How Does WordPress’ Performance Compare to Other CMS Options?

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I recently read an article by Danny Richman from seotraininglondon.org and it got me thinking about WordPress' current performance capabilities and the community's ability and willingness to implement the best possible solutions for both performance and SEO.
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I recently read an article by Danny Richman from seotraininglondon.org where he crawled one million websites to find the best CMS platform. It got me thinking about WordPress’ current performance capabilities and the community’s ability and/or willingness to implement the best possible solutions for website performance and SEO.

We have all encountered slow WordPress sites and also a few very fast ones, so I’m not coming to any conclusions here. The performance of your site does depend completely on how you set it up, however, the platform also plays a big part.

Website owners should always strive for better performance to get maximum traffic.

Danny Richman carried out a study to see which platform performed best across a number of sites. The study relies on Ahrefs‘ URL rating metric since Google stopped publicly revealing their own PageRank metric.

Not all the data is worth looking into, but from the results we can see that almost 70% of the tested WordPress sites still don’t have valid SSL certificates. Granted, this is not as dire a situation as Wix or Weebly who are at well over 90%, but it’s far off from the Shopify stat of less than 5%. This is something the WordPress community has been striving for, but it seems it hasn’t been enough just yet. Do the hosting providers need to do more to encourage their users to opt for SSL?

Image courtesy of seotraininglondon.org.

WordPress also scored the worst when it come to average page speed (not including images). Although being self-hosted is part of the reason for this, badly coded plugins play a big part too. Education is definitely an important factor here. What can we do to better educate plugin developers and guide them down a path to quality code?

There is no simple solution for performance enhancement when it comes to websites, not even the caching plugins that many in the community seem to regard as the go-to solution when a website is under-performing. We need to come together to educate the community better on how to build better products and websites.

You may not read much into this test, but in my opinion, it does give an indication of where the WordPress community needs to make larger strides. You can read the full article to come to your own conclusions.

If you want to start improving your site performance today, you should definitely read this article from Kinsta. It’s the truly ultimate guide on how to improve your site’s speed and includes some awesome tips that you may not have even heard about before. We trust Kinsta with some of our most important websites, so I definitely recommend you have a look at their offering if you’re looking for a great hosting partner.

Mark Zahra

Mark is the CEO behind the WP Mayor project. He has been using WordPress since 2012, joining the WP Mayor team in 2014. Since then, he has helped to review, test, and write about hundreds of WordPress products and services; educating the community of millions of WordPress users around the globe.

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5 Responses

    1. Hi Mati, it appears the original author didn’t include Drupal in his original article. I’d recommend contacting him directly to ask him why not since I’m only referencing it here. Perhaps you can also ask him to comment on why he didn’t include Drupal right here so other readers will know why too 🙂

  1. I helped in one wp site and I show:
    – Google connection makes the site slower
    – It needs one or more cashe plugins to be faster
    – statistics plugins that collect o lot of data make the site slower
    – The WP is needed a CDN
    – If we disable the Dashboard widgets that demand online connection with Wp the site runs faster

    1. Hi Elias, thank you for your comment. Can you elaborate on those points, please?

      What Google connection made the site slower?

      With regards to caching plugins, I disagree that they are necessary. If the site is built right, with optimized tools, and with the correct server setup for its needs, there could be no need for caching plugins.

      Which statistics plugins were you using for this project and what stats were they collecting? Perhaps they weren’t the most optimal tools for the job. If not, we can recommend something better.

      If you can add some detail to your claims, I’m sure it will be very helpful to other readers too.

      1. I don’t think the test you mentioned came through right in the comment.

        We will be writing articles in the coming weeks and months to go into more detail about website performance. Caching plugins are good, don’t get me wrong, but for certain sites it may be more worthwhile to work with a great host or developer who can set up your server in a way to maximize the site’s performance.

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