Glossary Terms

site performance

Site performance is the overall measure of how well a site runs across every technical dimension: load speed, server response, uptime, database efficiency, caching, error rates, and Core Web Vitals. It's broader than site speed alone, because a site can load quickly and still perform badly if it throws frequent server errors, times out under load, or fails form submissions. Real monitoring watches both the front end (LCP, INP, CLS) and the back end (PHP errors, query times, memory, cache hit rate). On WordPress it tends to be a compounding problem: each added plugin runs more queries and code on every page, so performance slips gradually as a site gathers features without matching optimization.