So you’re hosting your own WordPress blog on a Raspberry Pi 2 and want to join the HTTPS everywhere movement to ensure optimal privacy for your visitors. That’s great, but what kind of performance penalty can you expect as CPU intensive tasks are hardly a favorite with the RPi2. Is the extra computational cost of encrypting data and doing handshakes going to significantly slow down your site?

Well, you can probably answer that question yourself as your browser has just loaded this page over a secured TLS connection. Though WordPress can still serve static content generated by my caching plugin, there is no hiding the additional burden of doing handshakes and encryption. On my RPi2, the extra overhead is between 500 – 1000ms depending on latency.