OpenStation turns your WordPress admin into a desktop: windows, a dock, screens you can leave open while you work on something else. Last time we measured how fast it starts. This time we went screen by screen, head to head against classic wp-admin, on the same site, the same account, the same sitting.
Every number below was measured on the site you are reading right now, over a real network, on real WordPress.com hosting.
The short version
- Opening a screen: 25% to 54% less time in the browser, on all four screens we tried.
- Going back to a screen you already have open: instant, because nothing reloads. Classic makes you wait 2.4 to 3.7 seconds for the same thing.
- Starting the desktop: about 1.7 seconds slower than a classic Dashboard, once. That one goes to classic
wp-admin, and we will come back to it.
Opening a screen
This is the part you feel all day. The numbers are the time the browser spent, measured as load minus time-to-first-byte (TTFB). Subtracting TTFB takes the hosting out of it: the server does the same work either way, so what is left is the part we are responsible for.
| Screen | OpenStation | Classic wp-admin | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Posts | 1172 ms | 1559 ms | 25% less |
| Media | 823 ms | 1528 ms | 46% less |
| Plugins | 782 ms | 1711 ms | 54% less |
| Post editor | 895 ms | 1960 ms | 54% less |
The heavier the screen, the bigger the gap. The post editor, the heaviest thing in wp-admin, saves the most: about a second, every time you open a post. TTFB stayed level between the two, within 100 ms on every screen, which is what you would expect when the server is doing identical work.
We checked whether the averages were lying
A median can hide a lot, so here is every sample, slowest to fastest. On three of the four screens the two ranges never touch: our slowest run still beat their fastest one.
| Screen | OpenStation | Classic wp-admin | Overlap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Posts | 740 to 1381 ms | 1220 to 2012 ms | slight |
| Media | 606 to 1235 ms | 1363 to 1916 ms | none |
| Plugins | 502 to 1052 ms | 1384 to 1867 ms | none |
| Post editor | 701 to 1243 ms | 1510 to 2293 ms | none |
Posts is the only screen where the two graze each other. Everywhere else there is clean air between them.
The part where we lose
The desktop has to boot before it can show you anything, and classic wp-admin does not. Loading the shell with the Dashboard in a window took 7.2 seconds, against 5.5 for the classic Dashboard. That is about 1.7 seconds more, once, when you arrive.
Then it starts paying you back. Every screen you open gives back roughly 760 ms, so you are ahead by the third one, and each time you return to something already open you save another 2.5 seconds. Three screens and you have broken even. A working morning is not close.
Why it is faster
None of this is a measurement trick, it is just how the two work. Classic wp-admin throws the whole admin away every time you click: the menu, the toolbar, the shared scripts and styles, rebuilt from scratch, every time. OpenStation loads that once and keeps it. A window then fetches a stripped-down admin page that does not build the toolbar or the menu at all, and whose stylesheets were already fetched the first time you opened it.
And going back to an open window is not a page load at all. It is a focus change, so there is nothing to wait for.
How we measured it
- One site, one account, one sitting. The two sides alternated in blocks, so a slow minute on the host hits both of them equally.
- The same metric on both sides. Both report PerformanceNavigationTiming from the document you are actually looking at. For OpenStation that is the window’s own document. No mismatched metrics, no thumb on the scale.
- A real baseline. Classic
wp-adminwas rendered on this same site through a per-request flag, checked on every sample: no desktop, with the admin menu and toolbar exactly where they should be. - Two samples binned. Two classic readings were taken before the load event had fired, so Posts has seven samples on that side instead of nine.
- Warm cache, live host. TTFB wandered between 788 and 1825 ms across the session, which is exactly why we report it separately.
One thing we did not measure: a properly cold cache. Emptying it properly also means clearing the site data, which signs you out, and that was not something we were going to do before every single sample on a live site. It is the rarer case anyway. You pay for a cold cache once per browser, not once per session, so the warm numbers are the ones you actually live with.
Everything above is OpenStation 1.1.4, measured against classic wp-admin on the same site. It is the desktop against the classic admin, not one release against another.
And if you don’t believe me, watch these YouTube videos:
Note: AI was used for the measurement and the first draft, I did the editing. If you want the method and every number we collected, the technical report is here.
