Improving Our Backend Performance by 15%

At WP Engine, we are relentlessly focused on being the best platform for building and operating high-performing digital experiences on WordPress.

To fulfill this focus, it’s important to remain the leader when it comes to WordPress performance at scale, and to provide customers with a platform that helps their sites run faster, more securely, and with the reliability to grow.  

We approach performance as a product that’s never finished. Performance is something we’re constantly working to improve. Most recently, we made a number of performance improvements to our platform to provide all of our customers—from shared to dedicated plans—with faster response times across their sites.

Check out the chart below to see the results:

Examples of where these improvements would be felt the most are in the WordPress administrative and content-editing screens, and on sites where pages are often uncachable, such as eCommerce and membership sites. 

We achieved these improvements through several optimizations, including:

• Using statistical data, available to us because of our large scale, and aggregating data across more than 500,000 WordPress installations, we tuned our PHP opcode caching parameters better than the typical “best practices” values.
• Increased the speed of both reading and writing to the WordPress Object and Transient Cache by tuning low-level protocols.
• Tuning our PHP v7.3 docker container to eke out more speed.

While these specific improvements were aimed at furthering the unrivaled speed of WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform (DXP), we also continue to make enhancements to our platform that touch on other areas, including developer tools and intelligence, to help companies of all sizes win online with WordPress. 

Stay tuned for additional updates as we continue to work on our platform in-house, and leverage partnerships with world-class infrastructure providers like Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services to provide you with the best foundation for building the fastest WordPress digital experiences on the planet.