So who wins the battle to become the best WordPress hosting overall?
In Olympic style – and to highlight that all of the following need to be considered the best hosting service for WordPress – we’ll hand out medals accordingly:
We’d like to stress that none of the WordPress hosting providers here failed any test. The overall standard was refreshingly high. Furthermore, all providers also offer a full range of more advanced hosting options if you start to outgrow the entry-level packages.
Our hope is that the information above will help you do two things: (1) provide a framework to distinguish between high-profile providers, and (2) use their overall offerings as a sensible reference point if you are comparing with other hosting services in the market.
What makes a host good for WordPress, and who to trust
When it comes to the WordPress hosting space, there are some things that you just must know:
The dirty little secret of most WordPress hosting reviews 🙊
Basically, the web is chock full of hosting recommendations and glowing reviews proclaiming this company or the other to be the best WordPress hosting around. But how do you really know who’s 100% honest with their recommendations, and why Company A is higher rated than Company B by some reviewer?
Well, you don’t.
Hosting is big business. According to the well-respected research firm Statista, the total global revenue for web hosting reached $124.8 billion dollars in 2023 and it’s projected to reach $157.9 billion in 2024. And while it’s hard to isolate the exact percentage of that made up by shared hosting, over 50% seems a reasonable guess.
Also, the next time you’re reading some breathless paean to some best WordPress hosting company, bear this in mind: they offer some of the biggest payouts in the affiliate marketing industry.
This simple fact alone is responsible for a substantial percentage of the “reviews” you’ll come across online, which are often little more than barely researched puff pieces designed solely to get you to click on an affiliate link.
Our approach is fundamentally different. We purchased real plans and performed real-world tests, and in this feature we cover every aspect of the hosting experience, from initial offer presentation and sign-up through to backend administration, WordPress installation options, customer support, and site load speed.
What you’re reading here is not some rehashed piece cobbling together a couple of existing WordPress hosting reviews, or the result of a cushy backroom deal with a hosting partner. It is the product of actual research in a live environment.
How to find out which of the WordPress hosting platforms is best for you 🔥
If you wanted to find out on your own where specific web hosting companies come in the race, you would have to do two things:
- Ask the actual users of some popular hosting platforms what their experiences are.
- Do some testing yourself on multiple hosts and measure the performance you’re getting.
We did both:
a) We found out what real users think of best WordPress hosting 🤓😵😃
In our point of view, you can’t really name some company the best WordPress hosting around until you’ve seen that company rated highly by real users (and a lot of them) – people who have tested the company themselves and have gotten top results out of it.
So to find out who actually comes on top according to the users, we’ve conducted the biggest WordPress hosting survey to date. That survey has taught us a lot about the nature of WordPress hosting, what people’s expectations are and who’s best at meeting them.
(If you’re interested to see the whole thing take place, click here.)
So that’s the first element in our puzzle to discover the best WordPress hosting in the market. The other element: performance tests.
b) We do monthly performance tests ourselves 📈📊📉
For each hosting firm, we signed up for their most popular or entry-level WordPress hosting plan a while back and launched a basic WordPress website on it.
We decided to go for a really stripped-down WordPress install to make comparisons as fair as possible.
Each install uses WordPress with the default theme, a pack of sample data, plus a couple of popular WordPress plugins (Contact Form 7, Wordfence, Yoast SEO) enabled.
We test each WordPress install for performance every month in the following ways:
- UptimeRobot: Used for monitoring the uptime of our hosts.
- WebPageTest: The homepage is loaded from a handful separate locations and the results tabulated.
The results are then updated and show up live on this post and our other hosting review posts via a shortcode mechanism. In other words, all other things aside, when you look at the performance numbers of these WordPress hosts, you’re looking at the most recent data available. For pageload, it’s the previous month, while for uptime, it’s the previous three months.
For the purposes of testing customer support, we installed each site on a temporary URL with the WordPress hosting provider, and reached out to them for assistance with how to set that up.
Disclaimer. Due to the nature of WordPress hosting, there is no magic single definitive test that will hold true under all circumstances. What we are looking for here is illustrative page load times and reasonable overall performance indicators at low usage levels. Remember that your mileage may, and probably will, vary.
I hope this guide has been helpful and that it’ll assist you in picking a host that matches your needs exactly. I’d love to hear more about your experience in the comments below. Get in touch!
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