According to kinsta.com research, Wordpress has become the most popular CMS system in the world. Big and small websites use it. People build complex webshops, galleries, booking systems, forums and corporate pages using it. Thousands of developers code for Wordpress every day and success of many projects rely on information and data stored and processed by it.
And every Wordpress installation run on a server, hosted somewhere around the globe. Server can be physical or virtual, it might run Unix, Linux, Windows or other OS, might have different processor, memory and storage hardware. Some are more powerful and some are less powerful, but most users never see these computers in real live.
The speed of your Wordpress depends on many factors. Number of plugins, logic complexity and data amount are those, which impact most of all. But what about raw server power? This project attempts to answer this question. Plugin, that we have developed will run unified tests and measure their execution times. Based on that we will score your server performance, so you can decide, if that is enough for your project or not.
10.july.2023: I have benchmarked several servers, mostly targeting CPU performance - sharing small overview and thoughts here in my blog.
5.November.2023: Experimenting with SQL query cache - does it make big difference on shared hosting servers - read here in my blog.
12.November.2023: Researching and answering most common question on VPS performance improvement - should you get more CPU cores - read more in my blog.
26.February.2024: Wordpress forum user Jaro noticed, that specific benchmarks are noticeanbly faster, when Wordpress is using PHP8.3. I can confirm that and suggest - if possible - switch to PHP8.3. Related and very interesting article at kinsta.com also confirms this. We are specifically talking about mb_eregi_replace and array manipulation functions, that used a lot in all Wordpress plugins. If you are comparing speed of different servers - bear in mind and always use same PHP version on all servers, that you are benchmarking.
13.April.2024: I came across amazing blog about Wordpress optimization - very detailed and professional explanations and tips.
19.November.2024: Very interesting Wordpress hosting comparison article - author spent quite a bit of time looking through various speed and performance aspects. If you are doing your own research - check out what things have been tested, they all make sense.
1.February.2025: New version 1.5.0 introduces completely new feature - schedulled benchmarks. Once enabled - Wordpress will attempt to executed CPU benchmarks - 2 seconds every 5 minutes. Script records number of successful iteractions - the more iteraction - the faster your CPU was at that moment. This is new feature - so your comments and ideas are super-welcome!
Testing methodology
CPU and memory tests
- CPU speed is tested using checksum calculation function md5 together with random number generator and regex functions, that add good stress on processor.
- RAM speed is tested by creating huge in-memory array full of random data and performing trivial operations on its elements.
Filesystem tests
- Filesystem writeability test tries to write 50MB large file 20 times
- Small file IO test does similar write attempts, but instead writing 150Kb large files 500 times.
- File copy benchmark attempts to copy 50MB large locally hosted file 20 times.
Database performance tests
Consists of the following parts:
- inserting large amount of random data into temporary tables;
- running simple select and update queries without table joins;
- running more complex select queries using table joining operators.
Note: from v.1.4.0, that has been released on 26.feb.2024 - database queries are specifically not using query cache. Query cache can give extra speedup in some cases, especially if server is not overloaded and does not have high number of database and queries (e.g. one-two websites running on VPS). On busy servers query cache can either not have any noticeable effect or may degrade performance.
Network speed test
Script tries to download large file from global CDN in order to make this test terrirory independant. On practice this is to-server network speed test - we believe it still can show tendency and quality of your internet connection.
Schedulled tests
Experimental feature introduced on 1.February 2025. You can enable schedulled events to run small amount of CPU intensive operations. Each schedulled even will run for 2 seconds and count number of successful iteractions. The more iteractions are performed - the more raw power your server has at the particular moment. Keep in mind, this still related to single core performance! Keep in mind, that in order for event to be triggered - there should be either setup cron or your website should have regular visitors. Schedulled event stats are not shared or recorded outside your Wordpress.
