WPHostingBenchmarks.com (part of reviewsignal.com) is an undisputed authority in the world of WordPress performance testing. Kevin Ohashi, the owner of the platform, has meticulously crafted a benchmark process that has gained widespread recognition across the industry. The test includes the following major components:

• Uncached performance test: Simulates real users logging in and browsing the site.
• Caching performance: Estimates the performance of the caching mechanisms on the server by repeatedly requesting the same page.
• Uptime monitoring: Site uptime is monitored with three separate tools for a few months.
• Server Benchmark: Uses a specially written benchmark plugin to estimate the raw MySQL and PHP server performance.

Despite our typical reservations about review sites, which often prioritize affiliate income over objectivity, Kevin's unwavering commitment to transparent methodology convinced us to participate in these tests for the third consecutive year.

We are proud to say that we have now earned two consecutive Top Tier awards.

ICDSoft had the fastest wp-login, Page and Login speed on the Load Storm test. It also had the third fastest p95. The Static test went smoothly. Uptime was 100% and 99.9924%. It's great to see ICDSoft maintain consistency and earn back to back Top Tier awards.

https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/company/icdsoft/

Every ICDSoft customer gets the same performance

One of the distinguishing factors of the WPHostingBenchmarks.com tests is that hosting accounts are tested as delivered, with the default configuration every ICDSoft customer gets. This makes the test very relevant for every user, as they don’t need to apply special performance optimizations that may not be compatible with their website. Everyone gets the same top-tier performance. 

So what are the technologies that enable this? We will quickly go over the tech stack we use at ICDSoft. 

High performance web server

We use the Apache web server, which has proven itself over the years as a reliable and performant web server. There have been multiple new and trendy web servers that have taken up from the market share of Apache, due to their better out-of-the-box performance. However, we have found that Apache can and does perform on-par with dedicated high performance servers when configured properly. We are proud to say that after the performance tuning performed by our system architects, our Apache installations perform on-par with or better than some acclaimed performance-focused web servers (like NGINX for example). 

Effective and fast PHP execution

A large part of the sites hosted on our servers are PHP applications – WordPress, Drupal, OpenCart, Magento, etc. We support multiple PHP versions in order to maintain compatibility – from the now ancient PHP 5.3, to the most current PHP 8.2. 

Additionally, we have two different PHP execution methods available – CGI (via suEXEC), and FPM combined OPcache. While CGI is a relatively slower method of running PHP, it provides backwards-compatibility with many older or custom applications. 

PHP-FPM with OPcache is a much faster way to execute PHP applications and is the default one on our servers – FPM assigns a worker process for each website and loads the PHP interpreter in the server RAM, while OPcache keeps pre-compiled script bytecode in the server memory. Thus, instead of parsing scripts on each request, the PHP interpreter loads them directly from the memory, which results in much faster script execution.

Server-side caching

Earlier we mentioned NGINX as an example for a fast web server. But it also has other useful implementations. Here at ICDSoft, we use NGINX as a reverse proxy for caching. All web hosting accounts we offer can take advantage of our server-side caching feature, and it does not cost anything extra.

Naturally, having your WordPress pages cached by the server adds another layer of performance optimization. So, using server-side cache certainly helped us get top results in the WordPress benchmarks. Users can enable server-side caching with a click of a button via the WordPress Manager in the hosting Control Panel.

WordPress Manager 

Our WordPress Manager, available to all ICDSoft customers without extra charge, gives direct access to many additional performance and security improvements. 

The interface shows at a glance whether the best technology stack is implemented on the site. Here are some of the controls available:

The toolkit also gives you an overview of the health of your WordPress site and includes a WordPress profiler that can help you find performance bottlenecks. 

Looking forward

Our journey doesn't stop here. We have been on the market for over 20 years, constantly enhancing our services, and we plan ahead for the next 20. We take great pride in the consecutive recognition as one of the best in this test, but our goal is to continually evolve, while maintaining compatibility and supporting all our clients.

We have some exciting new WordPress tools on the horizon, so be sure to visit our blog regularly for updates on them.

In the meantime, we can recommend that you go over to https://wphostingbenchmarks.com/benchmark/2023-25-wordpress/ and check the results yourself.