Live benchmark · Updated 2026-04-24
2026 WordPress Hosting TTFB Benchmark
A machine-readable, weekly-refreshed time-to-first-byte (TTFB) benchmark across 10 major managed WordPress hosts. Curl-based sampling, 5 samples/day per host, median + p90 computed over a rolling 7-day window. Measured from a São Paulo VPS for a realistic "visitor outside North America" view.
Review Signal's WPPerformance benchmarks stopped updating in 2020 and Hostingstep's annual tests don't publish raw data. This is the first public, weekly-refreshed, machine-readable TTFB benchmark for managed WordPress hosts in the 2022+ era. License CC BY 4.0 — cite this dataset freely.
Rolling 7-day TTFB ranking
Window: 2026-04-18 → 2026-04-24. Each host sampled 5 times/day (median taken per day) across the window. Lower is better.
| # | Host | Median TTFB | p90 TTFB | Samples (OK / total) | URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | cloudways | 36 ms | 36 ms | 1 / 1 | www.cloudways.com |
| 2 | pantheon | 36 ms | 36 ms | 1 / 1 | pantheon.io |
| 3 | dreamhost | 39 ms | 39 ms | 1 / 1 | www.dreamhost.com |
| 4 | nexcess | 43 ms | 43 ms | 1 / 1 | www.nexcess.net |
| 5 | pressable | 45 ms | 45 ms | 1 / 1 | pressable.com |
| 6 | bluehost | 48 ms | 48 ms | 1 / 1 | www.bluehost.com |
| 7 | flywheel | 64 ms | 64 ms | 1 / 1 | getflywheel.com |
| 8 | wordpress-com | 83 ms | 83 ms | 1 / 1 | wordpress.com |
| 9 | wp-engine | 225 ms | 225 ms | 1 / 1 | wpengine.com |
| 10 | kinsta | 270 ms | 270 ms | 1 / 1 | kinsta.com |
Methodology
What we measure: TTFB (time-to-first-byte) — the time from a client sending a GET request to receiving the first byte of the HTTP response body. Measured via curl -w '%{time_starttransfer}', following redirects, with a 15-second timeout cap.
Which URL per host: each host's own public marketing/blog site. These run on the host's own infrastructure and are a reasonable proxy for "what a well-tuned customer site CAN look like" — not necessarily "what the average customer experiences." We publish the exact URL tested per host in the dataset so you can audit the choice.
Sampling: 5 samples per URL per day, median of those 5 stored. Rolling 7-day window computes median and 90th-percentile of the daily medians. Failed samples (timeouts, 5xx, DNS) are excluded before median computation; sample-count columns expose OK vs total so you can detect flakiness.
Origin: benchmark runs from a São Paulo VPS. This measures "visitor from South America" experience — a harder case than "visitor from North America" and a more discriminating test between hosts with/without global edge coverage.
What this test does NOT measure: Lighthouse score, LCP, CLS, rendering time, JavaScript execution, TLS handshake (pre-included in TTFB). It does NOT test from multiple geographies simultaneously. It does NOT test a standardized WP-Bench install on each host (that was Review Signal's approach; more rigorous, much more expensive).
Update cadence: daily collection at 06:00 UTC. Rolling 7-day CSV regenerated on every run. Full runner is on GitHub (opening the benchmark pipeline is on the roadmap).
License: CC BY 4.0. Cite as: "2026 WordPress Hosting TTFB Benchmark — 10 Hosts, Weekly Dataset, WordPress Hosting for Agencies, 2026-04-24. Available at https://thebrownbrick.com/2026-wp-hosting-ttfb-benchmark."