PHP Vitals vs WPPerformanceTester

How fast is your web host? Dozens of PHP speed tests, 1 overall grade: The easy way to compare hosting performance. Bringing Transparency to Your Web Host’s PHP Performance The faster your websites run, the better. Better SEO, better UX, better returns on your effort. But in any PHP-based system (including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and many others) there’s an important performance factor that’s hard for you to see and mostly beyond your control. It’s your web hosting. How fast does PHP run on the infrastructure that your web host provides? PHP Vitals gives you a simple way to find out. A Free, Quick and Easy Speed Test In a minute or two, PHP Vitals analyses exactly how well your server performs on dozens of different tests of PHP performance. When you run PHP Vitals you’ll see an overall grade, and you can see where your web host belongs on the PHP Vitals leaderboard. You can’t see your server hardware. You don’t know how many others are sharing your resources. You don’t know if your hosting is rate-limited, over-provisioned, or dependent on ancient CPUs. PHP Vitals lifts the lid on what you’re really getting for your money. What Gets Tested PHP Vitals focuses on base PHP functions. Base categories are: – php_features – math – string – array – crypto – file – serialization Specific operations that are tested include: – PHP Class (getter/setter). – Public properties and methods. – Simple math operations. – Complex math operations. – String concatenations. – Regular expressions (regex). – Functions: explode, strpos. – Operations: Array sorting, set, unset, copy, and others. – Password hashing. – MD5 hashing. – SHA256 hashing. There are no MySQL or database benchmarks included. Features PHP Vitals suite of PHP performance benchmarking tests usually takes only 1-2 minutes to run. The tests give you live performance data. Each time you run PHP Vitals you’ll see a breakdown of individual test data and an overall grade (A+ to F). A visual grade scale shows where you sit on the scale, with a plain-language comparison such as “faster than X% of servers.” Test data is objective, for example the time taken for each test. Grades are based on the overall time taken. The subjective grading scale is likely to change over time (e.g. an A in 2025 is unlikely to still be an A in 2027). Benchmark test names, categories, and iteration counts are fetched from phpvitals.com when you run a test; all test code executes locally on your server. Every completed run is saved to a local benchmark history on your site (last 15 runs), whether or not you share results. Leaderboard sharing is optional: if enabled, completed benchmarks may also be submitted to phpvitals.com so developers can compare hosting performance worldwide. No personal data is collected. After each run, you can copy a detailed php.ini optimization prompt (benchmark results, PHP configuration, and slowest tests) and open ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini in a new tab. Nothing is sent to any AI service automatically—you paste and send only what you choose. Optional hosting type and monthly cost settings help group your results with comparable servers on the leaderboard. PHP Vitals data is presented through a responsive admin interface under Tools → PHP Vitals. Usage on WordPress PHP Vitals is very straightforward. Install the plugin, open Tools → PHP Vitals in your WordPress admin dashboard, and click “Run Benchmark”. External services This plugin connects to PHP Vitals for: Benchmark test metadata (names, categories, iteration counts) from /api/tests — test code runs locally in the plugin Grade thresholds from /api/grades Hosting type/cost labels from /api/options AI advisor prompt template from /api/advisor-prompt (fallback bundled in the plugin if unreachable) Optional leaderboard submission to /api/benchmark when sharing is enabled When leaderboard sharing is enabled, each completed benchmark may submit: Overall run time and grade PHP and WordPress versions Server software and PHP memory limit Hosting type and monthly cost (if configured) Per-test timing output from the run No personal account data or site content is collected. This service is provided by PHP Vitals: Privacy Policy, Terms of Use

WPPerformanceTester was written as a tool to benchmark WordPress in the WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2015) by Review Signal. Current benchmarks are on WPHostingBenchmarks.com. It was designed to test the server’s performance by stressing PHP, MySql and running $wpdb queries. WPPerformanceTester performs the following tests Math – 100,000 math function tests String Manipulation – 100,000 string manipulation tests Loops – 1,000,000 loop iterations Conditionals – 1,000,000 conditional logic checks MySql (connect, select, version, aes_encrypt) – basic mysql functions and 5,000,000 AES_ENCRYPT() iterations \$wpdb – 250 insert, select, update and delete operations through \$wpdb It also allows you to see how your server’s performance stacks up against our industry benchmark. Our industry benchmark is the average of all submitted test results. Notes on Performance Performance can be measured in a lot of ways. WPPerformanceTester was simply one component of a much larger performance benchmark. It tests a single server (or node) that it is running on. So if you’re considering looking at the results from a clustered or distributed setup, it may give you limited insight into how well your whole system performs. WPPerformanceTester is about the raw speed a system has to execute code and perform database operations. Real website performance isn’t always correlated with raw speed. A seemingly slow website could have a very fast WPPerformanceTester result. There are lots of layers (namely caching) in making a WordPress website fast. A good caching layer will almost always outperform computing power. But when the caching layers are equal, raw speed can make a difference. WPPerformanceTester is simply one tool to add to your toolkit in measuring performance. You should have a variety of others to test other facets of performance. Known Issues If the script times out (max_execution_time limit) it will not show any results. You can solve this by increasing the max_execution_time in the php.ini. Some plugins may also cause WPPerformanceTester to run exceptionally slow and make it more likely to hit this limit. One such plugin is VersionPress. You can temporarily disable plugins that might be interfering with it as an alternative way to run it. Note: It’s always best to BACKUP EVERYTHING before running ANY new plugin or making changes to your WordPress install.