Tag: 10

A client had recently pointed out to me a post detailing performance differences between the REST API that ships in WordPress Core, and WPGraphQL —

https://www.wpgraphql.com/docs/wpgraphql-vs-wp-rest-api#performance

In it, it asserts that the difference between two similar queries running the REST API and WPGraphQL yields vastly different performance impacts:

Below are screenshots of the same WordPress site asking for 100 posts from the WP REST API and 100 posts from WPGraphQL with the Chrome network tab open.

REST:

• Download size: 335 kb
• Time: 7.91s

WPGraphQL

• Download size: 6.4 kb
• Time: 67 ms

That seemed like an unrealistic difference from an initial glance — the REST API takes over 100x longer to return data than WPGraphQL? I wanted to check and see if I could duplicate the test and find out what accounted for the orders of magnitude difference between the two.

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