WP Engine vs RunCloud Performance Comparison

I recently optimized a client website who is hosted on WP Engine.

I am not a fan of managed hosting providers since they add a lot of restrictions, and I prefer to have the maximum control over.

Although these providers add some general rules for improving your website’s performance, these general rules do not work well for every website.

WP Engine uses aggressive caching techniques, which causes random issues at times.

For instance, I was trying to deactivate a plugin. Everything seemed okay, but after the page refreshed, the plugin was still in active state.

Anyways, I had clone the client website to my high frequency Vultr instance in Chicago, and set it up using RunCloud, NGINX server. WP Engine also uses NGINX under the hood.

I will do a TTFB comparison as that gives a good idea of the cache performance.

Both the live & the optimized websites use WP Rocket.

I have added some custom NGINX rules to improve the cache performance.

I am using SpeedVitals for comparing the performance.

TTFB of my setup from America

Location (US)	TTFB (ms)		Improvement (%)	Improvement (abs)
	RunCloud (my setup)	WP Engine
Las Vegas, US	212 ms	263 ms	21%	51 ms
Iowa, US	109 ms	78 ms	-33%	-31 ms
South Carolina, US	127 ms	263 ms	70%	136 ms
Northern Virginia, US	87 ms	234 ms	92%	147 ms
Oregon, US	264 ms	280 ms	6%	16 ms
Dallas, US	118 ms	177 ms	40%	59 ms
Montreal, Canada	101 ms	260 ms	59%	159 ms
São Paulo, Brazil	544 ms	678 ms	2%	134 ms
Santiago, Chile	498 ms	574 ms	14%	76 ms
Average	228.89ms	311.89 ms	30%	83 ms

Here’s the TTFB for Europe for RunCloud.

Here’s the TTFB for Europe on WP Engine

Average TTFB is 478ms vs 610ms. About 24.26% better TTFB on my setup on RunCloud vs WP Engine.

As it is clearly seen, RunCloud a much faster TTFB vs WP Engine.

If you would like to migrate from WP Engine, or any WordPress performance issues, get in touch.