Since ~40% of all websites supposedly still run on WordPress (WP), I thought it might be useful to run it faster. BookPress is about 50% faster than a performance-tuned WP setup with Elementor and WooCommerce.

Every time I used WordPress in the past, I got frustrated how slow it was, even with just a few plugins. So I wrote an light-weight C/C++ core and an embeddable PHP engine to run plugins and themes, with most of the WP API surface covered.

Try the live demo, including wp-admin!

The embeddable PHP runtime that covers most of Zend PHP's features runs 2x slower than Zend, but BookPress is still faster than a performance-tuned WP instance with OPCache, page cache and object caches.

BookPress runs alongside a traditional WP installation on Linux arm64 and x86_64.

Looking forward to what you all think.