Testing Wordfence Time Overhead

  • Resolved mountainguy2

    (@mountainguy2)


    7 years, 5 months ago

    I’ve got a fresh new website with a stripped down theme that’s at this time optimized for speedy browser load, thought I’d run some tests using load times in GTmetrix (average of three tests):

    With Wordfence: 1.36 seconds total site load, 463.3ms to load initial GET.

    No Wordfence: 1.30 seconds total site load, 393.3ms for first GET.

    (I don’t think we’ll lose any readers due to 6 hundredths of a second slower site loading.)

    So, if my math is correct, site experiences 4.62% increase in total load time with Wordfence activated, and… 17.80% increase in time to load first GET

    I’d imagine those percentages would look even better on a site with a lot of other stuff going on, as the Wordfence portion of overall load would be smaller. In other words, as Wordfence alludes to here and there, the speed overhead of Wordfence is often (if not always) worth the security protection.

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  • Hi @mountainguy2,

    Thanks for sharing this, sounds good!

    I’d like to add that it’s going to differ a little in each individual case depending on various resources related components; including:

    • Processing speed of PHP
    • Speed of connection to the database
    • File writing speed

    We recommend using PHP 7 for best performance.

    Also note that the only element we load on the front end is the JavaScript detecting if a visitor is a human or bot.

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