which method I use, is there a dramatic difference between pulling out entries from multiple sections VS pulling out entries from one?

For this example lets just say we are dealing with around 100,000 entries total.

Answer 1

It's hard to answer without examples of your content types.

I would suggest that if you would ever need deliberately relate one Entry to another using the Entries field type, then making use of separate Sections for each type of content would be the way to go.

e.g. If an "office location" entry is the parent to multiple "services"

A more obvious factor is when an entry type needs to be a Channel vs a Structure. This can only be set at the Section-level

Hope that helps