RowSprout adds 10 queries on the front while sitting still. Pro adds none there. Building 200 pages took 6.4 seconds. Redis removes 4 of those 10. Six Action Scheduler lookups stay.
Site Health says page cache is detected but the server response time is still slow. What the check actually measures, and how to find the real cause.
I benchmarked six MariaDB versions (10.6, 10.11, 11.4, 11.8, 12.3 and the 13.0 RC) on identical WordPress 7.1 and WooCommerce installs, two passes each. Only one upgrade changes anything, the famous 40x UPDATE win has a mirror image, and my March write benchmark was measuring the wrong thing.
The active installs count on WordPress.org has no history, is rounded, costs 0.34 KB to fake, and anyone can inflate a plugin they don’t own. I measured it.
I graded 57,948 WordPress plugins. 93% score an A or A-, because most plugins genuinely cost nothing. Here’s why that broke my speed badge.
I benchmarked MariaDB 10.11 vs 11.4 on identical WordPress + WooCommerce environments. The results: 40x faster subquery updates, 8x faster date queries, and 28-32% faster meta queries. Here are the real numbers.
I installed 16 WooCommerce configurator plugins on a clean site and measured the real page weight impact. Some add zero overhead. One adds 860KB of JavaScript to every product page.