Rhyker’s Quick Benchmark Test Results of FREE WordPress Caching Plugins

Posted in Cloud Computing, Hosting, VPS, WordPress

Don’t have a lot of time right now to run full blown optimized benchmarks tests. However, as I’m writing this blogpost — not from within my WordPress Backend, but through something else (which I’m pulling together for ‘TTCGS’) — I decided to blog about something useful, which is: the importance of having a caching plugin.

Rhyker2U Quick Benchmark Baseline

Before I give you the benchmark results let’s establish a baseline what I’m testing on.

Relevant WordPress Specifications

Site: rhyker2u.com (you’re on it right now)
WordPress version: v4.8.3
Theme: WooThemes Canvas
Number of plugins installed during benchmarking: 107-110

*) yes that might seem like a lot, but Rhyker2U — next to my personal blog — is a testing / development CMS for other projects. Usually I run an average of ~ 150 plugins per site. Especially when you add ecommerce and/or membership plugins (which I haven’t … yet).

Testing Toolsuite

There are a couple of tools to run benchmarks. However in these quick tests I only use my personal favorite: Pingdom’s Free Toolsuite (no account creation necessary).

Benchmark link: https://tools.pingdom.com
Testing location: Stockholm Sweden

Benchmark Test Results

And here are my quick test results …

Only WP Jetpack (+ Photo CDN)

Plugin link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/jetpack/

Horrible results, and regretfully? This is typical for most websites. The only reason it still is faster than 11% of other tested websites, is due to running a heavily optimized server. Visit My Projects Roadmap to see what I mean.

WP Fastest Cache (Free) + JetPack Photo CDN

Additional Plugin Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fastest-cache/

Better already. Time to do some further and proper tweaking.

+ CloudFlare

… much better already! Strangely enough the page size increased.

+ Content Tweaks

Better loading times, but worses Performance grade. Let’s switch from caching solution.

W3TC + CloudFlare + Photon CDN Benchmarks

Ah, now we are getting somewhere! This type of configuration and finetuning ain’t for the faint hearted though (i.e. Redis Object caching, HTTP/2, nginx.conf parameters). Hence why I offer this service at ComputerNerdinside.com … which is by no means to use this blogpost from a commercial view point.

But … this is ‘all so yesterday’ already as I don’t like the Canvas WP theme either. Thus moving onto a new theme to experiment with Update 08-NOV-2017: Unlocked some features in my Canvas (provided by WooThemes) WP theme I wasn’t aware about existed. Thus keeping it around for a bit longer. To continue …