Pay attention:
Because the results of what I’m about to share…
Choosing fast hosting solution is absolutely critical to the success of your business site, because if your WordPress website loads slowly you will suffer from-
Not only is site speed a critical factor for your visitors, but it’s also a confirmed Google ranking factor and it’s not often Google confirms an SEO rankings factors definitively.
But what does all of that mean in the real world?
Well you can use this calculator from Google to find out. For me, it meant that I would increase my bottom line by $28,464 if I increased website speed by 1 second-
So you need to make sure you are actually choosing the fastest Wordpress hosting provider which is absolutely critical because if you get it wrong, the consequences for your WordPress site could be far-reaching.
We’ve also seen some pretty bold claims from WP Engine recently stating their new Google C2 Infrastructure is “40 percent faster than anyone else in Wordpress”–
As you can imagine…
That led to some pretty heavy backlash which was doubled down by the founder blocking a number of industry leaders that asked them to provide data to back up their claim.
On top of that:
WP Engine’s article also says…
But that is also very misleading!
Because they don’t consider the $290 per month Scale plan hosting package a “premium” plan and they are VERY shy about sharing pricing for their “40% faster than everyone else” C2 setup-
But, I’ve got some great news for you.
After jumping through many many many hoops, I was able to get a site set up on the new WPEngine C2 platform for $600 per month-
So I am very much looking forward to putting the “40% faster than every Wordpress host” claim to the test because they are 1,100% more expensive than the next cheapest web host in this test.
This is also likely to be the only independent testing you’ll see of WPEngine’s new C2 hosting service because of the high pricing and the many barriers they have in place to get setup.
And just to add to the controversy:
Kinsta recently migrated all their customers to the same C2 Google Cloud Platform that WP Engine are claiming victory over-
But the key difference between the web hosting companies Kinsta & WP Engine…
Is that with Kinsta, the new C2 platform is default on all of their web hosting account plans which start from $30 per month versus the $600 per month cost and special setup requirements of WPEngine.
So with all this controversy over who actually are the fastest WordPress hosts…
…I decided to put 12 fast WordPress hosting providers to the test.
What Will I Learn?
I decided to test the 12 fastest WordPress hosting providers by comparing how they performed in terms of load speed, support and price.
The last time I tried to find the best managed Wordpress host, I only compared 7 hosts.
So this time I have increased this to 12 of the fastest WP host to find great hosting solutions.
Here’s a quick introduction to each host-
Kinsta is a premium WordPress hosting provider who is obsessed with fast speeds and top security. It uses a Google Cloud platform across its 24 data centres meaning a speedy and secure transfer of data.
Some of Kinsta’s best features are:
And they have a super user-friendly dashboard with access to 24-hour support from real WordPress experts at just the click of a button.
Kinsta has plenty of options when it comes to choosing a plan and they all come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The Starter Plan is priced at $30 per month and provides-
Other plans include Pro which is $60 per month, Business which has 4 tiers you can choose from starting at $100 per month and Enterprise which has 4 tiers you can choose from starting at $600 per month.
Siteground offers multiple types of hosting and their Managed WordPress Hosting services are welcomed by those on a smaller budget and they are recommended by some big names such as WordPress itself and Yoast.
Siteground offers:
And they also commit to a 100% renewable energy match with their data centre (Google Cloud).
They often have promotions running so you may see even lower prices available and all plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
The current Siteground Managed WordPress plans are-
Keep an eye on the pricing and try and lock the prices in for a longer period of time if you can afford the upfront payment.
WP Engine is a well-known host that caters specifically to WordPress sites. They boast of being the best platform for hosting a WordPress website and do offer a pretty good sales pitch.
With WP Engine plans you get-
We will see if the hype is real…
WP Engine has 3 set plans you can choose from which can be paid monthly or yearly. You can usually get a better deal if you go with the yearly option.
Custom plans are for those sites that are expected to receive more than 400,000 monthly visits and you need to discuss with a sales specialist to get a quote.
WPX Hosting offers a fantastic managed WordPress hosting service that has been proven to provide speedy load times backed up by an excellent level of support.
Their plans include:
And WPX Hosting CoFounder Terry Kyle is committed to using the success of this hosting provider to care for and improve the lives of hundreds of cats and dogs every day.
So as well as investing in a great service you are also contributing to the running of Every Dog Matters.
WPX Hosting plans are pretty competitively priced and all offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you aren’t happy.
The monthly price gets reduced if you purchase the yearly subscription.
A2 Hosting offers a ton of different budget-friendly hosting services. Their managed WordPress hosting packages include some pretty cool features that keep up with the other premium hosting services on the market.
Such as:
And they are available 24/7 to assist with any questions or problems you may have.
A2 Hosting provide a lot of hosting services but as we are focusing on WordPress hosting then I will run through their managed WordPress hosting plans-
And all plans use A2 Hostings Turbo servers, which boast of being up to 20x faster.
They also have a pretty impressive ANYTIME money-back guarantee.
Bluehost is a well-known hosting provider that was founded by Matt Heaton in 2003. They offer professional managed WordPress hosting services that are designed to help build and grow their client’s websites.
All Bluehost WP Pro plans include-
And all this is backed up by 24/7 customer support meaning you can pick up the phone or send a quick message anytime day or night and have no worries about needing help fast from a different time zone.
Bluehost offers 3 WP Pro managed WordPress hosting plans-
Each plan offers a different level of some pretty impressive features, there are no traffic limits on these plans and they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Want to see how Bluehost stand up against its competitor SiteGround? Check out my post SiteGround vs Bluehost.
Cloudways is a cloud-based hosting platform that teams up with a selected provider to offer a good balance between functionality and affordability.
Cloudways plans offer-
…as well as a bunch of other helpful features.
They have been featured on some pretty notable websites like Forbes and PC Magazine.
Cloudways offers hosting with different infrastructure providers, for this article we have tested using Digital Ocean so I will run through those available pricing options-
And they have a ‘No Lock In’ policy meaning you don’t get tied up in contracts.
Dreamhost is an award-winning hosting platform that was originally founded in 1996.
They have been widely known as leaders in the web hosting industry so it will be interesting to test them against some of the newer kids on the block.
Dreamhost managed WordPress hosting plans include-
And the two higher-tier plans include Jetpack Professional too.
Dreamhost has a good range of pricing on its plans meaning they can appeal to all budgets.
And all the plans have unmetered bandwidth and like most of the other hosts, they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
GoDaddy is a well-known domain registrar but they are also a pretty popular web host too and has customers all across the globe.
Their WordPress hosting plans include-
The higher-tier plans also offer regular malware scans and removal as well as a free SSL certificate.
Here are the current pricing plans but ensure to double-check the renewal prices before you purchase-
Not a bad set of plans to choose from.
GreenGeeks is a hosting platform who pride themselves on providing an eco-friendly but fast and secure hosting service.
Their plans boast-
And if the name wasn’t a giveaway… GreenGeeks focuses on giving back to the environment by having a 300% green energy commitment on all plans.
GreenGeeks currently have a special price on plans so be sure to check on their website for any pricing updates-
And they offer the standard 30-day money-back guarantee so you can try them out with peace of mind.
LiquidWeb is another old-timer in the web hosting industry, they were first founded in 1997 and they pride themselves on their 99.999% uptime.
Nexcess has joined LiquidWeb and now take care of their managed WordPress hosting plans through their high-performance cloud which includes features like-
And they back all this up with 24 hour support.
LiquidWeb offers a wide range of plans, here’s a quick look-
They are so confident in their services that they offer 14 days free hosting without even asking for a credit card!
Pantheon is a web hosting company that advertises lightning-fast speeds through a combination of hosting and its WebOps platform.
Their plans include some great features like-
Can they live up to their claims in the tests I am going to put them through! We will see shortly.
Pantheon offers two fixed price plans-
And a third plan called ‘Elite’ which you can chat through with a web expert before getting a quote.
Each WP host was tested “out of the box” with the recommended setup to recreate the customer hosting experience and hosting needs as closely as possible.
| HOST | PLAN | MONTHLY RENEWAL PRICE | WEBSITE SLOTS | CDN INCLUDED? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A2 Hosting | 1-Site Turbo | $32.59 | 1 | No |
| Bluehost | WP Pro Build | $27.95 | Unlimited*** | No |
| Cloudways*** | Digital Ocean | $22 | Unlimited*** | No |
| Dreamhost | DreamPress Plus | $29.95 | 1 | No |
| GoDaddy | Managed WordPress Basic | $14.99 | 1 | Sucuri |
| GreenGeeks | Ecosite Premium | $24.95 | Unlimited*** | No |
| Kinsta | Starter (C2) | $30 | 1 | KeyCDN |
| Liquid Web | Personal | $29 | 1 | No |
| Pantheon | Basic | $50 | 5 | Fastly |
| SiteGround** | StartUp | $11.95 | 1 | Cloudflare Free |
| WP Engine* | Startup | $35 | 1 | Stackpath |
| WP Engine C2* | New C2 Platform | $600 | 1 | Stackpath |
| WPX Hosting | Business | $24.99 | 5 | WPX Cloud |
*The WP Engine benchmarks were first taken on their startup hosting plans. Then we upgraded the hosting packages and they migrated the domain to the new C2 architecture (with a different IP) where we took a second set of benchmarks.
** SiteGround is only being tested here with the recommended free Cloudflare CDN (content delivery network) enabled.
*** Cloudways is more self-managed with System Admin Panel knowledge required.
**** Unlimited managed WordPress hosting is rarely unlimited and managed WordPress hosting companies TOS make sure it very clear that any account exceeding normal usage will be billed, restricted or disabled.
I built a test blog to the following specifications-
And then cloned that across each of the 12 Wordpress hosts so that every web host had an identical install of Wordpress.
Then I ran 5 distinct tests across these sites-
So without further ado…
I ran each of the test blogs through GTMetrix from each of the 7 global locations.
To make sure all caches were primed, I ran 3 passes of GTMetrix for each test site, for each server location (there’s data center locations for all your target audience) and averaged out the results-
Unlike last year, the results of this were incredibly close this time around.
Both WPX Hosting (0.8 seconds) and Pantheon (0.81 seconds) are literally neck and neck in 1st and 2nd place.
Interestingly Kinsta in 3rd place need double the time (1.60 seconds) than 1st and 2nd place did to load the site.
But shockingly the new WP Engine C2 environment delivered similar results to the basic hosting plan despite costing hundreds of dollars more per month.
The GTMetrix Test Winner:
It’s hard to declare either WordPress hosting company a winner here but I think WPX Hosting wins purely because they cost $24.99 per month whereas Pantheon costs $50 per month.
Next, I wanted to run a similar site speed experment but this time using Pingdom tools.
I followed the same order process by running 3 passes for each test site, for each server location (there’s a ton of data centers) and then took an average of the results that look like this-
Interestingly the top 4 hosts are unchanged in this test and came out in exactly the same order as test #1 above.
Both WPXHosting (357ms) and Pantheon (359ms) were neck and neck yet again with 3rd place Kinsta (835ms) trailing behind.
The Pingdom Test Winner:
So just like in test #1 we can easily declare that both WPX Hosting and Pantheon are more than twice as fast as the rest of the managed WordPress hosting providers.
Isolated site speed testing is one thing, but it doesn’t tell you how hosts perform under stress.
So I wanted to know how each web host would handle 500 simultaneous visitors using Load Impact.
The problem with this test is WordPress web hosting providers often block it because they think it’s a DDOS attack and because all of my testing was done anonymously across each hosting account, I didn’t want to submit a live chat support ticket to the system administrator and disable the protection.
So I created a new page on each of the sites with 1,000 words per piece-
Then I setup Load Impact to test each page with 500 simultaneous visitors.
These are the results for those hosts that didn’t automatically block the test-
Pantheon (4ms), WP Engine (17ms), WP Engine C2 (23ms), Kinsta (24ms) and WPX hosting (26ms) were the managed hosting providers that performed exceptionally well.
With that said, each of the hosts performed well under load and each of them demonstrated that they can comfortably handle larger simultaneous high traffic sites.
But Pantheon really stole the show here!
And while I would have loved to be able to get the data on the hosts where the tests failed, I couldn’t have done that without tipping off the support team members that they were being tested.
The Load Impact Test Winner:
Hats off to the Pantheon team for achieving the kind of stability under load, that is a serious achievement. However WP Engine, Kinsta and WPX Hosting all held their own.
All of the tests so far have been served up from cached results but this test is designed to test the website performance of the actual server itself for each WordPress site.
To do that I am going to use the Wordpress Performance Tester plugin from Kevin Ohashi who invites WordPress hosting companies to pay to take part in his annual testing.
This stress tests server resources by doing a number of things-
Once it has finished crunching all of the data, it outputs 2 distinct metrics to measure performance-
I let the server monitoring plugin loose on each of the test blogs, this is how it went down-
What I love about this test is that a lot of hosts hide behind heavy web design caching because there’s a big difference between a server rendering a cached page and actually having to think about things.
As you can see Pantheon (3.82 seconds) really fell behind the pack here despite being top competitors in all of the previous tests.
And for the first time, we can see a clear difference in performance between WP Engines offerings with the new C2 platform showing a significant increase in performance.
WPX Hosting (0.696 seconds), Green Geeks (0.81 seconds) and Siteground (0.965) all put in sub 1-second high performance respectfully.
The WordPress Performance Tester Winner:
It looks like Kinsta (0.538 seconds) have made significant improvements this year with their new C2 platform offering a high performance of 23% faster execution time and a 31% more queries per second over last years testing.
Finding the fast Wordpress hosting provider is one thing, but unless that is backed by an incredible customer support team you’re going to face problems.
Each of the tested hosts are managed Wordpress hosts and self-proclaimed Wordpress site experts (except CloudWays & Pantheon).
So I wanted to put the speed and quality of support of each WP hosting account to the test by asking them to solve 3 common problems that most people have faced-
I sent the same questions on a support ticket to the customer support of each host to see how they would react and this is what happened-
Although WP Engine wouldn’t offer free site migration, they do offer a free plugin that should help with the process.
But in general, as you can see from the results, the quality of live chat customer service that each managed hosting provider offers really separates the cream from the crop.
The Support Team Winner:
The only host that offer free migrations, free malware cleanup AND took control of the hotlinking problems was WPX Hosting. However they don’t offer phone support and everything is done via 24 7 live chat email & email accounts.
So after the 5 tests, I can compare the most important features you should be looking for when choosing a WordPress host.
We’ll take a look at these key features:
Take a look at this comparison table and scroll across to see all the hosts.
| WP Engine / C2 | WPX Hosting | Kinsta | A2 Hosting | Dreamhost | Cloudways | Siteground | Pantheon | Bluehost | Go Daddy | Liquid Web | Green Geeks | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Price | $35 / $600 | $24.99 | $30 | $32.59 | $29.95 | $22 | $11.95 | $50 | $27.95 | $14.99 | $29 | $24.95 |
| Sites Allowed | 1 / 1 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | unlimited | 1 | 5 | unlimited | 1 | 1 | unlimited |
| Speed | Slow | Fast | Fast | Slow | Slow | Normal | Slow | Fast | Normal | Fast | Normal | Slow |
| Support | Poor | Excellent | Excellent | Average | Average | Poor | Average | Poor | Average | Poor | Poor | Average |
| **Migrations | Plugin | Free | Free | Free/Paid | Paid | Free/Paid | Paid | Unclear | Paid | Paid | Free | Free/Paid |
| Backups | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily | Free Daily |
| SSL Certificate | Free SSL | Free SSL | Free SSL | Free SSL | Free SSL | Free SSL | Free SSL | Free SSL | Free SSL | Yes | Free SSL | Yes |
| Staging Area | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Email Hosting | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | Paid | No | Yes |
| Trust Pilot Rating | 3 Stars | 5 Stars | 5 Stars | 4 Stars | 4.5 Stars | 4.5 Stars | 5 Stars | No reviews | 1.5 Stars | 4.5 Stars | 4 Stars | 4.5 Stars |
**Migrations: Free/Paid = First site free and any after paid.
Despite the results of the managed WordPress hosting tests, no host is perfect and each of them has their own advantages and disadvantages.
And what is the right choice of web hosting services for me, might not be the right choice of WordPress hosting services for you.
So here is what I don’t like about each of the featured WordPress hosting providers-
There is no such thing as perfect right?
WPX Hosting (Cost: $24.99 per month) offers the fastest Wordpress hosting based on my testing. They came out on top with a high performance for both of my loading speed tests as well as a solid performance in the Wordpress performance benchmarker testing. Read my full WPX Hosting review to learn more about them.
Pantheon (Cost: $50 per month) was hot on their heels during both of the WordPress speed tests, dominated the load impact testing but seriously fell short in the Wordpress site performance benchmark and support tests.
Kinsta (Cost: $30 per month) also put in a solid performance top to bottom including speed, performance, load and customer support. Take a look at my detailed Kinsta review to learn about my favourite feature.
(If you’re looking to switch hosting to improve not only your speed but also your core web vitals, I highly recommend this one).
So if I had to rank them-
Why?
Because despite Pantheon delivering lighting fast load times, they really fell short in the support area and that is really what separates the cream from the crop and their hosting plans price per month is one of the highest.
Both WPX Hosting and Kinsta over-deliver in this area and have a great reputation for taking control of problems (whilst maintaining a 99.9% uptime guarantee) and solving them…
…while both being best value with lots of disk space and nearly 50% cheaper in price than Pantheon with a 30 day money back guarantee.
And as for WP Engine’s claim that they are 40% faster than everyone else in Wordpress, well they are barely 20% faster than themselves and both their $30 monthly hosting plan and new C2 $600 monthly hosting plan failed to perform against cheaper hosts.
And don’t forget, a faster WordPress website will result in-
And last, but most importantly-
I came across an interesting thread the other day in a Facebook group-
So that double confirms it!
WPXHosting is the best Wordpress hosting!
Which leads me to an important question…
…have you had any good or bad experiences with any of the featured hosts?
Answers in the comments please along with your name and email address! In the meantime, take a look at the website hosting resource site FAQs below.
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I’ve been using WPX for a few months and am fairly happy with the performance and customer support. I wish I had more control over my account and the features, especially when it comes to changing settings and customizing something on the backend. It’s a great hosting company, and I’d say it’s suitable for those who don’t want to mess with backend stuff at all.Anyway, thanks for putting this extensive comparison post together, Matt! Learned so much about other web hosts.Cheers,Kim
Thanks for sharing your experience with us, Kim! Cheers!
Great article. In the process of looking for viable alternatives to InMotion. Thanks for taking the time to research all of this. Incredibly helpful.
No problem! Happy to share my experiments/tests with my readers!
I can tell you that WPX hosting are absolute rubbish. First of all they don’t tell you a lot of things of what they don’t allow that normal hosts do like access to the db with scripts. Their support I found it to be very bad a lot of times but better than most, and very arogant. I am surprised you recommended them and I joined them because of your review but to be honest with you this one disappointed me the most. I have 2 accounts with them and both had issues, which they never resolve, they don’t apologise and I have seen their CEO responses on trustpilot to be very arogant. Keep up the good work
Hey Dan! I’m sorry to hear that you had a bad experience with them. I had a lot of positive feedback about them, plus, WPX hosting performed very well on my tests (this is why I recommend it).
Hi Matthew,I like your WP hosting tests! However could you also do a test for a WooCommerce, LMS or Community or Membership Wordpress website. So a WP website type that is more demanding and have a lot of uncachable content.Now the speed part of your Hosting tests are mainly a “who’s best at caching static content” contest…And could you please include the following WP Hosting companies / plans next time?1. Cloudways with Vultr2. Cloudways with Vultr High Frequency (HF)3. Gridpane with Vultr HF 4. Closte5. Kinsta Business6. Kinsta Enterprise 1Keep up the good work!Thanks,Sander
Hey Sander! Thanks for the suggestion- I’ll do my best.
Would be interesting to see a comparison of small hosts that offer a good performance/service and don’t break the bank…underdogs of the market.
Do you have any names to suggest?
WPX is okay at best.Lots of weird stuff like:> staging server setup is clunky. definitely not seamless like Kinsta or WPE> no beta URL for sites not ready to go live. Do they seriously think I’m going to walk my clients through editing their Windows Hosts file? Ummm…. no> no unique URLs for CDN > for CDN to work you have to have two A records setup one for @ and another for www. This creates issue a landing page redirect chain which only adds more delay to load times.Umm
Hey Mark – Thanks for your feedback. In this test, my main objective was to see which host (from the list) was the FASTEST, not the best.So I focused on speed tests and that’s it. But you’re right, there are some features that could be improved!
Hi Terry, I would like to thank you for the quality of your hosting (speed and support are impressive). TEN TIMES faster in WP ADMIN (I am building site so speed in admin is major concern) than my current host for same site. Same site, same size, same optimisation. Do not want to shame them by naming them here but I am not kidding. Unfortunately before the month trial was over with WPX I did have to move back to my old host with great sadness because my site is getting too big (I will need 150-200GB storage when it is finished). Any plans to offer other products? I would move tomorrow. Also thanks to Matthew for his rigorous articles. NK
Thank you for sharing valuable information. please keep sharing more posts.
No problem Sahilesh!
it’s really nice and meaningful. It’s a really cool blog.
Thank you!
best article nice information about wp hosting. thanks for sharimg
Thanks!
Hey Becky – Thank you for your feedback, it’s most appreciated. Hope it would help others to make their decision!
I love this article it’s amazing
Cheers!
They are awesome so far! I peppered the guy on chat with pre-sales questions before signing up. Then, when I had questions after signing up, the same chat system and guy were what I used. I LOVE THAT!They also email you important details all wrapped up nicely (think nameservers, IP address, FTP login, etc) that made it so easy to get the info I needed. And finally, they support a nonprofit to help homeless animals, not trying to just alleviate the problem but to eliminate it entirely! What a wonderful company to work with so far!
Your blog is amazing. Thanks for sharing the hosting information. waiting for more blogs.
No problem! Are you using one of these hosts?
Thanks for taking the time to do the research and write this beast!! I just signed up for WPX to test them out, moving from Siteground.Thanks again!
Nice, Becky! Any first impression of WPX you would like to share with us?
U r recommending WPX and Kisnta. Then why about A2 hosting?
Hey Semayoon – If you would have read the full article, you would have seen how A2 hosting has performed my tests. Overall, A2 hosting is not the fasted hosting provider but it offers other great features! I suggest you read my review dedicated, here: https://searchlogistics.com/blogging/reviews/a2-hosting/ to get more detailed information.
I love this so much information thank you very much
Cheers!
Just a bit of an update for you. Silver lake has sold majority of its stake in GoDaddy last year. So GoDaddy has nothing to with WP Engine. Though I do agree, WPX is any day better than WP Engine.
Interesting – Thanks for the update Aquif
Good analysis. It’s effective. Website speed depends on hosting.
Thanks for such an informative review Matthew. I just finished closing my account with Siteground after a nightmare experience. Doing so much research was only frustrating because everyone thought their own hosting co were the bees knees, which was super confusing for a newbie like me….and I smelt BS. So after a painful several days of learning hosting ropes and doing more research, coming across this article was such a relief. Thanks. Going to try WPX. Already been on customer service chat to ask more questions. Must say they are absolutely not pushy compared to any of the others, nor the blog/affiliates. Cheers!
I am glad that my article helped you out! Hope you’ll have a good experience with WPX – Let us know!
I’m curious as to why Flywheel and SiteDistrict weren’t included here or on the 7 managed hosts test.I will admit, I need to go back and read more of this. But seeing these two missing when you claim these are the 12 fastest, seems like you are going to be wrong before you even start, and is why I didn’t read all of it yet.I could be wrong, but WPX boasted they were the fastest according to you, and linked to this article. I imagine Flywheel would not be the fastest, but would top a number of the ones on this list, but I’d wager that SiteDistrict would be at or very near the top.Otherwise, it does look like you do a fairly comprehensive set of tests to reach your conclusions.
Hey Scott. They weren’t in my radar this time. But I might try them in my next round of tests. I would appreciate you read all the article so you can see in detail how each hosting provider has performed for each test. It’ll help you better understand my point.
Grate posting thanks for sharing Use full information
No problem!
Hi Matthew,I’m gonna bookmark this blog definitely. Amazing comparison.I would also like to bring to your attention a new managed WordPress hosting, WPOven.Could please add that to the list as well, it will be greatly appreciated.Keep up the great work.
Hi Makeala. Sure, I’ll consider it for my next round of testing! Thank you!
it’s a very useful and informative article for beginners I check your articles regularly thanks for sharing with us.
Hey Erik. Thank you for reading and following my blog!
nice post great web
Cheers!
Just curious – why not use a more realistic test site for the speed tests? E.g. use Astra and one of the importable Elementor sites. I think that gives a better picture of how a “real” site might load.
What do you mean by ‘more realistic’? Have you ever done a test like this? What results did you get?
which hosting you are using matthew to host this blog ?
Kinsta! It’s written in the article 😉
Having suffered so many issues with three Wordpress sites (Thrive Themes) on various high-level hosting plans, all with local Australian, and US hosts, I eventually read from the CEO of Thrive Themes his suggestion of WPX. Being on the other side of the planet I was nervous.They have offered fantastic 24/7 report and my issues have virtually gone away. It is one less thing that we have to worry about. Great performance and maintenance too.Plus, as I am not a tech, they never treat me as a fool. Thank you WPX
Thank you for your feedback, Jamie! Glad you have such a good experience with WPX.
Super valuable data on the fastest WordPress hosting. Thanks Woodward!
No worries. Happy to help!
Hey Matt, next year I would nominate adding Pressidium to the list. I’d never heard of them but moved my main blog to them from Siteground on a fellow blogger’s recommendation and their support has been superb. The only gripe I have is they’re fully managed so you don’t have access to your cPanel, but if you message support they literally get things done within 10 minutes. Pretty fast load times too.
Hey Bren. Thanks for your suggestion and feedback.I’ll have a look at it!
Awesome article Matthew! I’ve switched over to WPX because of it.
Hey Dylan! I’m happy if I could help you to make the right decision! 😉
Thanks for all information what you shared here through this article it is really very helpful
Thank you, Ravina! Glad you found this article useful!
I’m sorry, but $30/moth for a managed hosting, for a WordPress site is not expensive. What do you want? Pay peanuts and get top hosting and support? Someone has to pay operating expenses AND earn something.
Haha, I agree! It’s worth it!
What a pity WPX don’t offer VPS
Agree!
Would be great to see Closte added to this test as well
Maybe next round. Thanks for the suggestion.
For site migration you can check out WP All-in-one migration, super simple and free for sites up to 512mb. They even have a plugin add on to allow you to transfer a larger site that have upload size limits by doing it in chunks.We use it for quick site migrations sometimes from staging to production, or local to staging.Also would be interested in seeing Pagely in one of your next testing rounds. Our company uses it for hosting and have been very happy with it. They are similar to Kinsta only with AWS hosting.
Thanks for the tip Dashiell, I’ll check it out.
You have seriously worked a lot to gather this information, I really love it….Thanks sharing this piece of information.
It was no mean feat!
Indeed an amazing post. Keep up the good work.
Thanks Himani – I certainly will!
I was hoping to see Chemicloud on your list! That’s my current host and I’m struggling to figure out if they are fast enough. This analysis is interesting and provides some great options to consider if I decide to switch. Thanks!
Thanks Shelley, I’ll consider them for the next round of testing.
Good review. Thank you. It would be super beneficial to list which of these hosts offer caching and other options that greatly speed up Wordpress. Such as: NGINX, LITESPEED, HTTP/2 and a lot of hosts offer their own form of server side caching as well.Thanks again!
Thanks Scott! Will see about adding more detail in the next round of testing.
Interesting that Litespeed is on Kinstas list of banned caching plugins, but they do have their own solutions which seem to work according to their reviews. I don’t host with them. I’m with a smaller niche hosting company which I’d love to compare to Matthew’s list!
Thank you, valuable information
No problem!
Hi. Thank you very much for your article. In my country (Mexico) there is no serious option to choose from. I am just a “newby” and after strugglin several years with a scrap like Host Gator, I do not understand how I could live with that provider. Very slow server, when I create a very simple marketing campaign from Facebook it just goes down… technical support is ok for very simple things but whenever you try to get more help (like for example a continuous fall in the server) they just do not know what to do and they just blame your applications… etc. It was just a nightmare. I am changing right now to WPX Hosting.
Glad to hear you are switching to WPX Hosting – they will take care of you!
Great Blog!
Cheers Jacob
That’s some serious article to look for. I am on WPX so it my day.
Haha brilliant – you made the right choice!
Good post I hope to see more!
There’s plenty more where this came from.
I would like to see your update for milesweb.in. Milesweb hosting service provider. Can you please rate the hosting provider as a request?Thanks in advance
I will consider them for my next round of testing. Thanks
I would like to see a review of the Rock Stage. They say that performance is the best on the market!
Thanks for the recommendation
Would be interesting to see if any of these hosts perform differently between plans, the site ground plans specifically state that higher plans offer more resources and speed, so would be interesting to test of that’s true.
Let me know your findings!
This is really a great article and a great read for me. It’s my first visit to your blog and I have found it so useful and informative specially this article. Thank you
There’s plenty more for you to read through – welcome!
Wow thanks for doing such a thorough job, this was really well put together and informative.
Thanks Henry! It is certainly thorough!