PHP Vitals, a new WordPress plugin for speed testing your web host

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. After a few days the PHP Vitals leaderboard was already showing results from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australasia. When you visit the WordPress plugin directory, you'll see the PHPVitals is credited to our international sister company, Webslice. That's our team by another name.

Isolating hosting performance makes optimisation easier

It's not news that faster websites are better for SEO, UX, and other important reasons, or that improving WordPress performance can get tricky. When things are running slow it can be hard to tell if you need to deal with a rickety theme, a caching issue, a slow server, or something else. There are so many possible culprits that we started to suspect that, at least some of the time, hosting has been guilty but getting away with it. PHP Vitals brings web hosting into the conversation.

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. 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 Web 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.

Related article: Web Hosting shopping guide: Features, prices, and more

Hosting is complex, and often opaque. That doesn’t always mean that your host is hiding something, though. It just means that you can't always tell how cost-effective a particular package will be. 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, you see a wide range of PHP Vitals grades. We want people to know what they’ll get before they sign up.

An A-grade from PHP Vitals tells you that your hardware is optimised for PHP, that it's genuinely modern (not a 2019 model CPU, for example) and that you are free from other restraints.

So, get ready to find out: are you getting good value from your hosting?