It’s easy to think that the most expensive WordPress hosting provider will give you:
…But it’s not always the case.
When I tested the 12 fastest WordPress Hosting Providers, I found that many cheaper options performed significantly better than the expensive ones! In fact, the winner of the overall challenge was one of the more affordable options on the list.
In this article, I’ll detail my tests and show you how I picked the winners of the challenge so you can see that the most expensive option isn’t always the best.
But before we go into the challenge, let’s have a look at the key features you need to look for when selecting a WordPress hosting provider.
When you’re looking for a host, make sure you compare these features before making your selection:
However, the two most important factors you should take into account are:
Speed is critical because your hosting solution affects your website speed, which impacts conversion rates.
Don’t believe me?
According to Google, by improving the speed of my site by just 1 second, I could actually make an extra $28,464 every year!
As for customer support, you’re going to run into problems when setting up and maintaining your site. You want a reliable, knowledgeable, and fast-acting team that can help you get your website up and running and help you troubleshoot problems quickly.
To test site speed and customer support from each host, I built a test blog that contained:
I cloned the site across each of the 12 WordPress hosts. This way, each host had an identical test blog.
I then went ahead and ran 5 distinct tests across these websites.
For Test 1 and 2, I tested each site’s website loading times (from cached results) using different website speed tools.
For the 3rd test, I needed to see how the hosts handled a little extra stress. To do this, I used Load Impact, which assessed how each host handles 500 simultaneous visitors.
As for the 4th test, I wanted to test the actual server performance for each site. I used Kevin Ohashi’s WordPress Performance Tester Plugin which stress tests server resources by performing numerous functions like math function tests, string manipulation tests, and loop iterations.
This is a great test to assess hosting solutions because it shows the difference between a server rendering a cached page and one that actually has to think about performing different activities. Once each site-finished crunching the data, I looked at the execution time and queries per second.
Finally, for the 5th test, I wanted to test the customer support team from each host. I asked them to solve 3 common problems:
If you want to understand more about how I conducted each test, have a look at my ‘Testing The 12 Fastest WordPress Hosting Providers’ Case Study.
Below, I’ll list the 12 WordPress Hosting Contestants, the plan I used, the cost per month for the plan, and the number of websites it covers.
The results were incredibly close. In first place was WPX Hosting (0.8 seconds), in second was Pantheon (0.81 seconds), and in third, Kinsta (1.60 seconds).
The top 4 results from the GTMetrix and the Pingdom challenge remained the same. WPX Hosting (357ms) came first while Pantheon (359ms) followed close behind. Kinsta (835ms) trailed behind in third place.
Pantheon did a great job here, stealing the show. There were 4 other contenders that also performed extremely well.
Here, Kinsta (0.538 seconds) came out on top. But other hosts also made it under the 1 second marker, including:
While Pantheon topped the charts in the other test, they really fell behind the pack here.
The only host that was able to resolve all problems for free was WPX Hosting. They offered free migrations as well as free malware cleanup and took control of the hotlinking issue. However, WPX Hosting doesn’t provide phone support and does everything via 24/7 live chat and email.
If I take all the key factors into account, the top contenders were:
I hope you understand that in the WordPress Hosting world, price does not always signify value.
It was interesting to see that, according to my test, WP Engine C2 ($600/month) the most expensive option, didn’t even land in the top 3 while WPX Hosting, one of the more affordable plans landed top spot!
Remember, the most expensive option isn’t always the best choice.
Find a provider that can give you fast loading times and great customer support!
Matthew Woodward is a self-proclaimed SEO nerd. He is most well known for his SEO & marketing blog which he began in 2012 as an experiment. But it quickly evolved into his passion project and has helped thousands of his followers achieve great things with their online businesses.