Greetings, Wordpress Wizard

Welcome to the first unified way to benchmark your hosting using simple Wordpress plugin.
A simple way to find out if your server is fast or needs an upgrade.

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.

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.

  Sharing is Caring!

If you like this plugin and the job it's doing - please share it among your collegues and friends. Leaving comment, review or a vote at Wordpress plugin repository also helps and encourages a lot!

Your questions, comments and suggestions are always welcome, just hit that contact button!

  Help with your hosting needs

Working in hosting business from 2004 as system administrator, analyst, PHP programmer and MySQL database administrator I have gained experience to solve different problems and find ways through difficult situations and solutions. I am able to help not just with Wordpress, but hosting issues in general. If you need help, please reach me through hosting.guru.

Total tests

78859

Global stats

2024
Average score

7.8

PHP 5.6
0.01%
PHP 7.0
0.03%
PHP 7.2
0.09%
PHP 7.3
0.73%
PHP 7.4
13.65%
PHP 8.0
8.66%
PHP 8.1
32.39%
PHP 8.2
28.91%
PHP 8.3
15.53%

2023
Average score

7.38

PHP 5.4
0.01%
PHP 5.6
0.03%
PHP 7.0
0.06%
PHP 7.1
0.05%
PHP 7.2
0.22%
PHP 7.3
0.66%
PHP 7.4
22.83%
PHP 8.0
17.71%
PHP 8.1
32.86%
PHP 8.2
24.24%
PHP 8.3
1.32%

2022
Average score

7.4

PHP 5.4
0.00%
PHP 5.6
0.14%
PHP 7.0
0.18%
PHP 7.1
0.11%
PHP 7.2
0.60%
PHP 7.3
2.45%
PHP 7.4
48.84%
PHP 8.0
20.48%
PHP 8.1
26.84%
PHP 8.2
0.36%

2021
Average score

8.02

PHP 5.4
0.01%
PHP 5.6
0.39%
PHP 7.0
0.30%
PHP 7.1
0.11%
PHP 7.2
2.01%
PHP 7.3
9.83%
PHP 7.4
75.31%
PHP 8.0
11.21%
PHP 8.1
0.83%

2020
Average score

7.82

PHP 5.4
0.03%
PHP 5.6
1.19%
PHP 7.0
2.53%
PHP 7.1
3.06%
PHP 7.2
11.76%
PHP 7.3
33.45%
PHP 7.4
47.27%
PHP 8.0
0.71%

2019
Average score

7.84

PHP 5.6
0.66%
PHP 7.0
5.96%
PHP 7.1
4.64%
PHP 7.2
29.14%
PHP 7.3
53.64%
PHP 7.4
5.96%

Example benchmark results

Benchmark on local laptop
VM on local laptop

Local VMWare player virtual machine running Debian 11 and using WordOp stack for Wordpress.

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen7 5650U
  • PHP 8.1 / PHP-FPM
  • MariaDB 10.6

View details

Development shared server
Simple shared hosting server

Benchmark from our development area, which is hosted a shared hosting server with moderate resource overselling.

  • CPU: AMD EPYC 7282
  • PHP 7.4 / PHP-FPM
  • MariaDB 10.3

View details

Powerful shared server
Powerful shared hosting

Powerful shared hosting with dedicated CPU and RAM resources and reduced number of hosted sites.

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900
  • PHP 7.4 / PHP-LSAPI
  • MariaDB 10.6

View details

Dedicated Server of 2023
Powerful VPS of 2023

Amazing results on brand new server from 2023. CPU speed changes it all. Soon we will need to adjust to it.

  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
  • PHP 8.1 / PHP-FPM
  • MariaDB 10.6

View details

Public wall of benchmarked sites

Developed by Anton Aleksandrov - hosting.guru - 2024