, 2 min read

Performance Comparison of Ristorante Panorama Website: WordPress vs. Simplified Saaze

Original post is here eklausmeier.goip.de/blog/2023/09-28-performance-comparison-of-ristorante-panorama-website-wordpress-vs-simplified-saaze.


In the previous post Example Theme for Simplified Saaze: Panorama I demonstrated the transition from a website using WordPress to Simplified Saaze. This very blog also uses Simplified Saaze. This post shows how much better performance-wise this transitions was. The comparison is therefore between:

  1. Original: WordPress version
  2. Modified: Simplified Saaze version of Ristorante Panorama

The original website is hosted by Strato. It uses WordPress and Elementor.

1. Comparison. For the comparison I use the website tools.pingdom.com which provides various metrics to evaluate the performance of a website:

  1. Page size
  2. Number of requests
  3. Load time
  4. Concrete tips to improve performance
  5. Waterfall diagram of requests
  6. Breakdown of content types

All tests in Pingdom were conducted for Europe/Frankfurt.

The results are thus:

Original (WordPress) Modified (Simplified Saaze)

The results for the original website are indeed very bad on every dimension: page size, load time, number of requests. In comparison to the modified version using Simplified Saaze the ratio is roughly:

  1. Page size is more than 10:1
  2. Load time is almost 8:1
  3. Number of requests is 8:1

So Simplified Saaze is better in all dimensions by a large factor. This is particular striking as the Simplified Saaze version is entirely self-hosted, i.e., upload to the internet is 50 MBit/s!

The recommendations for the original website are therefore not overly surprising:

The missing compression is clearly an oversight on the web-server part.

The breakdown of the content type for the original website is:

2. Modified website. The website powered by Simplified Saaze is still very image heavy, but there is no JavaScript, there are no fonts, or megabytes of CSS. The breakdown of the modified site is as below.

Actual loading of the modified site will roughly follow below waterfall diagram. This waterfall diagram shows that the images can all be loaded in parallel, while the actual HTML is one of the prime factors for the overall request time. Also, all images are way smaller, as they all have been converted to WebP format.

3. Competitor. There is another Italian restaurant in town, Ristorante Bella Vista. Pingdom values are as below.

Content type breakdown is:

The good request times can be attributed to:

  1. Jpeg images have been scaled down to make them small
  2. Less than 100 KB of JavaScript
  3. No webfonts

The Bella Vista website is hosted by Hetzner. It uses Weblication CMS, which is also based on PHP like WordPress.