WordPress Benchmarks

Individuals, publishers, businesses, and agencies, from simple blogs to large content driven websites.

A blog or content website.

• The top 20% of WordPress sites perform on par with custom-built sites; the bottom 20% are buried under plugin bloat. The spread is wider than on any other platform.
• We see higher trust signal density on WordPress sites than anywhere else -- testimonials, review counts, certifications, and guarantees appear more consistently than on builder platforms.
• Schema adoption is high, but it's almost always auto-generated by Yoast or Rank Math without human review. We regularly flag schema that technically validates but describes the wrong entity type.

• Third-party scripts from plugins that were uninstalled but not properly cleaned up. The scripts keep loading; the tool is gone.
• Unoptimized images -- WordPress added WebP output in 5.8, but many sites still upload large PNGs that the site serves as-is.
• Canonical conflicts when multiple SEO plugins are active simultaneously. Two plugins, two canonical tags, one confused crawler.

• WordPress sites show the widest performance spread of any platform we benchmark. The gap between the top-performing quartile and the bottom is larger than on any other CMS -- plugin discipline is the separator.
• The most common third-party tool combination we see on WordPress sites: Google Analytics + a caching plugin + an SEO plugin. That trio appears on a majority of WordPress sites in our corpus.