Wordpress with Divi on Siteground VS Ghost in Docker on VPS: Which is Faster?

I have a need for speed…

My self-hosted journey has been very informative in many ways and while along that journey I stumbled across Ghost. It’s open source and free to self-host, so I figured I would give it a shot. According to ghost.org:

Ghost is a powerful app for new-media creators to publish, share, and grow a business around their content. It comes with modern tools to build a website, publish content, send newsletters & offer paid subscriptions to members.

Ghost is very minimal and fast. But without ghost development experience, not very versatile and I would be pretty much limited to mark-up and some basic content cards along with a self-hosted comment system. That’s ok, I have one blog-based site that seemed like a good fit and that was the irrelevant https://bringbackgreatness.com site. I exported posts with a ghost export wp plugin and loaded them into the BBG ghost site. I cleaned them up and added some formatting as well as optimized webp images and was up and running in a couple of hours. I now had a slightly faster but less attractive website but fortunately, it was still irrelevant so it didn’t matter.

Ghost seemed fast but was it significantly faster? Fast enough to warrant the limited functionality?

The Test

I decided to recreate some of the blog sections of my main website, troubleshootme.com. I first created a ghost site and reverse proxied it to https://bcs.apps.troubleshootme.com. I added basic elements and soon had articles I could compare to my Siteground-hosted site. My Siteground hosting is shared but it does utilize mem-caching and the Divi theme is now much faster and essentially generates and serves optimized static pages. I will compare the home pages of each site as well as an article.