WP Engine Platform Becomes 40% Faster Making it the Unequivocal Performance Leader in WordPress

AUSTIN, Texas – Aug. 12, 2019 – WP Engine, the WordPress Digital Experience Platform (DXP), today announced it has become the first WordPress Digital Experience Platform to adopt Google Cloud Platform’s newest infrastructure, the Compute-Optimized Virtual Machines (VM) (C2). With these enhancements, WP Engine’s platform offers performance that is 40 percent faster than anyone else in WordPress. For the most demanding and compute-intensive websites, only WP Engine can provide the unrivaled speed, security, intelligence, expertise and award-winning global support to help companies of all sizes win online with WordPress.

Leading Performance

WP Engine shares our customers’ desire to push the performance envelope and power the most breathtaking digital experiences in WordPress. Increasingly, success online is determined by how well a site’s infrastructure can repeatedly deliver a high level of performance across a variety of network conditions and devices. A mere one-second delay can result in a seven percent conversion loss and an 11 percent drop in page views, which can translate into millions of lost dollars and potential customers. Performance matters, and with this new infrastructure, WP Engine can offer WordPress sites unrivaled performance and unmatched speed.

“With this announcement we’re unequivocally offering the fastest infrastructure there is in WordPress today,” said Jason Cohen, Founder and Chief Technology Officer for WP Engine. “It’s thanks to our strong partnership with Google that we were able to work closely to integrate our technology with theirs and become the first to market to do so. We are excited to partner with Google Cloud Platform on this achievement and help push the state of the art of what’s possible with WordPress digital experiences for our customers.”

New Innovation, Better Performance

For the past quarter, WP Engine has been hard at work adapting its proprietary WordPress optimization stack to offer compute-optimized VMs by Google. These compute-optimized VMs (C2) offer high per-thread performance and memory speeds that benefit the most compute-intensive workloads. The new instances can power the most demanding and performance-hungry applications such as high-performance computing (HPC), electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, and single-threaded and other compute-intensive applications. 

Continual Performance Improvements at Scale

Platform performance is WP Engine’s highest priority, and the company is constantly tuning the parameters of its Digital Experience Platform to ensure it is optimized for WordPress performance for all its customers. By approaching performance with the mindset that is a product that’s never finished, WP Engine is constantly making performance improvements to provide all its customers—from shared to dedicated plans—with faster response times across their sites.

Recent performance optimizations include:

• Using statistical data, available due to WP Engine’s scale, and aggregating data across more than 500,000 WordPress installations, the company tuned its PHP opcode caching parameters better than the typical “best practices” values
• Increased the speed of both reading and writing to the WordPress Object and Transient Cache by tuning low-level protocols
• Tuning its PHP v7.3 docker container to get even more speed

“Many customers depend on Google Cloud to power their most critical business applications, and to quickly bring new innovations to market,” said Shailesh Shukla, VP of Product Management, Compute and Networking, Google Cloud. “This is why we have been continuously focused on pushing the performance envelope of our infrastructure. With our new Compute Optimized VMs, we’re enabling customers to take advantage of the latest innovations in CPU technology and achieve more than 40% higher performance. We’re thrilled to partner with WP Engine in bringing this performance boost to their customers and offering the fastest WordPress infrastructure in the market.” 

WP Engine GCP Partner

WP Engine is a partner listed on the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace. 

WP Engine Plans

We are making this compute-optimized architecture standard in all WP Engine Premium plans in alignment with Google’s rollout schedule, at no additional cost to our customers. Existing customers will receive more information about their upgrade date directly, while new customers wanting to adopt this technology may consult with a WP Engine sales representative via chat or call 1-877-973-6446. 

To learn more about our new infrastructure, please visit our landing page here.