BookPress serves WordPress sites from a compiled native engine instead of the PHP stack. Same themes, same admin, same URLs. Every page renders from scratch in well under a millisecond, with no cache in front of it, and an idle site costs megabytes, not gigabytes.
Front page, keep-alive p50. BookPress is done before the ruler leaves zero, and Optimized WP's 0.55 ms is its best case: a verified warm cache hit.
WordPress is the official Docker image: Apache, mod_php, OPcache, MariaDB, no page cache. Optimized WordPress is that same stack with WP Super Cache installed and switched on. BookPress is BookPress. Every cache hit below is verified before it is timed, by the response header, by WP Super Cache's own marker, by a page-generation timestamp that stops changing between requests, and by the cache file on disk. All latencies are keep-alive p50 from the same client at the same settings, each stack measured with the other two stopped.
Methodology: one machine, identical theme and content,
each stack measured with the other two stopped. WordPress is the official
Docker image: Apache, mod_php, OPcache, MariaDB, no page cache. Optimized
WordPress is that same stack plus WP Super Cache, tuned the way a competent
host would tune it, with the cache hit proven before any sample is taken.
Latencies are keep-alive p50, one connection, 200 requests per run, median of
three runs; the capacity chart is a separate test at 16 concurrent
connections. Every stack compresses, and both figures include it. The machine
is a Google Cloud c2-standard-4, which you can rent and check.
Treat the ratios as the claim rather than the absolute numbers, and subtract
the transport floor in the table to compare the engines directly.
| WordPress | Optimized WordPress | BookPress | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Front page, cache miss (p50) | 37.8 ms | 39.0 ms | 0.16 ms |
| Front page, cache hit (p50) | 38.1 ms | 0.55 ms | 0.18 ms |
| Blog post, cache miss (p50) | 44.2 ms | 45.2 ms | 0.26 ms |
| Blog post, cache hit (p50) | 44.6 ms | 0.56 ms | 0.26 ms |
Search ?s=hello (p50) | 39.6 ms | 40.5 ms | 0.20 ms |
| Transport floor, subtract to compare engines | 0.16 ms | 0.16 ms | 0.06 ms |
| Pages/s, 16 concurrent, front page (4 workers) | 61 | 3,969 | 11,301 |
| Pages/s, 16 concurrent, page the cache can't serve | 61 | 60 | 11,194 |
| Memory, whole stack | ~268 MB | ~199 MB | ~13.9 MB |
| Transfer size, front page (gzip) | 11.6 KB | 11.7 KB | 4.1 KB |
| Front page, gzip negotiated (p50) | 38.7 ms | 1.7 ms | 0.47 ms |
Every WordPress request today spins up a PHP interpreter, loads core, theme, and plugins, and talks to a MySQL server. Then it does it all again for the next visitor. BookPress replaces that machinery with a compiled engine and keeps everything your site actually is: the content, the theme, the admin.
Block themes like Twenty Twenty-Five render natively. Templates, template parts, patterns, and global styles produce the same HTML and CSS WordPress produces, from the same unmodified theme files.
Log in at /wp-admin like always. Dashboard, posts, pages,
editor, settings. Your existing WordPress password verifies as-is after
migration. No resets, no new accounts.
Migration streams your WordPress content straight in. Everything imports losslessly and exports back out just as cleanly. It stays your data, in both directions.
Permalinks, pagination, archives, even ?p=123 redirects
behave exactly like WordPress. Your SEO never notices the engine swap.
BookPress doesn't try to run every WordPress site on day one. It targets the sites that make up the bulk of the web: brochure and business sites, blogs, portfolios, and agency-built sites on a supported stack. WooCommerce and heavy custom PHP aren't supported yet. A free compatibility scan gives you a per-site verdict before anything moves. Clean fit: migrate in one click. Not a fit: nothing changes for you.
No. It's an independent engine that implements WordPress behavior in native code: the theme system, the admin, the URLs. Your content and themes stay portable in both directions.
Measured, not estimated, on a Google Cloud c2-standard-4 you
can rent and check for yourself. Three stacks on one machine: WordPress on
the official Docker image with no page cache, that same stack plus WP Super
Cache proven to be hitting before anything is timed, and BookPress.
Front page, with the cache excluded: 37.8 ms, 39.0 ms, 0.16 ms. Search, which no cache can serve: 39.6 ms, 40.5 ms, 0.20 ms. That is 236× and 198× on this machine. The headline says 100× because that is the figure that has held up across machines: absolute numbers move with the hardware, ratios mostly do not.
Those are the cases that matter, because they are most of what a real site serves: first visits, anything after an edit, search, logged-in sessions. Against WordPress's genuine best case, an anonymous repeat visit landing on a warm cache, the gap is small: 0.55 ms against 0.18 ms, and part of even that is network transport rather than either engine. We are not going to dress that up. A good page cache is fast at the one thing it does, and replaying a stored file is hard to beat. The argument for BookPress is that it needs no cache to be fast at everything else, and that a whole site costs 13.9 MB rather than 268. The benchmark is a single script that boots all three stacks and measures them, so you can reproduce it on your own hardware.
Common functionality (SEO, forms, utility plugins) is being reimplemented natively, and supported stacks are validated plugin by plugin. The free compatibility scan reports exactly which of your plugins are covered before any migration happens. Heavily custom PHP is out of scope initially, and we'll tell you so up front.
You install a temporary plugin on your existing WordPress site. It runs a free compatibility scan, then streams your database, uploads, and theme across. URLs and domains are preserved, and existing passwords keep working. Only sites that pass the scan cleanly are accepted. If yours doesn't, nothing changes for you.
The economics follow from the engineering: an idle site costs almost nothing to keep online, so hosting it can cost almost nothing too. For agencies and hosts, wholesale pricing lands around €1–3 per site per month. More for agencies →
BookPress is in active development, with early access opening for agencies managing portfolios of brochure sites. Tell us about your stack.
hello@bookpress.io