Finding the fastest WordPress host is a lot of work, with every company seemingly claiming to be the fastest, but how can every company be the fastest? It sometimes feels as though you just need to take their word for it, because how can you verify their claims? Do you have to trust a random website or blog with many different performance statistics ranking the WordPress hosts from best to worst, but how can you verify these claims are even real and aren’t just essentially paid adverts to be ranked the best.
Well, there are free tools and WordPress plugins that you can use to verify how fast your WordPress host is, effectively and simply. We’ll walk you through exactly which plugins to use, and how to use them. We’ll show you the raw, unedited results from our own servers which are fully optimised for busy, heavy traffic WordPress sites so you can run them on your current host and compare the results to ours.
WPPerformanceTester
The first test we are going to perform is a WordPress plugin called ‘WPPerformanceTester’ and is authored by kohashi. You can find out more information about this plugin by clicking here.
The plugin mainly measures the performance of the database by performing a string of complex queries to measure performance. The plugin measures how long it takes to execute the queries and how many queries the server can handle per second, the higher the amount of queries then the faster the server is, and in turn the faster your WordPress website is. Database performance is a good measurement to compare performance between different WordPress web hosting providers, as generally a web hosting provider who has slow servers, unoptimised database instances or overloaded servers will show a higher execution time or lower queries per second.
Once you have installed the plugin, it’s fairly simple to run. Within your WordPress admin dashboard, go to tools >> WP Performance Tester. You can then simply click the ‘Begin Performance Test’ button. The test will take as little as 2 seconds to a few minutes to complete, depending on how good your WordPress host is.
In this test, you want the total execution time to be as low as possible, and the queries per second to be as high as possible. You can take a look at our own results below:
As you can see in the screenshot, we show an amazing 0.151s execution time with an ability of 6622 queries per second.
WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool
For our next test, we are going to utilise another WordPress plugin which measures the performance of your WordPress Host. The tool is called ‘WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool’, authored by Anton Aleksandrov. You can view more information about this plugin by clicking here.
The Hosting Benchmark Tool is more comprehensive as it measures many different aspects of the server your WordPress website is hosted on. From CPU, Memory, Database, File System, Object Cache and Network speed, this plugin measures them all and gives you a handy rating from 0-10 on how it compares to benchmarks ran by other users.
Once you have installed the plugin, simply browse to Tools >> WP Benchmark tool in your WordPress admin dashboard. You will need to tick the boxes to consent to the terms and GDPR before clicking ‘Save Settings’, I would suggest leaving the other settings as they are. Once you have done this then you can click ‘Start benchmark!’.
The Benchmark will take a couple of minutes to complete, depending on the speed of your WordPress host.
As you can see from our results below we score 10 out of 10 for every aspect, we literally couldn’t be any faster.
Loader.io
So far we have seen how to compare your WordPress host server hardware and performance, but what about real world tests?
Well, in this case we’re going to use a website called loader.io – Loader.io allows you to send traffic to your website as though they are a real visitor, and gives you metrics on the response time of your webpage and if any errors occurred during this time. There are a few different tests you can perform, but on this one we’re going to focus on the ‘Main Client Load’ test which measures how many clients your website can handle over a period of time.
Since we are so confident in the amount of clients our servers can handle, we are going to test with the maximum values loader.io will allow us which are 10,000 clients over a 1 minute duration. This simulates a 1 minute period where the clients will start at 1 and increase to 10,000 clients over a period of 1 minute – at the end of the test there will be 10,000 people loading your website every 1 second – this is the ultimate test, as 10,000 people clicking on your website is a massive amount!
As you can see from the screenshot, 100% of the requests were successful and there were no failures or timeouts during the test. The average response rate was also an amazingly low 563ms!
Why is SharedGrid so fast?
We are a team who have vast combined experience in Linux, Networking and Server Performance, having worked in previous industries where performance and reliability matters such as the government agencies, and emergencies services. We have built up the experience and knowledge to know how to properly optimise servers, networking equipment and choose the right software for the best performance, reliability and security.
Our Software and Hardware Stack
Selecting the correct Software and Hardware stack is very important, therefore we utilise the following to give you the best experience:
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X – WordPress is a single-threaded application therefore we offer the 9950X CPU which offers the best single thread performance on the market up to 5.7Ghz.
NVMe Storage – We utilise NVMe hard drives for storage in our servers which is the fastest storage type on the market.
10 Gbps Network – Offering network speeds of 10 Gbps per server, nothing can slow down your website loading times.
LiteSpeed – All our web hosting and WordPress hosting plans use the LiteSpeed web server which offers the best loading times for your website. LiteSpeed has also been fully optimised to give us the edge over competitors.
LiteSpeed Cache – The LiteSpeed cache plugin is installable on WordPress to serve content from memory.
MariaDB – Our MariaDB instances are fully optimised to give you the best read and write performance on your database.
Location – We offering hosting within the UK and New Jersey, USA so you can pick the location best for you.
Sign up today or learn more about our services https://sharedgrid.com/