Static HTML vs. WordPress: what the numbers actually show

There's a lot of marketing-speak on both sides of the static vs. dynamic debate. "WordPress is flexible." "Static sites are fast." What's actually true, and how big is the difference for a typical small business website?

We took the same website — same content, same design — and published it two ways: as a WordPress site on well-configured managed hosting, and as static HTML served from Amazon CloudFront. Then we measured Core Web Vitals using Google's PageSpeed Insights.

The test setup

The WordPress site was hosted on a reputable managed WordPress host with caching enabled. This is a fair comparison — we didn't use a slow shared hosting account. We used the kind of setup a well-resourced small business would actually run.

The static version was served from AWS CloudFront with gzip compression, HTTP/2, and standard CDN caching headers. No server-side processing of any kind.

What we measured

• Time to First Byte (TTFB) — How long until the browser receives the first byte of the response
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — When the largest visible element has loaded
• Total Blocking Time (TBT) — Total time the main thread was blocked during load
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — How much the layout shifts during load

The results

TTFB on WordPress: 380ms average. TTFB on CloudFront static: 28ms. That's a 13x difference before the browser has even started rendering anything.

LCP on WordPress: 2.4 seconds. LCP on static HTML: 0.9 seconds. Google's threshold for "good" LCP is under 2.5 seconds — WordPress barely passes, static HTML comfortably passes.

TBT was roughly comparable on both since both pages loaded the same JavaScript. CLS was better on static (0.01 vs 0.08) because WordPress themes often inject elements that shift the layout during load.

What this means in practice

A 2.4 second LCP vs a 0.9 second LCP might not sound dramatic, but load time and conversion rate are tightly linked — even 100ms of extra delay measurably cuts conversions. For a site getting 1,000 visitors per month with a 2% conversion rate, that's real revenue left on the table.

More practically: Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. A site that consistently scores in the "Good" range across all metrics will outperform one that barely passes, all else being equal.

The caveat

WordPress can be made faster with significant optimization work: aggressive caching, CDN integration, image optimization, and removing unused plugins. But this requires ongoing maintenance and expertise. Static HTML is fast by default, without optimization.

For a small business owner who just wants a fast website without becoming a server management expert, the architecture matters more than the optimization layer on top of it.