WordPress Hosting Benchmark Methodology

At Hostingstep, we buy our hosting accounts, deploy a test site, and measure their performance. We have created a page listing all our invoices for your reference.

All the test sites come with a standard test bench setup with the following configurations:

• Twenty Twenty-Four WordPress theme
• Akismet, Contact Form 7, Rank Math WordPress plugins
• PHP 8.1
• Server-side caching on all sites. The WP Fastest Cache plugin is installed to enable caching if not available.

We strive to improve the benchmarks every few months. We will notify you of any changes on our Changelog page.

Test 1: TTFB

TTFB is one of the key metrics used to measure the performance of any hosting provider. According to Google, a good TTFB value should be less than 800 ms (0.8 seconds). However, a faster TTFB (100 ms—500 ms) is ideally good for a faster user experience.

We use the Pingdom Synthetic monitoring tool to measure the TTFB from 20 North American regions. The tool is set to measure the TTFB every 60 seconds once, so 1440 tests are done in a day to measure the average TTFB. Likewise, 44640 tests are done monthly, and 535680 tests are done in a year to calculate the monthly and yearly average TTFB score.

View sample report

Test 2: Uptime

Uptime is another crucial metric for evaluating a hosting provider. Using the fastest hosting provider, which comes with poor uptime, is meaningless.

Our uptime test is done through the same Pingdom Sytenthic Monitoring tool from the same regions every 60 seconds once.

View same report

Test 3: Load Test

We use loader.io to run load tests on our sites. We send 500 constant client loads (concurrent visitors) to the site, and the average response time is calculated. We also list the maximum and minimum response times and timeout errors (if recorded).

View sample report

Test 4: WPBenchmark

WPBenchmark WordPress plugin performs a series of hardware tests, including CPU & Memory, network, and database tests to evaluate the hardware performance of the server. We set a standard PHP version across all the test sites to bring accurate hardware reviews of hosting providers.

Test 5: Global TTFB

We use SpeedVitals tools to measure the global TTFB score from 40 international locations in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. This test is done for businesses that receive global visitors.

test 6: Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are measured through the GTmetrix tool. In our custom test format, the URL is tested from Cheyenne, WY, USA, using Google Nexus 6/6P/ Pixel XL/ Pixel 2 XL with an unthrottled connection.

Though there are three major metrics, we evaluate the hosting provider solely based on the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score.

Resources:

WordPress Hosting Benchmarks: Get access to all performance test results with 365 days of data. It is updated yearly once.

Fastest WordPress Hosting: Similar to the above benchmark post, it comes with quarterly performance data.