Best WordPress Web Hosting
Based on In-Depth Reviews
- 200+Hours of research
- 40+Sources used
- 25Companies vetted
- 3Features reviewed
- 4Top
Picks
- Go for a shared hosting plan if your budget is limited.
- Buy your domain name from a third-party, not your host.
- Keep an eye on renewal rates when subscribing.
- WordPress can be used with all types of web hosting.
How We Found The Best WordPress Hosting
Our Top Picks: WordPress Web Hosting Reviews
WordPress is for much more than just blogging. 38.5% of all websites use WordPress as their content management system—a type of software used to create and modify digital content—which makes for a market share of over 63%! Many large brands, publications, organizations, and notable individuals, as well as government institutions, use WordPress for their websites. The platform is both versatile and powerful enough that it can be used to build all kinds of websites: digital portfolios, online storefronts, video streaming hubs, and yes, blogs.
WordPress on its own isn’t enough to launch a website, though. Unless you’re using the company’s website builder, you’ll need to pair the software with the service of a web host. Given the large number of varied hosts currently in operation, this is not an easy choice. Our goal when selecting the best WordPress hosting companies was to streamline this part of the process for consumers, especially for those who aren’t familiar with any of the language and technology that goes into it.
SiteGround review
Best All-around WordPress Hosting
Screenshot Siteground.com, October 2020
SiteGround brings the best of both worlds—performance and user experience—and it’s reflected in the price tag. Its rates are closer to those of a managed WordPress host; the basic plan starts at $14.99/mo, whereas most shared hosting plans begin under the $10 range. However, it makes up for that with one of, if not the best performance results among non-managed web hosts.
SiteGround also boasts one of the most highly-regarded customer support teams in the entire industry. On Review Signal’s website, it is currently second overall, and second in the customer support category among shared hosts. The help from customer representatives is often cited as one of the best things about the company. On other review sites, such as G2 Crowd, SiteGround features largely positive reviews from verified customers.
How does it perform?
Both SiteGround’s uptime and loading speed have been consistently lauded by multiple sources. It has received numerous awards from Review Signal in the past, including several top tier mentions. 2020’s benchmarks note that its uptime was excellent and that the service had done away with any issues regarding loading tests.
As of this writing, SiteGround is ranked #5 (9.1) out of 167 hosts on HRANK, with an average uptime and response time of 99.983% and 622ms, respectively. In 2019, it was ultimately ranked #1 (9.7) with a nearly perfect average uptime of 99.992% and a great response time of 499ms. Lastly, SiteGround performed quite well on the WordPress Performance test of Matthew Woodward’s web host testing.
DreamHost review
Best Value WordPress Hosting
Screenshot DreamHost.com, October 2020
DreamHost offers a variety of WordPress hosting services, including shared, managed, VPS, and even dedicated hosting. As one of WordPress’ three recommended web hosts, one would expect it to live up to the hype. And that they do, with the best ratio of performance and user experience to price out of all the hosts we looked at.
DreamHost plans are considerably more affordable than its competition. Moreover, the difference between their renewal and promotional rates is almost negligible. The company’s shared plan starts at a rate of $4.95/mo, later renewing at $6.99/mo., and the higher tier of its shared plan goes from $10.95/mo to $11.99/mo upon renewal. This occurs after a 90-day promotional period, which is the longest money-back guarantee we found among all the web hosts we evaluated.
As for user experience, our time with DreamHost can be described as nothing but positive. When setting up our test website for our original web hosting article, our questions were all quickly answered via email by a customer representative. The company’s proprietary control panel was easy to navigate, and the process of building our website on the platform was easier than with any other host we tested.
How does it perform?
Performance might not be DreamHost’s strong suit, but it shows respectable results, considering its rates. The best performance results it has gotten have been on Review Signal's benchmarks. In previous years, DreamHost managed to receive one top tier mention and has been otherwise well received. In 2020, it obtained an honorable mention in the <$25/month category, with an uptime of over 99.9% and a load storm test that they called “excellent.” The site benchmarks also mention that DreamHost had one of the fastest response times. This is backed up by data on HRANK, where DreamHost ranked 14 out of 167 based on response time, despite troubles with uptime.
WPX Hosting review
Best Managed WordPress Hosting
Screenshot WPX.net, October 2020
Managed WordPress hosts usually target the same niche of customers: individuals, agencies, and businesses who want highly-optimized WordPress hosting and are able to pay more than the average customer. This makes for very tough competition. Our pick for this category is WPX Hosting, whose approach to hosting is focused on attracting consumers tired of traditional web host marketing strategies.
Instead of showering consumers with different plan tiers or levels, WPX has just two plans for consumers to choose from. Both include the same essential features: unlimited site migrations and security certificates, 28-day automatic backups, a staging area, and a proprietary CDN called WPX Cloud. The only difference between plans is the price, the number of websites you can host (5, 15, 35), and the amount of storage and bandwidth you get. WPX hosting plans start at $20.83 (yearly) and $24.99 (monthly), renewing at the same price.
How does it perform?
WPX Hosting has traditionally performed very well in speed and uptime tests. After returning to Review Signal’s Performance Benchmarks in 2019, it received three top tier mentions, one for each category it participated in (<$25/mo, $25–50/mo, and $51–100/mo). It reported 100% uptime statistics in all but one instance and had remarkable load times across plan tiers. WPX went on to receive the same three top mentions in 2020’s benchmarks, maintaining its stellar performance.
WPX Hosting does not appear in HRANK, but we found additional test results on Matthew Woodward’s site. His most recent results, updated on Aug 20, 2020, place WPX as the fastest WordPress hosting company. It performed very well on all four performance tests: two loading speed tests, measured through GTMetrix and Pingdom; a stress test, measured through Load Impact; and a general performance test, done via the WordPress Performance Tester plugin.
Kinsta review
Best Scalable WordPress Hosting
Screenshot Kinsta.com, October 2020
Consumers should look for a web host able to accommodate growth, regardless of the type of website. However, some websites are expected to grow faster than others from the onset, such as an up-and-coming poet’s blog, a tech start-up’s site, or a popular brick-and-mortar store that’s going online. If that’s the case, you need to look at more than just price and performance—you need scalability.
Another managed WordPress host, Kinsta has been making waves for its easily upgradable and all-inclusive plans. As a true cloud web hosting company, its hosting architecture is spread across multiple data centers throughout the world. In Kinsta’s case, it is powered by Google Cloud Platform’s 24 global data centers. This better prepares your site for responding to unpredictable or sudden activity spikes, since your site can scale up to match the surge in traffic.
Growth isn’t just vertical; it can also be horizontal. That is to say, scalability also refers to a web host’s ability to easily expand a client’s number of sites. All of Kinsta’s plans include the same basic features, but more expensive plans increase their capacity. As the level of your plan goes up, so does the number of WordPress sites you can have, each of which can be monitored separately via the host’s comprehensive analytics dashboard, which tracks all kinds of data and metrics, such as visits, requests, resource usage, response codes and stats, and database and cache performance metrics.
How does it perform?
Kinsta is currently one of the best performing web hosts in the market. Review Signal noted in its 2019 Performance Benchmarks that Kinsta was one of only two companies to have earned a top tier mention on every one of its plans, every year for the past 5 years. It was called a “model of high performance” for its flawless 100% uptime and excellent load stress testing.
Like many other managed WordPress hosts, Kinsta does not appear on HRANK. We looked to Matthew Woodward’s testing for more information regarding the host’s performance. In his most recent update, he placed Kinsta as the second-fastest managed WordPress hosting company, performing well in all tests. Additionally, it showed the best results from the WordPress Performance Tester plugin.
Further Insight Into Our Methodology
Our first step when researching WordPress hosting was to look back at our regular web hosting content. Much of what we ended up writing was informed by that content, given the similarities and overlap between both topics. Nonetheless, as we dove deeper into our WordPress research, more distinct characteristics came up. We also tried to make this content more accessible and friendly to an audience unfamiliar with either WordPress or web hosting as a whole.
Much as in our regular web hosting article, we placed a lot of weight on user experience and performance when evaluating hosts. However, we also placed a greater emphasis on price for WordPress hosting. A lot of people looking for a WordPress web host want a quick, simple, and affordable solution to their hosting needs. The same goes for businesses, which are the biggest users of WordPress. With COVID-19 still spreading throughout the country, businesses need a way to connect with customers online fast, and, depending on the type and size of business, social media simply isn’t enough.
Our sources for evaluating WordPress hosting performance were largely the same as they were for regular web hosting, with a few exceptions. Most notably, we added Matthew Woodward’s performance testing to the mix when evaluating performance. As for Review Signal’s yearly performance benchmarks, we used their 2020 version of the testing, supplementing it with the 2019 edition for companies that did not participate this year. Lastly, we picked a date and gathered uptime and response time information from HRANK from the last 30 days.
Price & Subscription Model
With web hosting, you get what you pay for. While there are many “cheap” web hosts out there, what these hosts save you in money upfront, you lose in the underwhelming or outright negative experience you may have. After all, being thrown into a crowded server isn’t what most people would want for their website, regardless of its purpose.
We favored web hosts with more reasonable prices across the board. However, our focus when evaluating the price and subscription model was to compare how each company’s plans were advertised and how varied their offerings were. That is to say, the fairer they were when advertising their plans—low renewal rates, short-term subscription lengths—the better they scored with us. The same goes for transparency: we went through the checkout process of each host we considered and favored those whose pricing was clear and did not bloat our shopping cart with extras or surprise fees.
User Experience
Nothing sells a web host like treating their clients right. Although WordPress hosting isn’t difficult to set up, some assistance is always welcome. We looked for comments and testimonials from customers on forums and comment boards all over the Internet. We automatically disqualified any web host with overwhelmingly negative service feedback, favoring instead those that could back their claims of fast and efficient customer support.
We also took into account user experience with each web host’s platform. In order to easily interact with a website, web hosts include what are known as control panels in their plans. Most web hosts use cPanel, a proprietary control panel known for its ease of use and compatibility with third-party applications. Other popular control panels include Plesk, Direct Admin, and ISPmanager. We slightly favored hosts with cPanel, since it is the industry leader and transferring your website from one control panel to another can be difficult. Nonetheless, hosts with any user interface that was favorably received by users scored well with us.
Performance
The importance of performance will vary from person to person, depending on the purpose of their website and the level of traffic they expect. That said, no one likes a slow website—especially not your visitors. According to BCC Interactive, one study by American market research company Forrester showed that not only do half of the visitors expect your page to load in under two seconds—40 percent will give up after three seconds. There are other hidden costs to a slow website, such as lost SEO, additional overhead costs, damage to your brand, and the loss of long-term consumer loyalty.
Generally speaking, the performance of a website is intrinsically linked to the type of hosting the client pays for. This means that websites on a shared hosting server can expect a higher degree of inconsistency in uptime and loading speed than those in VPS or cloud servers. In order to compare web hosts, we looked at the data collected on these two criteria by reputable online sources, which we mentioned above.
Helpful information about WordPress Web Hosting
Chances are that if you’re looking for a web hosting solution, you’ve seen plenty of hosts offering plans labeled as “WordPress hosting.” Given the platform’s popularity, it doesn’t come as a surprise that web hosts would seek to provide this option. But what exactly is WordPress hosting? Isn’t WordPress just a blogging platform?
WordPress may have started as a blogging platform, but fewer and fewer people are using it just for that. In fact, only a minuscule 6% of all WordPress users use it solely for blogging. WordPress is now most commonly used as a content management system (CMS) by businesses—small and large—and individuals alike.
WordPress has become such a dominant figure on the Web thanks to its combination of versatility, ease of use, and accessibility. A large number of WordPress plugins make it possible to create just about any type of website. The wide variety of WordPress-compatible themes, which range from the simple or unadorned, to the flashy, make changing your website’s appearance easy. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you can set up WordPress in as little as five minutes, provided your web host meets some basic requirements.
The only thing a WordPress web hosting plan has to do is meet these requirements. That’s why many are simply shared hosting plans with a fresh coat of paint provided by having WordPress software pre-installed. This saves consumers a little time and, depending on the person, a whole lot of effort.
For some companies, however, WordPress hosting is more involved. Web hosts that specialize in hosting on WordPress (i.e. only host on WordPress) generally have ways of optimizing the platform’s performance. They do this through the use of special databases, caching, and other tools that give them an edge when hosting on WordPress. This type of WordPress-optimized hosting is commonly employed by managed WordPress web hosts.
Regular vs. Managed WordPress Hosting
Unlike most web hosts that advertise regular WordPress hosting, managed WordPress hosts take additional steps to improve the platform for their users. For instance, companies that brand themselves “managed WordPress” web hosts are generally able to provide servers that are optimized for running the platform. If you’re looking into WordPress hosting and want the best of the best, this is what you should be looking for.
Possibly the most alluring aspect of managed WordPress hosting is its hands-off approach. Much of what you need done to get your site to work or look the way you want to can be carried out by or with the help of the web host’s WordPress experts. This takes a lot off consumers’s plates, allowing them to focus on other aspects of their website.
Of course, this all comes at a price. Managed WordPress services are more expensive than regular shared hosting WordPress plans, generally coming in around the $20/mo range, whereas even high-end shared hosting may not surpass $15/mo. If you don’t want to deal with the pressure of tinkering with your website or you simply aren’t confident in your ability to do so, managed hosting is a good alternative—as long as you can afford it.
Types of Web Hosting
Shared
The most common—and affordable—type of web hosting. Shared hosting has been the standard in the industry since its inception. It’s inexpensive and provides the basic features one would expect from a host, such as a security certificate, email support, analytics, and support for various types of script and databases.
When a customer “buys” shared hosting, they’re allotted space in a single physical server populated by many other websites. This makes it somewhat unreliable, as one website suffering from a sudden burst of visitors, or a malware attack, could affect another site on the same server. This is also why this type of hosting is more affordable. Shared hosting is offered by most web hosts and ranges in price from less than a dollar per month to around $15/mo.
VPS
Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is the natural upgrade to shared hosting. In this type of hosting, a single physical server is still technically “shared.” However, individual “pockets,” or virtual servers, are created for each website hosted on the larger server. This grants greater privileges to users, who can tamper and play around with their server’s framework to a greater degree. It also mostly prevents one website from affecting another due to large or sudden increases in bandwidth usage.
Cloud
Cloud hosting generally refers to websites or accounts hosted on a cluster of servers. Being hosted this way increases reliability since if one of the servers is knocked out, a copy of your website is still present in all the others. Cloud hosting plans may advertise higher uptime, speeds, and freedom to adjust required resources. Redundancy and scalability are the two major benefits of this type of hosting. Because of the size at which cloud networks can function, cloud hosting has a wide range of price points, from prices as low as that of shared hosting to those as high as of dedicated hosting.
Dedicated
Dedicated hosting is reserved for large-scale operations and clients who are seeking the highest level of reliability. This type of hosting grants users the entire space of a physical framework to their accounts. Like VPS hosting, this means some level of technical expertise is required—even more so for dedicated. Hosting of this kind is some of the most expensive, but for those who can afford it—and who actually need the computing power—it can provide the peace of mind that shared, VPS, or even cloud hosting may not be able to.
What to Watch Out for with WordPress Hosting
Companies under the same umbrella
If you already have a web host and are considering switching, it might be worth doing some background research beforehand. Many popular web hosting companies are owned by larger corporations, as is the case of the Endurance International Group. This isn’t indicative of any particular trends, but if you have a bad experience with one of a company’s brands and end up switching to another of theirs without knowing, you might be disappointed later.
Renewal rates and initial long-term rates
Nearly every web host features what are known as introductory rates and renewal rates. For hosts, this is a way to entice consumers; for consumers, it’s a way of testing the waters without investing too much, so long as they can count on a money-back guarantee. However, many web hosts are notorious for ramping up their rates tremendously once customers' introductory rates expire. Some hosts may even charge as much as double their initial rates. This is borderline predatory and we advise those looking for a web host to steer clear of companies that charge more than 50% of the original rate upon renewal.
Additionally, don’t be fooled by the extremely low initial rates you see some web hosts offer. Not only could this be indicative of a poor hosting experience overall, but these rates are almost always dependent on long subscription lengths. If a web host is offering a very low rate for three years of subscription time, then not only will that extend beyond the time frame of any money-back guarantee, but you’ll also have to pay that money upfront.
FAQs About WordPress Hosting
WordPress: .com vs .org
Wordpress.com is a hosting service operated by WordPress the company that features several plans and is designed to get people started with their own website fast. However, it has several limitations. For example, you can only place your site under a subdomain, you can’t monetize your blog or website, and you only get disk space of 3GB. On the other hand, WordPress.org is where consumers can find open-source WordPress software. The software doesn’t cost anything by itself, but you’ll need an account from a web host in order to use it.
What happens if I move my website from one web host to another?
In the worst case scenario, moving your website from one host to another could result in missing content, lost files, and other negative repercussions, such as losing your domain name. This is all easily avoidable, given one takes the proper steps beforehand to ensure a smooth transition.
First, we recommend that you register your domain name with a third party. Web hosts like to throw in a free domain with some of their plans, but this usually only lasts a set amount of time. After that grace period, the host will start to bill you and, in case you want to move your site, will still own the domain.
Second, we recommend that you stay on the same platform. Assuming that your website is built on WordPress, avoid moving it to another CMS, like Drupal or Joomla, without some technical help.
What if I stop paying my web host?
Different web hosts will have different reactions to a customer not paying their bill. However, there is a general process that consumers can expect from their host in these cases. First, your host will send you a few reminders about your bill being due. They may even call, in addition to any reminders, they may have sent previously warning you about your upcoming bill. If the web host’s billing department can’t reach you after a few days or they determine that you have no intention of paying, they will then suspend your account. Most web hosts do allow for a grace period after this where users can collect their content before it’s deleted from the servers. Your content will most likely be gone after 15-45 days, after which your bill may be sold to a collection agency.