Every review, comparison and benchmark on WPForge is produced by our own engineering team on infrastructure we control. This page documents exactly how we test — so you can judge our results, reproduce them, or disagree with us openly.
Our test environments
- Shared hosting tier — a budget shared plan, because most readers start there. If a theme/plugin only performs well on premium stacks, we say so.
- Managed WordPress tier — a mainstream managed host with object caching and CDN enabled.
- VPS tier — a self-managed Nginx + PHP-FPM 8.3 + MariaDB stack with Redis object cache, tuned the way we tune client servers.
- Devices — results are measured on real mid-range Android phones and real desktops, not only lab emulations.
Tools we use
PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse for Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP), WebPageTest for waterfall analysis and TTFB percentiles, Query Monitor for database and hook-level profiling, and k6 for lightweight load checks. We publish raw scores with test dates — never “feels fast” claims.
Scoring dimensions
| Dimension | Weight | What we look at |
|---|---|---|
| Performance | 30% | Core Web Vitals, payload size, database queries, render-blocking behavior |
| Features & flexibility | 25% | What you can build without custom code; lock-in tradeoffs |
| Ease of use | 20% | Setup time for a non-developer, documentation quality |
| Support & ecosystem | 15% | Response quality, changelog cadence, third-party compatibility |
| Value | 10% | Price vs. what free alternatives already cover |
Independence
We do not accept paid placements, sponsored rankings, free licenses in exchange for coverage, or affiliate commissions. When a vendor sends us a license, we still buy a normal copy if we test it for a client project. Rankings are ours alone, and we update them when the tools change — see our editorial policy for corrections and update rules.
