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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-
- Lower search engine rankings
- Higher bounce rates
- Lower page view numbers
- Lower conversion rates
- Lower profits
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?
- 12 Fastest WordPress Hosting Companies You Should Look Into
- How The Wordpress Hosts Were Tested
- Test 1 – GTMetrix Loading Speed
- Test 2 – Pingdom Loading Speed
- Test 3 – Load Impact
- Test 4 – WordPress Performance Tester
- Test 5 – Support Quality
- Wordpress Hosting Key Features Compared
- The Worst Things About Each Host
- The Fastest Wordpress Hosting Is…
12 Fastest WordPress Hosting Companies You Should Look Into
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-
1. Kinsta (www.kinsta.com)
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:
- DDoS detection
- Hardware firewalls
- Uptime monitoring
- SSL support and free SSL certificate
- Free site migration
- Daily backups
- Development staging areas
- KeyCDN included
Pricing And Plan Information
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-
- The hosting of 1 site
- Up to 20,000 monthly visitors
- 10GB of SDD storage
- A 50GB CDN limit
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.
2. SiteGround (www.siteground.com)
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:
- Free SSL certificate
- Daily backups
- Email services
- Staging tools
- Free CDN
Pricing And Plan Information
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-
- StartUp – $6.99 per month (reduced from $14.99) and you are allowed 1 site, 10,000 monthly visitors and 10GB of webspace.
- GrowBig – $9.99 per month (reduced from $24.99) and you are allowed unlimited sites, 20,000 monthly visitors and 20GB of webspace.
- GoGeek – $14.99 per month (reduced from $39.99) and you are allowed unlimited sites, 100,000 monthly visitors and 40GB of webspace.
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.
3. WP Engine (www.wpengine.com)
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-
- A CDN included
- A free SSL certificate
- Daily backups
- A staging area
- 24/7 support available
Pricing And Plan Information
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.
- StartUp – $30/month gives you a 25,000 monthly visits allowance, 10GB of storage, 50GB bandwidth allowance for 1 site.
- Growth – $115/month gives you a 100,000 monthly visits allowance, 20GB of storage, 200GB bandwidth allowance for a maximum of 10 sites.
- Scale – $290/month gives you a 400,000 monthly visits allowance, 50GB of storage, 500GB bandwidth allowance for a maximum of 30 sites.
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.
4. WPX Hosting (www.wpxhosting.com)
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:
- 24/7 expert support
- Free custom-built CDN
- Free SSL
- Free migrations
- Daily backups
- DDoS Protection
- Staging Area
So as well as investing in a great service you are also contributing to the running of Every Dog Matters.
Pricing And Plan Information
WPX Hosting plans are pretty competitively priced and all offer a 30-day money-back guarantee if you aren’t happy.
- Business – $24.99/month which covers you for 5 websites, 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth.
- Professional – $49.99/month which covers you for 35 websites, 40GB of storage and 200GB of bandwidth.
- Elite – $99/month which covers you for 5 websites, 10GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth.
The monthly price gets reduced if you purchase the yearly subscription.
5. A2Hosting (www.a2hosting.com)
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:
- Free staging area
- Free SSL certificates
- Malware protection
- DDoS protection
- Daily backups
- Cloudflare included
Pricing And Plan Information
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-
- 1-Site costs $11.99 and gives you 10GB of storage
- 3-Sites cost $18.99 and gives you 20GB of storage
- Unlimited sites cost $36.98 and gives you 40GB of storage
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.
6. BlueHost (www.bluehost.com)
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-
- An unlimited number of sites
- A staging environment
- Unlimited web storage
- A free SSL
- A CDN enabled
- Spam protection
- And much more
Pricing And Plan Information
Bluehost offers 3 WP Pro managed WordPress hosting plans-
- Build – $19.95 a month
- Grow – $29.95 a month
- Scale – $49.95 a month
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.
7. Cloudways (www.cloudways.com)
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-
- 24/7/365 Customer Support
- Free SSL
- CDN
- Free migration
- Dedicated Firewalls
- 24/7 monitoring
- Automated backups
- Staging environment
They have been featured on some pretty notable websites like Forbes and PC Magazine.
Pricing And Plan Information
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-
- $10/month gets you 1GB of RAM, 25GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth
- $22/month gets you 2GB of RAM, 50GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth
- $42/month gets you 4GB of RAM, 80GB of storage and 4TB of bandwidth
- $80/month gets you 8GB of RAM, 160GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth
And they have a ‘No Lock In’ policy meaning you don’t get tied up in contracts.
8. DreamHost (www.dreamhost.com)
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-
- Unlimited email
- 1-click staging
- SSL certificate
- Daily backups
- 24/7 WordPress support
- Free automated WordPress migrations
Pricing And Plan Information
Dreamhost has a good range of pricing on its plans meaning they can appeal to all budgets.
- DreamPress – $16.95 covers 100,000 monthly visitors and 30GB of SSD storage
- DreamPress Plus – $24.95 covers 300,000 monthly visitors and 60GB of SSD storage
- DreamPress Pro – $71.95 covers 1,000,000+ monthly visitors and 120GB of SSD storage
And all the plans have unmetered bandwidth and like most of the other hosts, they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
9. GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com)
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-
- 99.9% uptime promise
- CDN boost for fast load times
- Free business email for the first year
- Access to free themes & plugins
- Free 24/7 customer support
- One-click migration tool
Pricing And Plan Information
Here are the current pricing plans but ensure to double-check the renewal prices before you purchase-
- Basic – $6.99 and you get 1 website with 30GB of storage and is recommended for up to 25,000 visitors a month
- Deluxe – $9.99 and you get 1 website with 75GB of storage and is recommended for up to 100,000 visitors a month
- Ultimate – $12.99 and you get 1 website with unlimited storage and is an unlimited number of visitors a month
- Ecommerce – $15.99 and you get 1 website with unlimited storage and is an unlimited number of visitors a month but this has a bunch more features to warrant the higher price.
Not a bad set of plans to choose from.
10. GreenGeeks (www.greengeeks.com)
GreenGeeks is a hosting platform who pride themselves on providing an eco-friendly but fast and secure hosting service.
Their plans boast-
- Unlimited space
- Unlimited data transfer
- Free SSL certificate
- Free domain name for the first year
- Nightly backup
- Free CDN
- Unlimited email accounts
Pricing And Plan Information
GreenGeeks currently have a special price on plans so be sure to check on their website for any pricing updates-
- Lite – $2.95 (normally $9.95) which covers 1 site and unlimited web space
- Pro – $5.95 (normally $14.95) which covers unlimited sites, unlimited web space and 2x performance.
- Premium – $11.95 (normally $24.95) which covers unlimited sites, unlimited web space and 4x performance and a free dedicated IP
And they offer the standard 30-day money-back guarantee so you can try them out with peace of mind.
11. LiquidWeb (www.liquidweb.com)
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-
- No traffic limits
- Daily backups
- A staging site
- Automatic SSL
- Unlimited email accounts
- Their own data centres
Pricing And Plan Information
LiquidWeb offers a wide range of plans, here’s a quick look-
- Spark – $19/month. With this you get 1 website, 15 GB storage and 2 TB bandwidth allowance
- Maker – $79/month. With this you get 5 websites, 40 GB storage and 3 TB bandwidth allowance
- Designer – $109/month. With this you get 10 websites, 60 GB storage and 4 TB bandwidth allowance
- Builder – $149/month. With this you get 25 websites, 100 GB storage and 5 TB bandwidth allowance
- Producer – $299/month. With this you get 50 websites, 300 GB storage and 5 TB bandwidth allowance
- Executive – $549/month. With this you get 100 websites, 50 GB storage and 10 TB bandwidth allowance
- Enterprise – $999/month. With this you get 250 websites, 800 GB storage and 10 TB bandwidth allowance
They are so confident in their services that they offer 14 days free hosting without even asking for a credit card!
12. Pantheon (www.pantheon.io)
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-
- 24/7/365 support from WordPress experts
- Automated backups
- CDN included
- Maintaining a 99.99% uptime
- Managed HTTPs
Pricing And Plan Information
Pantheon offers two fixed price plans-
- Basic – $41 per month (or $29 per month if paid annually) this plan covers 25,000 monthly visits and 20GB SSD storage.
- Performance – This plan has many tiers ranging from $160 per month to $916 per month (or $114 per to $687 per month if paid annually). And ranges between 25,000-300,000 monthly visitor allowance and 30-200 of SSD storage.
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.
How The Wordpress Hosts Were Tested
I built a test blog to the following specifications-
- 11 high resolution photos
- 1,000 words of dummy content
- Astra theme
- Elementor plugin
Then I ran 5 distinct tests across these sites-
- Test #1 – GTMetrix website speed (from 7 global server locations)
- Test #2 – Pingdom Tools website speed (from 7 global server locations)
- Test #3 – Load Impact stress test (500 simultaneous visitors)
- Test #4 – WP Performance Tester (a plugin that tests raw server management configuration performance)
- Test #5 – Support quality (I installed a false flag virus on each site)
So without further ado…
Test 1 – GTMetrix Loading Speed
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-
Test #1 Conclusion
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.
Test 2 – Pingdom Loading Speed
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-
Test #2 Conclusion
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.
Test 3 – Load Impact
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-
These are the results for those hosts that didn’t automatically block the test-
Test #3 Conclusion
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.
Test 4 – WordPress Performance Tester
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-
- Math – 100,000 math function tests
- String Manipulation – 100,000 string manipulation tests
- Loops – 1,000,000 loop iterations
- Conditionals – 1,000,000 conditional logic checks
- MySql – basic mysql functions and 1,000,000 ENCODE() iterations
- $wpdb – 250 insert, select, software updates and delete operations
- Execution Time – how long it took to do all of those tests (lower is better)
- Queries Per Second – how many queries per second processed (higher is better)
I let the server monitoring plugin loose on each of the test blogs, this is how it went down-
Test #4 Conclusion
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.
Test 5 – Support Quality
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-
- Problem #1 – Would they take care of website transfers?
- Problem #2 – Would they remove malware on my test site? (I infected each site with a false flag triggering virus)
- Problem #3 – Would they stop other sites hotlinking my images?
Test #5 Conclusion
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.
Wordpress Hosting Key Features Compared
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:
- Price per month
- Sites allowed
- Speed
- Customer support
- Migrations
- Daily backups
- SSL certificates
- Staging Environment
- Email hosting
- Trust Pilot rating
| 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.
The Worst Things About Each Host
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-
- Expensive on a per site basis
- Unimpressive speed
- No email – adds additional costs with another provider
- No free site migrations offered
- Long banned plugins list
- Majority owned by GoDaddy’s owner
- Poor ratings & bad experience
- No phone support
- No VPS hosting options
- No Git support
- Back end control panel could be easier to use
- Expensive per site with this hosting plan
- Unimpressive speed
- $25 per site migrated if not coming from cpanel
- Malware removal $125 per site cleanup
- Free CDN not included
- Among slowest hosts in this test
- CDN not included
- Migrations will cost $99 per each site
- Malware removal $199 per site cleanup
- No email support
- Control panel not user friendly
- No free malware removal
- Site migrations $25 per site after 1st free transfer
- Limited support performance in above tests
- CDN not included
- Unimpressive speed in these tests
- No free malware removal
- $30 per site migration
- Pricing virtually triples in year 2
- No staging hosting environment on base plan
- After first month, no monthly payment option
- No real CDN on base plan (free Cloudflare doesn’t count)
- Expensive per site
- No phone support
- No email accounts – additional costs with Google Apps or your chosen provider
- List of banned plugins
- Expensive for multiple sites
- No live chat for pre-sales questions
- Expensive per site
- No free site migrations offered
- No free malware removal
- Limited support help in above tests
- To migrate a site $149.99 for up to 5 sites
- Slow speed in this comparison
- CDN not included
- Malware removal for $500+ per year
- Poor customer ratings
- Migrations $99.99 per site
- Malware removal $359.99 per year
- Poor customer ratings
- Limited support performance in above tests
- Expensive per site
- Average speed in this comparison
- No free malware removal
- CDN not included
- Limited support performance in above tests
- No email accounts – additional costs with another provider etc
- Slow speed in this comparison
- Site migrations $15 per site after 1st free transfer
- CDN not included
There is no such thing as perfect right?
The Fastest Wordpress Hosting Is…
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-
- Happier visitors
- Lower bounce rates
- Higher page view numbers
- Higher search engine rankings
- High traffic sites conversion rate
What Other People Say…
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the fastest hosting for WordPress?
I run tests across a range of the fastest WordPress hosts every year. In my latest round of testing, I declared WPX Hosting as the best host, followed by Kinsta in second (who host this blog) and Pantheon in third.
What is the fastest web hosting?
The fastest WordPress hosting service for a WordPress site is WPX Hosting (at the moment). I ran speed tests across 12 different hosts and WPX Hosting came out on top with both Kinsta and Pantheon closely behind them. Read the full post for the full case study results.
How much does it cost to host a WordPress website for a year?
If you want to host your site with a premium provider that is fast, includes an excellent set of features and truly expert support – you can expect to pay $249 a year with WPX Hosting and $300 a year with Kinsta. Look at my A2 Hosting review if you need a cheaper option.
What are the most important web hosts features?
The most important features to look for are daily backups, on demand data backups, a free CDN & free SSL certificate, email hosting, free malware scanning, free malware clean ups and excellent support.
264 Responses
Hi there,
I might be biased here, but if you compare fast WordPress hosting, you should really include 20i – not only really fast, but 100% run on renewable energy, lots of extras and true autoscaling (just to name a few features). Let me know if you need any more info, would be happy if this in included in your test.
If I ever do another round of testing, I will try to include it. Thanks for the suggestion.
Bluehost and GoDaddy test site redirect to +18 site
wpserver08(dot)xyz
wpserver12(dot)xyz
Thank you for the heads up! We have removed those links.
I found a blazing fast wordpress hosting, and could you take it into your test lists? In my experience, it overtakes Wpx a lot, which calims itslef the fastest. Hope you can test it and put the result in the benchmark. The hosting is called Rocket, and its url: https://d.pr/PtP5VZ
I know this hosting, and you’re right; it’s actually pretty fast.
If I ever do another test, I’d include it for sure!
Thanks for sharing informative content!
No problem!
Hi Matthew,
Long time no see.
I read your blog since 2013, and very happy to see you’re still sharing.
Hat off to you!
And thank you for this another useful and professional review.
I bought wpx via your link, cheers!
Best,
Howard
Thank you, Howard, for following my blog for so long. I appreciate it!
Wish you all the best!
WPX is SO helpful! I am not particularly techy, and have run into so many issues on my site. I know if I mess it up, help is just a message away. The issue is generally resolved within 5 minutes! Plus, the hosting really sped up my slow site.
Glad to hear about your experience with WPX. Thanks for sharing with us!
Really Like Your articles. Thanks for sharing such types of informatics article. keep sharing.
Thank you- Glad you found this blog post useful.
I have tested wpx hosting and several of the other mentioned hosts above, and I certainly would not rate wpx as highly.
Yes they may have fast servers, but I found the customer support rather lacking.
Ironically, the best customer service/support I found was also one of the cheapest hosts I tested (GURU), their (Litespeed) servers also out performed better than many of the more expensive hosts.
Another shady tactic I have noticed with WPX, they will get a bunch of people to make positive comments on a facebook post, then disable comments and boost that post as an ad. So nobody else can comment or disagree.
The absolute worst of this bunch (that I have tested) are Siteground, who I would never touch again with a barge pole, followed closely by GoDaddy.
here are my reviews/tests if you are interested.
https://michaels.me.uk/category/reviews/hosting/
Thank you for sharing your opinion and reviews with us. I really appreciate it!
I just wanted to point out that I compared/tested these tools on their performance (speed) ONLY.
This is why WPX is rated number #1. It was the tool that performed the best through my tests.
Ours is a wp site, but the loading speed is very low.
We are working on ways to improve it. will update once we are above par.
This can help: https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/on-page/perfect-google-pagespeed-score/
It’s a very nice detailed Thanks for sharing
No problem!
Thanks for sharing this informational article…
No problem!
Please give me a trial
What trial are you talking about?
Mathew you are doing great, keep posting nice articles.
Thank you Sehrish!
Your blog is amazing. Thanks for sharing with us.
No problem!
Really nice post…
Thank you, Sheharyar Riaz!
Have not hosted with any of the above, but would you mind reviewing HostArmada?
I added it to my list- Thanks for the suggestion, John!
Nice
Thank you!
No words to explain this post. I am very excited about reading time because I found in this article real information, and it is containing a much more useful method. You know I am facing one small issue past some days finally I solved my problem after reading this post. Thanks so much for sharing as like rich full content.
Glad you found the solution to your problems, Nikita!
Hello,
Great review indeed. Can you test the host: NazwaPL – it’s the number one host provider in Poland. The performance is good, the price is perfect, the customer service is crap. But I would like to see your opinion.
My website is built with this provider and is doing well.
Added it to my list! Thanks for the suggestion.
I appreciate the detailed data-driven review. Well done. I can’t help but notice that it is approaching 2 years old. A lot could have changed since 2019. It would be helpful for all the people about to discover this article to know which host is actually winning in 2021 -vs- the results of 2019 tests..
Yes, you’re right. A lot can change in 2 years. I’ll try to do other tests this year, but as you can imagine, running tests like these takes times, investment and money to do, so I can’t promise anything!
UK based blog reviewing US hosting companies. I’m guess because they pay the most in affiliate fees.
Doesn’t make the findings any less valid, but I found it curious given the domain name used, and everything being in dollars. It wouldn’t make sense for a UK focused or European focused blog to be using US servers. That would actually be slower.
Uk based but with visitors from all around the world (UK, US, India, Australia, Canada etc).
Using US dollars, in this case, is the easiest solution.
The article was very useful. thank you
No problem!
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for your research!
it is very informative. the data you provide very validly. thank you very much for sharing such a piece of great knowledge. keep sharing…
Thanks
No problem! Glad it helps!
What host do you use currently (8 feb. 2021) for this site?
For my blog, I am currently using Kinsta :)
Hi Matthew, excellent case study which you presented really well.
I’d be curious to learn how flywheel stacks up to the rest but I realize it would be impossible to cover every single host out there and put it all into one post.
That being said you provided some quality data for anyone looking to choose a hosting company.
Thanks, Joseph! Cheers!
Oh My Oh My
Mathew, Hats off to the best blogger ever…
Great plugins and good platform of hosting
Great review Matthew. Do you think WPX are a good bet for ecommerce or membership type sites also?
WPX, Kinsta.. great hosting providers!
Believe that your contribution here is the first that has dealt so clearly with this topic. You can clearly see that you really went out of your way to get it all right in the end. In the end, you did that too.
Thanks, Hannes! Cheers!
I have been with WPX hosting for about 1.5 years. I had been happy with their hosting and the live chat support was excellent. However, recently my site suffered from a 503 error (unsure of the reason). Unfortunately, this also occurred on the weekend. A support ticket was created and was ‘escalated’ to the Security & Optimization department. But this department only works weekdays from 9am to 6pm. FIVE DAYS later and I’m still waiting for my site to be fixed. I’ve persisted with my questions about why it has taken so long and been met by similar responses “Our Security & Optimization team will reach you back in their working hours(09:00 AM – 06:00 PM GMT+3).” I’ve also been accused of being too persistent and that “Pushing us to do this “faster” will not help us in any way, you as well” My site has been down for five days and I’m losing money and organic search. How can I not be persistent? They also give me absolutely no explanation or information on why the 503 error occurred. I’m in the dark and they don’t want to shed any light. They say it isn’t a DDoS but they do seem to blame me and say that “It seems the website has overloaded its resources.” So I’d say speed is great but it certainly isn’t everything. I have been hurt by this latest issue and I am considering changed hosts. Kinsta seems a good alternative.
So sorry to hear about your bad experience!
Kinsta is a great host.
In fact, this blog is hosted with Kinsta (and I don’t plan to change it anytime soon).
Great review Matthew. Do you think WPX are a good bet for ecommerce or membership type sites also?
Hey Mark! Yes WPX is a good bet as well as Kinsta :)
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 Vultr
2. Cloudways with Vultr High Frequency (HF)
3. Gridpane with Vultr HF
4. Closte
5. Kinsta Business
6. Kinsta Enterprise 1
Keep up the good work!
Thanks,
Sander
Hey Sander! Thanks for the suggestion- I’ll do my best.
Cloudways with Vultr High Frequency (HF) performing well nowadays. please do a test for us, thanks
I’ll add your suggestion to my list!
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!
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!
I love this article it’s amazing
Cheers!
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?
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!
Hey Becky – Thank you for your feedback, it’s most appreciated.
Hope it would help others to make their decision!
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://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/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!
Yup,
Required fasting hosting for Wordpress website. when your web hosting will be fast then your website traffic will grow and improve…
It certainly does help Anushka
thought WPX Hosting might need to change their home page (which they mention your test results), I’m happy they do not need :)
Excellent review, when someone like you does these all tests and suggest the best hosting, it helps a lot for others like me.
Glad to hear it :)
Very interesting to see these findings. I have been using siteground and it has been great.
Glad to hear it Rey
informative article, helped me alot.
plz make another article on float hosting..
thank you for sharing…
Thanks for the suggestion Dan
Thanks for sharing such good information with us. I hope you will share more information about wordpress hosting. Please keep sharing!
Keep an eye out for the next round of testing.
Great content as usual!
Cheers Muhammad!
Great information thank you for share…
No worries :)
I am currently a Siteground user.
I did notice that the GoGeek plan claims to use faster servers, and the price on that plan is more comparable to WPX Hosting.
I would have been very interested to see that version of Siteground compared.
Still would be. :-)
Thanks Jon – I’m keeping a note of suggestions to consider for my next round of testing :)
I also agree with this 100%, big difference and have big sites on that plan and my VPS.
Also, you must not only set up Cloudflare in SiteGround cPanel and Cloudflare account settings, but also install the WordPress plugin and apply the optimizations from it.
Thanks for the tip Vincent!
You have done a fantastic job. You gave us lots of information, along with examples that are very helpful for me. Thank you so much for sharing.
No problem Charles – hope you can use this testing to choose the best hosting for your site.
I’d like FloatHosting included in your next test. Thanks.
Will take it into consideration, thanks Joseph.
Hi Matthew next time try to include this two: namehero (great support) and hostek (fastest servers in my opininion i terms of first byte – also great support).
Thanks for the suggestions – I will add them to the list of hosts to consider in the next round of testing.
wow sir this is amazing for me.
Great news :)
Very nice information. WPX Hosting seems to be good and reliable also. It is also worth to take control of the problems associated.
Their support team are fantastic at dealing with all kinds of issues which is invaluable and surprisingly harder to find than you think.
Awesome blog. It’s very helpful blog. Thanks for sharing.
Have a wonderful day.
Glad I could help, thanks John.
Great blog.Thanks for sharing.
Hope it helped you decide on which WordPress host is right for you :)
Thanks… Finally my doubt cleared…
Great news – glad I could help Shekhar
nice posting
Thanks very much :)
Im on easyname and Im not sure if it is fast enough.
My powder brows blog is loading very slow sometimes.
you think its a good idea to change?
xoxo
franziska
Try these steps first – https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/on-page/increase-website-speed/
I got to know lot about WP. Thank you for sharing.
Glad I could help :)
Please try closte.com also.
I’d be curious to see your results as they are the provider I use!
Thanks Stuart, maybe in the next round of testing.
Nice Information
Thanks for the support Akash
Thanku share This Post
No worries :)
I’d love to see how Convesio compares to them
Maybe in the next round of tests :)
WPX is one of the best fastest wordpress hosting.
True that
Great review, thanks, Matthew!
We have moved from hosting sites on managed VPS running (LiteSpeed) to Kinsta.
Kinsta support and performance blew are mind. We are not trying to move all of our clients to Kinsta!
Yes I have a bunch of sites on Kinsta, including this one! Awesome support!
GoDaddy on number 4th? I heard and read a lot that GoDayy hosting is worse .
I guess they’ve been making some improvements
I’ve been with one hosting company (Interserver) VOLUNTARILY for years.
The past few days have been a sign that its time to move on and this test is a superb eye-opener. I’ve been going back and forth with the live-chat attendant at WPXhosting voicing my concerns as I really really hope nothing goes wrong with the migration.
I just wanted to leave this comment before finally paying for a plan.
This must’ve taken a lot of time and resources on your end, thanks for going through all the troubles.
Hey Babs, well I think you are making the right choice with WPX hosting as your hosting company. As you can see from my fast WordPress hosting tests, they come highly recommended.
Hi There, I am curious why you did not test HostGator?
They sucked in my last test https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/fastest-wordpress-hosting/
I am using Cloudways but I am not using the Digital Ocean but rather Google Cloud.
Even though this plan is more eexpensive I assume it would make a huge difference.
Can you add the Google (and maybe the Amazon) servers to the test as well?
Yes I’ll consider those options for next year but I suspect you are making a good choice!
Hi Hameed,
In this test, WPEngine and Kinsta were both running on the Google Cloud (new C2) and Matt included Amazon in last year’s test.
Terry Kyle
CEO, WPX Hosting
After reading your previous reviews, I decided to go with WPX. I have 25 + sites on Flywheel. They are really good but somewhat expensive. So gave WPX a go. The problems I had was firstly with the UI. It is so gen 1 compared to Flywheel. Maybe it is because I am used to a better UI. The more important issue was that WPX dis not have a temporary site url. This was a big deal for me as there were few sites which is still in dev mode. If I wanted to host it with WPX, I had to either point the domain to the server or do some complex host configuration on my laptop, which didn’t make sense, especially when Flywheel had it so easy. So I bought a package and then had to ask for a refund. I would definitely give it another try once they sort out this issue.
Yes the UI could do with the help of a designer that is for sure! WPX do have a staging area now which I agree should be one of the key features for any WordPress hosting providers.
Matthew:
The quality of the content you continue to pump out amazes me. This was a very timely topic for me because while I’ve been with SiteGround for the past year, I haven’t been impressed. Your test results confirm what my gut was telling me – that SiteGround isn’t that great. I haven’t even heard of WPX Hosting so I’ll definitely check it out. One thing that would be nice to add to your report is the background of each company – i.e. how big are they, where are there servers located, and are they independent or are they part of some conglomerate that owns numerous hosting companies. It seems all these hosting companies are great at one point and then they grow so big so fast they start to suck or they get gobbled up by a bigger company and then they suck.
Travis
Thanks Travis!
SiteGround are actually a really good budget performer but it seems like you’ve outgrown them and the problems with them really come in at the increased renewal price at which point there are better options for the money.
You are right about the performance of hosts changing which is why this fast WordPress hosting is an annual test :)
Hi Travis,
WPX is privately owned by myself and 1 partner, completely bootstrapped 6 years ago and not part of any conglomerate.
Server location (apart from our own 25-location custom CDN, free to all WPX users) are Chicago, London and Sydney and we will probably add India, South Africa and Argentina in 2020, though that is still to be confirmed.
Let me know if you have additional questions.
Terry Kyle
CEO, WPX Hosting
Wow! I’m from south America ( Uruguay), and I’m very satisfied of your service. And although the server is a bit far from my location, the performance it’s pretty good.
But if you open a data center in the region you will definitely rocks here. And I will be the number 1 evangelizer of your service.
Hi Terry,
As an EU citizen I would really love to see a real EU-location. With the BRexit UK will not be an option anymore for me. I’ve contacted support but they stated the same that their are no plans to add an EU-server.
Personally I think you will need to keep the EU market.
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
Would love to see if there’s any real benefit to using “wordpress” hosting vs regular hosting and a comparison of those providers.
I suspect the main difference we would see is in the service and experience the support team provide and you would hope the server is specifically optimised to run the WP application.
Good stuff again. Would like to see servebolt and gridpane in your tests as hosting, and cache busting urls for load time tests.
Thanks, added to the list and the WP Performance Tester results give us a peek behind the cache
Hi Andrew,
Servebolt also competed with WPX in Kevin Ohashi’s most recent tests on Review Signal and both companies achieved ‘Top Tier’ status (the highest level): https://reviewsignal.com/blog/51-100-month-wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-2019/
Terry Kyle
CEO, WPX Hosting
Great write up. I use Cloudways and I think, after read this, I’ll move my sites to WPX and give them a whirl. 1 think you missed though, Cloudways don’t have free (offsite) daily backups, they charge $0.033 per GB.
I suggest you take some measurements, move one site, take some more measurements and then decide if you are going to migrate everything.
You should add Lightning Base to this. They’re excellent. I use them and WPX hosting for all of my personal projects, and recommend them to my clients.
Added to the list thanks!
Hi Kao,
Lightning Base competed with WPX in Kevin Ohashi’s most recent tests on Review Signal and both companies achieved ‘Top Tier’ status (the highest level): https://reviewsignal.com/blog/51-100-month-wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-2019/
Terry Kyle
CEO, WPX Hosting
Excellent article, as always. Thanks.
No problem Richard! Hope you got an insight into the top fast WordPress hosting providers and see who really offers fast hosting and value for money.
Excellent article! I was wondering if you could also write one explaining the difference between the speed test tools. Pingdom, GTMetrix and Lightspeed all give different ratings and this is really confusing. Also what about mobile performance? I recently realized mobile loading is a lot slower than desktop. Is it worth using an AMP plugin? Thanks.
You should learn about mobile first indexing, basically the performance of your desktop site in Google’s search results is directly influenced by it’s mobile performance.
So if it sucks on mobile, you are paying the price with your desktop rankings.
AMP takes away a lot of functionality, instead take a look at https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/seo/on-page/increase-website-speed/
I would like to see the same test and benchmark with mid-range packages and configurations.
Such as Cloudways on AWS.
Was Redis setup on all platforms who provide it without extra cost? Such as Cloudways?
Yes we can add some of those into next years fast hosting play!
Cloudways was tested by Matt here using Digital Ocean.
In last year’s test, Matt included AWS.
Terry Kyle
CEO, WPX Hosting
While I know its impossible to include all hosting companies, I would have loved to see Flywheel in this test. If you have had any experience with them, I would appreciate your feedback.
I have no personal experience with them but would love to include them!
Hi Jared,
If it helps, I ran my own Divi comparison earlier in 2019 and Flywheel were included in that: https://blog.wpxhosting.com/fastest-divi-hosting/
Terry Kyle
CEO, WPX Hosting
I’m with a2hosting still happy with them so far, their support is Excellence but then again my site is still small and there’s not much to complain about so far. I used to host with WP ENGINE years back when they started (with my other site) and thought they had too many restrictions, it actually felt like I was using WordPress.com version. Most bloggers swear by Siteground and Bluehost but they are not my favorite, I tried CLOUDWAYS at the beginning of the year using their trial for less than a month simply because their interface is not user-friendly.
If your URL is the one you left in the comment, you haven’t done any speed testing for a long time.
This test was so good that I had to sign up using your aff link. The timing was also perfect. Next time please add more premium hosts to the comparison like: digitalocean and eukhost.
Thanks Robert will do!
Hi Matthew,
Thank you for your research!
When you will update your research next time, could you please add more metrics, like:
– PHP version (5, 7)
– Server (Nginx, Apache, Litespeed)
– HTTP protocol version (HTTP 1.1/2) (https://www.wpserver03.xyz/ – HTTP/2; http://wpserver12.xyz/ HTTP 1.1 + HTTP 2)
– Caching plugins (now https://wpserver05.xyz/ using W3 Total Cache)
I think this will be handy.
Regards
So you would like me to delve into the more technical specs of each host? I chose not to get too technical because most people don’t care as long as it’s the fastest.
Hi SEONoob,
To clarify, these are WPX tech specs requested above:
PHP 7.3 is the current highest available version but 7.4 is about to hit and as soon as it is proven stable, it will be rolled out to all servers. Usually it’s very quick from new release to implementation at WPX.
We are currently using Apache but have been testing Litespeed as an alternative for some time and are likely to switch to that in 2020.
We do use http2
We recommend W3 Total cache as that one is best suited to our platform.
Let me know if you have additional questions.
Terry Kyle
CEO, WPX Hosting
Interesting to see this review. I’m a Kinsta user and I do have better experience there compared to WPX Hosting. WPX is good and the email hosted is a bonus. But, it may not be for everyone. Example, my site is messed up (structurely) and it’s just too much work to fix it. Maybe in the future.
But when this happens, you may not be able to use the full services offered by WPX. But, it is still a good web hosting company.
Other than that, Kinsta is top notch but can be pricey when you have over 150k visitors per month.
Cheers.
I am not sure what problem you have that doesn’t let you use the full services by WPX?
(I have my sites split between Kinsta and WPX)
Excellent review and I agree with your conclusion. I have been using a combination of hosting services, but knowing that I can get free migration to WPX hosting plus free malware protection/removal is the kicker for me.
Will WPX migrate all 5 sites you can host with them for free? When I migrate to SiteGround a couple of years ago, they would only move one site. I paid someone to do the rest…
Another issue is the SSL certificate …Is it available for free with all these host providers? I know that SiteGround has a free version and a more secure version of SSL certificate that costs anywhere from $99 a year (with a wildcard so you can have it installed on all your sites) or more…
My last question is how much storage do you get and bandwidth for each of the services? In my case, the sites I will move are bulky and require a lot of bandwidth as they are e-commerce stores…
Thanks for the work putting this together (and the investment of the $600 for the WP Engine C2 hosting test!)…
I am not sure how many sites they migrate but ask their support they will be able to tell you but for sure they have free SSL certificate for all your domains.
I suggest you take a look at each plan of the hosts you like the look of because storage etc varys wildly.
I’m with WPX and they will migrate ALL sites into your account for free.
Hi Dave,
At WPX, all site migrations are free (if they don’t involve a domain change e.g. migrating a site from davesblog.com to davesamazingblog.com) and are usually completed within 24 hours, could be a little longer during the Black Friday period.
The unlimited free SSLs are by Let’s Encrypt (co-sponsored by Google) – more info here: https://letsencrypt.org/
Storage and bandwidth varies by plan, just click on the Pricing top menu link on the WPX site.
Hope that clarifies!
Terry Kyle
CEO, WPX Hosting
I thought WPX Hosting might need to change their home page (which they mention your test results), I’m happy they do not need :)
Excellent review, when someone like you does these all tests and suggest the best hosting, it helps a lot for others like me.
I used Kinsta earlier, but it looked expensive when my site earnings dropped. After your first review, I have migrated to WPX Hosting. It is one of the best and excellent support hosting provider with enough features (like 5 websites and 100GB data transfer with their free CDN)
No problem glad to help!
Other than the support team, how has your experience been with WPX Hosting?
I have spent a year with WPX with several sites and Siteground with several more – sadly tied in to a three year deal.
I had one site infected with Siteground who just shut it diwn and were extremely unimpressive in support. I was totally unimpressed. Whatever the infection it reappeared several times over several months despite cleaning my installs at work as well as installing expensive security plugins per their advice.
Moved the site to WPX and the infection reappeared and was cleaned within 24 hours. Their support is second to none and the only complaint I have with them us that they don’t like recommending plugins.
I want a divorce from Siteground – poor support and high maintenance. WPX us everything a good partner should be.
Yes and that is really what separates the cream from the crop – both WPX Hosting and Kinsta hosting have an “active” support team that are the fastest to take control of problems and fix them. The time and money that saves every month far exceeds the cost of the hosting.