Our first WordPress plugin is now in the WordPress plugin directory. Called PHP Vitals, it makes it quick, free, and easy for web developers to see how quickly your web host runs PHP, the technical backbone of WordPress. In an industry not known for its transparency, PHP Vitals puts objective data in the hands of the people who need it.
Our Technical Director, Quintin, introduced PHP Vitals at WordCamp Brisbane on June 15, treating the Australian WordPress community to the world’s first live demonstration of PHP Vitals’ benchmarking tests. After its first few days the PHP Vitals leaderboard is already showing results from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australasia.
Quintin says, “WordPress developers are well aware that performance matters for SEO, UX, and other important reasons. That’s why we’re all familiar with caching, code optimization, and only running trusted themes and plugins. These are all important things to get right, but they are not the full performance story. The idea behind PHP Vitals is to bring web hosting into the conversation, and give developers the power to see and understand how their hosts contribute to overall WordPress speed.”
The plugin only takes a minute or two to run, before returning granular results from dozens of PHP performance tests as well as an overall grade. As Quintin explains, the data has multiple uses.
“Firstly, if a site is running slow then PHP Vitals can tell you really quickly whether there’s an issue at the hosting level. You don’t want to spend hours troubleshooting WordPress if it’s actually your tech stack that’s holding things back. Or you don’t want to be on the phone to hosting support if they’re already doing a great job!
“Then there’s the leaderboard, where every user of PHP Vitals can submit their results. For anyone in the market for WordPress hosting, this is an objective way to compare performance from different hosts before you commit your money to any of them.”
You don’t need to spend long on Google to realise that different hosting comes at different prices. What you can’t see so easily is that every company has its own answer to questions like when to retire older, slower hardware or how many hosting customers are too many for each shared server.
Quintin says, “It comes down to cost-effectiveness. If you’re paying top dollar, you ought to get top speeds. PHP Vitals can assure you that a premium price tag is not sitting on top of outdated hardware, for example. Even at low or mid-price ranges, we’re seeing a wide range of PHP Vitals grades come through to the leaderboard. We want people to know what they’ll get before they sign up.”
By focusing on PHP, rather than broader performance tests, PHP Vitals puts a spotlight squarely on web hosts. “It’s a world that we deeply understand,” Quintin says. “Hosting is complex, and often opaque. That doesn’t always mean that your host is hiding something though. We’re proud to be offering transparency, and giving developers another tool they can use to run WordPress as fast as possible.”
Now that PHP Vitals is launched and live, we're keen to hear from WordPress developers. As well as submitting results to the PHP Vitals leaderboard, you’re invited to submit reviews and ratings, or contact us with suggested additions or improvements. If we can make it easier for WordPress developers to find fast hosting at the right price, then PHP Vitals is doing its job.