How fast is your web host?
Dozens of PHP speed tests, 1 overall grade: The easy way to compare hosting performance.
The faster your websites run, the better. Better SEO, better UX, better returns on your effort. But in any PHP-based system (including WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and many others) there’s an important performance factor that’s hard for you to see and mostly beyond your control. It’s your web hosting. How fast does PHP run on the infrastructure that your web host provides?
PHP Vitals gives you a simple way to find out.
In a minute or two, PHP Vitals analyses exactly how well your server performs on dozens of different tests of PHP performance. When you run PHP Vitals you’ll see an overall grade, and you can see where your web host belongs on the PHP Vitals leaderboard.
You can’t see your server hardware. You don’t know how many others are sharing your resources. You don’t know if your hosting is rate-limited, over-provisioned, or dependent on ancient CPUs. PHP Vitals lifts the lid on what you’re really getting for your money.
PHP Vitals focuses on base PHP functions. Base categories are:
php_featuresmathstringarraycryptofileserialization
Specific operations that are tested include:
- PHP Class (getter/setter).
- Public properties and methods.
- Simple math operations.
- Complex math operations.
- String concatenations.
- Regular expressions (regex).
- Functions: explode, strpos.
- Operations: Array sorting, set, unset, copy, and others.
- Password hashing.
- MD5 hashing.
- SHA256 hashing.
There are no MySQL or database benchmarks included.
PHP Vitals suite of PHP performance benchmarking tests usually takes only 1-2 minutes to run. The tests give you live performance data.
Each time you run PHP Vitals you’ll see a breakdown of individual test data and an overall grade (A+ to F). Test data is objective, for example the time taken for each test. Grades are based on the overall time taken. The subjective grading scale is likely to change over time (e.g. an A in 2025 is unlikely to still be an A in 2027).
With the option to submit test results to the PHP Vitals leaderboard, you can let developers around the world see a summary of your results, and the hosting provider that it came from. Sharing is optional and no personal data is collected, shared or stored.
PHP Vitals data is presented through a beautiful and responsive admin interface. Run and share tests on demand, and build up a history of performance grades over time.
PHP Vitals is very straightforward. Install the plugin, open "PHP Vitals" from the main menu in your WordPress admin dashboard, and click “Run Benchmark”.
Is PHP Vitals a free plugin?
Yes, it’s 100% free.
Does PHP Vitals collect or report any of my personal data or website data?
No personal data or information about your website content is collected or shared.
Why does PHP performance matter for WordPress?
WordPress is a PHP-based CMS, so WordPress performance (e.g. how fast your website loads for visitors) depends on PHP performance (i.e. how fast your hosting provider or your server runs PHP).
Who created PHP Vitals?
We’re Webslice, a hosting company that loves LAMP stack and PHP development. We also love a fair fight, so we wanted a way to compare hosting providers (including ourselves) based on raw performance rather than who’s got the biggest advertising budget or the cosiest industry relationships.
We have a couple of sister companies with the same owners and team - SiteHost and MyHost.