are wordpress sites slower than bare html/css sites?

Question

Wordpress has amazing functionality, but I was wondering if all the folders, files, and php would make the loading slower. Given two sites with equal front-end content, would a site that just has the minimum html and css be faster to load and lower bandwidth than a wordpress site?

Other than php functionality, what would be the differences?

Answer 1

The major difference is that WordPress assembles all its pages dynamically from bits and pieces in the database, and that database is almost invariably kept on a different server, so you're always going to have that little bit of additional overhead going out to that second machine.



Still, if you want all that functionality, you're not going to get it with just HTML and CSS; you're going to have to add scripts of some sort, and that's going to cost you some speed, especially if they're hosted offsite. In the long run, it's pretty much a wash.

Answer 2

I agree with Windowphobe, beside php, Wordpress makes many calls to mySQL database server for every page view requested by visitors browser, which makes WP website slightly slower than plain html. This difference dramatically increases with lower quality/resources of your hosting company. If yo have less than 10 pages/posts on your WordPress, you can always convert the site to static html.

On the other hand, experienced PageSpeed optimization evangelists can also tune your WP installation to load as fast as a plain html by utilizing some special caching, minification and optimization techniques...

Answer 3

Using a phone I have found Wordpress to be slower than some other blog sites.