WordPress sites, plugins and all, faster than the PHP stack.
BookPress renders each page faster than a well-tuned WordPress setup.
Early access. For people who run their own server and like to try things. Put it on one site of your own for $1€0.85, and take the site back to WordPress with one command. What early access means →
- Elementor page, Intel server
- 74.0 ms
- WordPress: 97.1 ms
- WooCommerce shop, Intel server
- 69.7 ms
- WordPress: 95.7 ms
- WooCommerce shop, ARM server
- 46.9 ms
- WordPress: 68.6 ms
- Elementor page, pages per second under full load
- 36.1
- WordPress: 26.4
Same site on both. See the comparison
Try a real WordPress site running on BookPress.
- Sign in as
demo/demoand publish a post. - Browse the WooCommerce shop and the Elementor page.
- Read what the demo cannot show you yet.
The demo resets every 30 minutes. Until then, every visitor can see what you type.
- BookPress engine
- version (on the demo)
- Theme
- Kadence 1.5.2
- Plugins
- WooCommerce, Elementor, Yoast SEO, Contact Form 7, Yoast Duplicate Post, Hello Dolly
- Machine
- Google Cloud e2-micro
2 shared vCPU, AMD EPYC, 2.25 GHz
1 GB RAM (969 MB usable)
30 GB disk - Page cache
- none
- Sign in
- demo / demo
- Resets
- every 30 minuteson the hour and the half hour, UTC
The smallest instance Google Cloud sells.
Still WordPress, without the weight.
BookPress replaces PHP-FPM and MySQL with one compiled engine. Your content, your theme and your admin stay as they are.
✓ Your theme renders for real
Templates, template parts, patterns and global styles render from the same theme files WordPress uses.
✓ Your plugins run, checked first
We check each plugin before it runs, so you know which ones work before your site moves. WooCommerce and Elementor run.
✓ Your admin keeps working
Log in at /wp-admin as before. Dashboard, posts, pages,
editor, settings. Your WordPress password works after migration.
✓ Your URLs stay put
Permalinks, pagination, archives and ?p=123 redirects
behave as they do on WordPress.
Check if your site is compatible
Install our free plugin on your WordPress site and run the scan. It reads the plugins and theme you have installed, changes nothing, and tells you which of them run on BookPress.
- Download the plugin.
- In wp-admin, open Plugins, Add New, Upload Plugin. Choose the file and activate it.
- Open Tools, BookPress Readiness and run the scan.
What it checks and how to install it Or answer five questions
BookPress Readiness 1.0.0, 57 KB. WordPress 5.6 or later, PHP 7.2 or later.
The well-tuned WordPress setup we measured against
WordPress ran on PHP-FPM with OPcache and JIT, a Redis object
cache and MariaDB. Both sides served the same site with no page cache, on a
4-vCPU Intel server and a 4-vCPU ARM server (Google Cloud
c2-standard-4 and c4a-standard-4).
BookPress 0.2.40, measured 27 September 2026.
Under full load, the same server serves 35 to 43 pages per second with BookPress and 26 to 28 with WordPress.
Questions people ask first
Is BookPress a WordPress fork?
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.
How fast is “fast”?
WooCommerce and Elementor pages render about 1.3 to 1.5 times faster than a well-tuned WordPress (PHP-FPM, OPcache with JIT, Redis object cache, no page cache on either side). A site with no plugins renders about 220 times faster. With a page cache in front, WordPress serves a repeat visit in under a millisecond.
What about my plugins?
BookPress checks every plugin before it runs and tells you which ones work. A plugin that would fail comes back named, with the file and the line. WooCommerce and Elementor run. Heavy custom PHP is out of scope for now.
How does migration work?
One command in: wp bookpress import --dir=<wp-root>.
One command out: wp bookpress export --dir=<wp-root>.
Each command asks before it writes. Import leaves your WordPress and its
database unmodified, and a site that goes in and back out is
byte-identical. Both commands with their
output →
How do I install and update it?
Run curl -fsSL https://bookpress.io/install.sh | sudo sh
on the server. BookPress then updates itself, and goes back to the
previous version if the site stops answering after an update.
What does it cost?
Per site, worked out from the infrastructure you stop paying for, from $1.00€0.85 per site per month at Starter down to $0.45€0.38 at Agency, and per vCPU above 500 sites. Billed annually. The pricing page has the tiers and how we work the number out.
Run it on your sites
License BookPress by the site and run it on your own servers.