How Does WordPress’ Performance Compare to Other CMS Options?

I recently read an article by Danny Richman from seotraininglondon.org where he crawled one million websites to find the best CMS platform. It got me thinking about WordPress’ current performance capabilities and the community’s ability and/or willingness to implement the best possible solutions for website performance and SEO.

We have all encountered slow WordPress sites and also a few very fast ones, so I’m not coming to any conclusions here. The performance of your site does depend completely on how you set it up, however, the platform also plays a big part.

Website owners should always strive for better performance to get maximum traffic.

Danny Richman carried out a study to see which platform performed best across a number of sites. The study relies on Ahrefs’ URL rating metric since Google stopped publicly revealing their own PageRank metric.

Not all the data is worth looking into, but from the results we can see that almost 70% of the tested WordPress sites still don’t have valid SSL certificates. Granted, this is not as dire a situation as Wix or Weebly who are at well over 90%, but it’s far off from the Shopify stat of less than 5%. This is something the WordPress community has been striving for, but it seems it hasn’t been enough just yet. Do the hosting providers need to do more to encourage their users to opt for SSL?

Image courtesy of seotraininglondon.org.

WordPress also scored the worst when it come to average page speed (not including images). Although being self-hosted is part of the reason for this, badly coded plugins play a big part too. Education is definitely an important factor here. What can we do to better educate plugin developers and guide them down a path to quality code?

There is no simple solution for performance enhancement when it comes to websites, not even the caching plugins that many in the community seem to regard as the go-to solution when a website is under-performing. We need to come together to educate the community better on how to build better products and websites.

You may not read much into this test, but in my opinion, it does give an indication of where the WordPress community needs to make larger strides. You can read the full article to come to your own conclusions.

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