Performance Evaluation of Dynamic and Static WordPress-based Websites

WordPress is a popular website Content Management System (CMS) based on the PHP programming language and MySQL or MariaDB Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). Since PHP is not compiled but interpreted programming language, every time a WordPress-based web page is requested from the server, it needs to load core CMS files and custom theme files, read related content from associated database and generate final HTML output that will be sent to the user's web browser. This significantly prolongs a website's loading time because a user's web browser is normally not able to display any part of web page's interface until the server sends the complete front-end code. In this paper, we have setup a standard WordPress-based website and its static version on a virtual machine. Using the Apache Bench program, we have tested their performances by observing chosen metrics. The experiment results indicate that usage of a static version of a normally dynamic WordPress-based website can have great benefits for both server-side and client-side website operation processes.