MySQL versus MariaDB load times in WordPress

Databases are a crucial part of your website, the database stores your texts, website content and structure, and many other important data such as customer data. With a website, it is therefore very important to find the best solution for this. With the launch of MariaDB already some time ago, it is now also possible to start working with a MariaDB for your next WordPress website. In this blog post, let's take a look at what the speed difference is between the two different databases.

Everyone knows by now that the speed of your website is an important item these days. With a faster load time, your visitors are more likely to be satisfied and it can even make a significant difference in how your website is ranked in search engines like Google. Making your website available quickly also makes a difference in your conversion rates. So with a faster site, you can ensure that your overall website experience goes up. WordPress is known for its ability to be fast, provided you make sure you take necessary steps to keep it that way. Let's take a look at the differences between hosting your WordPress database in MariaDB and MySQL.

What is MariaDB?

MariaDB is considered the spiritual successor to MySQL, where MySQL was bought over by Oracle, and has not been "truly" open source after this. Was MariaDB set up by much of the original team behind MySQL. But with the mission to avoid some of the bugs or limitations. And to offer a true open source experience. MariaDB can therefore be viewed by anyone, and freely used by companies and individuals. MariaDB is therefore built differently from the ground up in a number of key points, and can therefore avoid a number of limitations that MySQL does contain and is difficult to shake off.

We were and still are therefore excited now that we can also offer standard MariaDB hosting databases within our hosting packages, and encourage many people to start using it. Indeed, existing MySQL databases can be seamlessly transferred, and Content Management Systems such as WordPress can be installed here without any other steps. It is only necessary to briefly specify a different host name the rest can just be kept the same. Also, the database can continue to be viewed and edited just like normal online via PHPmyAdmin.

Load times and test scenario

For the test case we used the domain name and website of MijnDemoPartner.nl, we installed a minimum of plug-ins on it. Runs on the standard SSD hosting packages, uses the GeneratePress theme. And it uses PHP version 7.4. And has a standard free SSL certificate on it. Load times are of course always dependent on a lot of factors, as soon as you make Ads and Google Analytics active then you will notice that your load times already jump up. So always keep your own data in mind. And test first before you switch right away.

We do the testing on exactly the same server and situation, the only difference is that we port the database to MySQL and MariaDB. The database itself is otherwise the same.

MariaDB test score:

Finish load time: 1.05 seconds Load: 560 MS

MySQL test score:

Finish Load time: 1.26 seconds Load 740 MS

So there is a difference in the load time between MariaDB and MySQL, not a huge difference, but still a few milliseconds that can make just the difference. Amazon has done quite a few experiments with this recently, and every millisecond can cause a conversion not to happen. Of course, they have entire departments for this to test and optimize. A WordPress website is often managed by only a small team.

Therefore, converting a database from MySQL to MariaDB can be an easy way to shave a few milliseconds off your website for relatively little work. With more optimization work, you can spend much longer for even less result.

You can also do this self-testing without losing or converting everything, simply export your current MySQL database, create a MariaDB and user, import the SQL database into MariaDB, and finally update the data in the wp-config.php file to the new database. After this, your website will run directly from the MariaDB database. And you can start testing your configuration right away. To check the speed directly, you can use the browser tools with F12 to check what the difference is in your website.