This is a series of articles explaining how to speed up WordPress, the use of which is growing rapidly for CMS-based business sites and media sites. In part 1, I will explore why speed is important, and explain the basic components that comprise page load time and requests per second. --Kengyu Nakamura, Prime Strategy Co., Ltd.

Why the need for speed?

WordPress is the most-used content management system (CMS) software in the world. According to W3Techs, it composes 24% of all websites on the net, and a 60% share in CMS-based sites.

WordPress has many merits, including development productivity, web standard source code, and a management interface that excels in design and user-friendliness. Thanks to these features, its usage is rapidly increasing for CMS-based business sites and media sites.

On the other hand, because of its dynamic nature as a CMS software created with PHP and MySQL, WordPress lacks in speed compared to purely HTML counterparts.

Moreover, in recent years, the trend for CPU development is to have multiple cores in the 4GHz range. Since WordPress uses single process sequential execution, it is difficult to improve its performance in an environment centrally based on hardware processing speed.

In these circumstances, there is a growing need to speed up WordPress itself, whether for user experience or SEO, or simply to increase pages views by decreasing site loading times.