The Best WordPress Hosting 2025: 17 Tested, 5 Recommended

Let’s say you’re looking for a new WordPress Hosting Provider! You search for “Best WordPress Hosting” and Twenty tabs later, you’re drowning in a sea of “Expert” lists that all recommend different hosts as #1. But somehow… you’re still unsure about picking that “best host” for your business because you read the same generic information which you already aware.

Then you go search into forums like Reddit and read multiple threads, you’ll see each one of them recommends their favorite hosting company as the best. You’ll end up more confused. Ultimately, you will likely choose a WordPress hosting provider that is well-marketed rather than its performance outlook. This is the story of most business owners seeking their ideal WordPress hosting in 2025.

Enter Hostingstep, where we do something unique that no other site does. We use our own funds to buy hosting accounts, install identical WordPress sites and test them 24/7, 365 days a year. No random “best hosting” list is influenced by affiliate commissions. All our recommendations are based on real performance data obtained from our test sites, which you can fully verify.

To find the best WordPress hosting, we measure what actually matters: how fast the site loads, how often it stays online and goes down and how it handles traffic spikes.

Our Testing Methodology:

• Real-World Performance Testing: Identical WordPress sites deployed across all the 17 hosting providers.
• Testing Duration: Jan -June 2025 (6 months) and 2024 (12 months)
• Benchmarking Tools: Pingdom synthetic monitoring and Loader.io
• Test Site Setup: Twenty Twenty-Four theme, standardized plugins (Akismet, Contact Form 7 and Rank Math)
• Key Metrics Measured: TTFB (speed), uptime and load handling response time.

Best WordPress Hosting Providers of August 2025

Performance Data Q1-Q2 2025 | Independent Testing & Analysis

Hosting Provider	HostingStep Rating	TTFB (Speed)(lower is better)	Uptime(higher is better)	Load Test(lower is better)	Pricing	Learn More
WP Engine Premium WordPress Hosting	9.8 ★★★★★ Excellent	354ms	99.99%	19ms	$23.00/mo 3 Months Free	Get Started 🔒 On WP Engine’s Website
Hostinger Budget-Friendly Hosting	7.0 ★★★★☆ Good	491ms	99.99%	247ms	$2.69/mo 10% Exclusive Off	Get Started 🔒 On Hostinger’s Website
Kinsta Google Cloud Hosting	8.2 ★★★★☆ Very Good	446ms	99.96%	27ms	$30.00/mo 1st Month Free	Get Started 🔒 On Kinsta’s Website
Cloudways Cloud Hosting Platform	7.7 ★★★★☆ Good	441ms	99.99%	128ms	$11.00/mo $30 Off 3 Months	Get Started 🔒 On Cloudways’ Website
GreenGeeks Eco-Friendly Hosting	8.8 ★★★★★ Excellent	417ms	99.98%	26ms	$2.95/mo 70% Off	Get Started 🔒 On GreenGeeks’ Website

Our Top Pick At a Glance

BEST FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE WORDPRESS HOSTING

WP Engine

Starting Price: $20/month (Startup plan)

Visit Site

On WP Engine’s Website

Elite Performance

Elite performance with Cloudflare Enterprise integration

Performance Metrics & Features

TTFB

354ms

Elite tier

Uptime

99.99%

Excellent

Load Handling

19ms

Elite – fastest tested

Rating

4.8/5

Excellent

4.8

★★★★★

Hostingstep Rating

Excellent

Why It’s Our Top Pick: WP Engine has been consistently delivering fastest load handling, TTFB and uptime performance since mid of 2024. Their performance is unmatched for serious business websites.

Ideal For: Business sites, high traffic blogs, and WooCommerce sites where performance and reliability matters more than pricing.

Limitations: Expensive for small sites, personal and hobby blogs.

BEST SHARED HOSTING FOR RELIABILITY

Hostinger

Starting Price: $2.69/month

Visit Site

On Hostinger’s Website

Exceptional Reliability

Exceptional reliability for a shared hosting provider with 25 websites support on starter plan

Performance Metrics & Features

TTFB

491ms

Average tier

Uptime

99.99%

Only 2 mins downtime

Load Handling

247ms

Needs improvement

Multi-site

25 sites

Starter plan

4.6

★★★★☆

Hostingstep Rating

Very Good

Why It’s Best for Shared Hosting: Hostinger is the only reliable shared hosting with 99.99% uptime with only 2 minutes of downtime in the last 6 months. They also offer highest inode limits (400,000) compared to competitors which offers around 200,000 inode limits.

Ideal For: Beginners, small businesses and multi-site owners who are looking for reliable shared hosting with best peformance to price value.

Limitations: Good TTFB but gets slow during traffic spikes, not ideal for high traffic sites.

BEST FOR MANAGED WORDPRESS HOSTING

Kinsta

Starting Price: $30/month (first month free)

Visit Site

On Kinsta’s Website

Global Data Centers

Access to all 37 Google data center locations and premium tools like APM

Performance Metrics & Features

TTFB

446ms

Strong

Uptime

99.96%

Very Good

Load Handling

27ms

Elite handling

Data Centers

37

Global locations

4.7

★★★★★

Hostingstep Rating

Excellent

Why It’s Best for Managed WordPress: If you are picking a multi-site plan, you can host each of your site closer to your target audience from any of the 37 global data center locations. For critical WordPress sites, APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools are essential to monitor and debug the site. Kinsta offers its for free across all plans. New relic, the leader in APM tool costs minimum $100/month and this alone makes Kinsta, the most ideal choice in managed WordPress space.

Ideal For: High traffic sites, resource-intensive WordPress applications (Kinsta uses fastest Google Cloud VMs), online stores, and membership sites.

Limitations: Higher pricing and no email hosting. Not suitable for basic blogs.

BEST FOR MANAGED CLOUD HOSTING

Cloudways

Starting Price: $11/month (DigitalOcean 1GB plan)

Visit Site

On Cloudway’s Website

Multiple Cloud Providers

Managed Cloud hosting with choice to host among five different cloud providers with unlimited websites

Performance Metrics & Features

TTFB

441ms

Strong tier

Uptime

99.99%

1 min downtime

Load Handling

128ms

Average handling

Cloud Options

5 providers

DO, Vultr, AWS, GCP

4.5

★★★★☆

Hostingstep Rating

Very Good

Why It’s Best for Cloud Hosting: Cloudways is the only company that allows you directly host on five different cloud providers through its managed dashboard. At $11/month, you can start hosting unlimited number of websites. They are WordPress centric with features like pre-speed optimized WordPress installations, Brezze caching plugin and you can get Cloudflare Enterprise CDN for just $4.99/domain.

Ideal For: multi-site business owners, developers, and businesses that needs Cloud hosting infrastructure without the complexity of managing servers directly.

Limitations: Learning curve required for beginners.

BEST FOR FAST SHARED HOSTING

GreenGeeks

Starting Price: $2.95/month (Lite plan)

Visit Site

On GreenGeeks’ Website

Consistently Fastest

Consistely rated as the fastest shared hosting since 2020. They outperform many of the premium and mid-range managed WordPress hosts

Performance Metrics & Features

TTFB

417ms

Elite tier

Uptime

99.98%

Very Good

Load Handling

26ms

Elite performance

1-Year Cost

$35

Best value

4.4

★★★★☆

Hostingstep Rating

Very Good

Why We Recommend Them: GreenGeeks has been consistently top performing, under-rated web hosting company in the industry. They ranked #3 in load handling out of #17 hosts tested. They also offer the fastest TTFB #1 among shared hosting companies. Uptime? That’s where our concern is. GreenGeeks uptime is 99.98%, a pretty good score (ranking #2 among 9 shared host) but the number of short outages are worrysome which are crucial for small businesses.

Ideal For: beginners, bloggers and who are just getting started. It costs just $35 for first year, the cheapest price for 1-year billing.

Limitations: Uptime concern on starter plan. Users can try Pro or Premium plan for better reliability.

Comprehensive Performance Data Comparison

Detailed Analysis of Top Providers

Best WordPress Hosting – WP Engine

The best WordPress hosting overall is the WP Engine. It offers an elite TTFB performance of 354ms, the fastest among all the hosts we have tested. Their uptime also stands out, with 99.99% uptime as of the data collected from January to June 2025. The most impressive part of WP Engine is its load handling capacity. It handled our load test with a response time of just 19ms, outperforming all other hosts we’ve tested. In total, WP Engine surpassed all 17 other WordPress hosting providers in every performance metric.

Performance Metrics (Jan – Feb 2025):

• TTFB: 354ms (Elite tier)
• Uptime: 99.99%
• Load Test: 19ms (Elite handling)
• Hostingstep Performance Score: 9.8/10

Honestly, we haven’t recommended WP Engine in the last four years due to their slow performance. However, things changed in mid of 2024 with visible performance improvements across all the metrics. When they introduced Edge caching, it promptly improved the TTFB response time. But still, I was skeptical with uptime percentage and load handling which can’t be improved with edge caching alone. To my surprise, we saw massive improvements in uptime and load handling was the bestest we’ve experienced so far. This indicates WP Engine simply didn’t add edge caching but upgraded their whole infrastructure from the base to compete with their competitors.

Regarding features, WP Engine includes everything you expect from a managed WordPress host. They have automated backups stored for up to 30 days, as well as staging, development, and production environments, global data center locations, security fixes, and Layer 3+4 DDoS protection, among other features. 

Pricing:

• Startup: $23/month (25,000 visits, 10GB storage, 75GB Bandwidth)
• Professional: $105/month (75,000 visits, 15GB storage, 150GB Bandwidth)
• Growth: $290/month (100,000 visits, 20GB storage, 240GB Bandwidth)
• Scale: $730/month (400,000 visits, 50GB storage, 550GB Bandwidth)

Best For: WP Engine is ideal for business sites, high-traffic blogs, WooCommerce stores, and critical WordPress applications where performance and reliability are more important than pricing.

Best WordPress Hosting [Shared] – Hostinger

Hostinger is the best shared WordPress hosting for beginners and small business to get started. Their performance is somewhat mixed, with TTFB of 491ms and load handling at 247ms, categorized as “Needs Improvement.” Their uptime has been 99.99% so far in 2025.

Performance Metrics:

• TTFB: 491ms
• Uptime: 99.99%
• Load Test: 247ms
• Performance Score: 7.0/10

Hostinger is not the fastest host in shared hosting category but their exceptional uptime reliability (only 2 minutes in last 6 months). Inodes issue is pretty common among shared host and they offer the highest 400,000 inodes on starter plan which makes them the solid choice under shared hosting options. . Both the introductory and renewal pricing is lowest in the industry, making them an ideal long term choice for most businesses on budget.

What makes Hostinger well suited for small business owners is its pricing. Small business owners are price-sensitive and expect the best value for money. Hostinger fits this category well with long-term introductory discounts and affordable renewal pricing. Their starter plan is priced at $2.99/month, which is similar to most shared hosts. However, Hostinger offers this pricing for a 48-month billing cycle, while most shared hosts limit these discounts to only 36 months. 

Again, take the renewal pricing: The Hostinger plan renews at $7.99/month, while all other shared hosts can be renewed for only over $12/month. Hostinger makes the deal even better for small business owners as it allows hosting 25 websites on the starter plan, while most hosts limit only one site hosting on the starter plan. Thus, I believe Hostinger is a strong choice for small business owners starting in 2025.

Pricing:

• Premium: $2.99/month (25 websites, 25k visits, 25GB storage)
• Business: $3.99/month (50 websites, 100k visits, 50GB storage)
• Cloud startup: $7.99/month  (100 websites, 200k visits, 100GB storage)
• Cloud Professional: $15.99/month  (200 websites, 300k visits, 200GB storage)

Best For: Hostinger is best suited for small businesses looking for long-term savings on their hosting bills. It offers the complete requirements of a small business (free domain, email hosting, AI builder, customer support, etc) at an affordable price.

Best Managed WordPress Hosting – Kinsta

If you are looking for the best managed WordPress hosting, check out Kinsta. It has an excellent performance score of 9.3/10 in our testing. Their TTFB is 444ms in the “Strong” rather than the “Elite” category, but they excel in two critical tests: Uptime and load testing. It recorded an uptime of 100% in 2025 while it consistently got 99.99% uptime with around 1-2 minutes of downtimes in previous years. Their load handling score is 27ms, similar to WP Engine, landing them in the “Elite” category.

Performance Metrics (Jan – June 2025):

• TTFB: 446ms (Strong tier)
• Uptime: 99.96%
• Load Test: 27ms (Elite handling)
• Performance Score: 8.2/10 (Excellent)

The reason we rate Kinsta as the best managed WordPress hosting is due to its WordPress centric features. First, Kinsta uses Google Cloud as the infrastructure partner and allows you to host the sites across all 37 global locations. Second, for critical WordPress applications, APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools are essential and Kinsta offers its APM tool for free on all its plans. Third, Kinsta uses the fastest Google Cloud servers. If you are new to this, Google offers different types of servers, each specializing in different use cases, and Kinsta uses top-tier C3D and C2 servers, which offer the fastest hardware performance based on our benchmarks.

WP Engine has this APM feature, but it is only limited to Enterprise plans. They don’t allow access to all Google Cloud locations, and they don’t use C3D and C2 servers on starter plans, which are only available on advanced plans. These are a few of the reasons we feel Kinsta deserves to be the best for managed WordPress hosting.

Pricing:

• Single 35K: First month free, then $30/month (35,000 visits, 10GB storage)
• WP 2: $59/month (70,000 visits, 20GB storage)
• WP 5: $96/month (125,000 visits, 30GB storage)

Best For: Kinsta is best suited for resource-intensive WordPress applications, online stores, membership sites, and even for blogs/small businesses where they need to choose managed WordPress hosting.

Best Fast WordPress Hosting – GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks is our top recommended best beginner-friendly WordPress hosting. Their performance is very similar to A2 Hosting and often goes neck to neck. It offers a strong TTFB of 418ms and elite load handling of 26ms, which is only short of WP Engine and better than every other 15 hosts we’ve tested. Their uptime in 2025 stays at 99.96% as of February 28, 2025.

Performance Metrics:

• TTFB: 417ms (Strong tier)
• Uptime: 99.98% (Strong)
• Load Test: 26ms (Elite handling)
• Performance Score: 8.8/10 (Very Good)

What makes us believe GreenGeeks is the best WordPress host for beginners is their simplified cPanel. Let’s accept the fact that cPanel is great, and at the same time, it feels bloated with too many options and steps to manage your sites. As a beginner, it involves a learning curve to understand cPanel and execute any changes. GreenGeek fixes this by offering a simplified dashboard where they bring most features of cPanel within one click.

Want to install WordPress or create a staging site, or need to create and manage new email accounts, or manage security features like installing SSL, managing DNS, etc.? Everything can be done in the GreenGeeks dashboard itself without logging into cPanel. With my 10 years of experience in the industry, I see no other host that has managed to bring out this kind of simplified setup of cPanel. With this approach, I strongly believe that GreenGeeks is the best WordPress hosting platform for beginners.

Pricing:

• Lite: $2.95/month (1 website, 25GB storage)
• Pro: $4.95/month (unlimited websites, 50GB storage)
• Premium: $8.95/month (unlimited websites, 100GB storage, 4X performance)

Best For: GreenGeek is best for beginners, first-time WordPress users, bloggers, and environment-conscious users* or anyone who is starting a WordPress site and wants a balanced performance, simplicity, and pricing. *GreenGeeks plants one tree for every new hosting account.

Best Mid-Range WordPress Hosting – Cloudways

If you are looking to upgrade from a shared host and are not willing to pay a premium price for a managed host, then check out Cloudways. It offers managed Cloud hosting services through five different cloud providers, and their pricing starts at $11/month. We tested their standard plan at $11/month and it recorded an average TTFB of 443 ms and 100% uptime in the first two months of 2025. Their load handling score is 128ms, which is good for WordPress sites.

Performance Metrics:

• TTFB: 441ms (Strong tier)
• Uptime: 99.99%
• Load Test: 128ms (Average handling)
• Performance Score: 7.7/10 (Very Good)

Cloudways gets picked in the mid-range category because of its pricing and plans. At $11/month, it allows you to host unlimited websites which is not a feature you see on shared or premium managed hosts. They have a custom control on par with WP Engine or Kinsta and it is better than cPanel. Additionally, they have their own caching plugin, Breeze, which works similarly to WP Rocket, giving you cost savings. They also have Cloudflare Enterprise offerings at just $4.99/site, which costs over $200/month when you get it from the official Cloudflare site. So, if you simply look at its outstanding pricing and its plan offerings, Cloudways is the clear sole winner in the Mid range WordPress category.

Pricing: 

• DO 1GB Plan: $11/month (1 core, 1GB RAM, 25GB storage)
• DO 2GB Plan: $24/month (1 core, 2GB RAM, 50GB storage)
• DO 4GB Plan: $46/month (2 cores, 4GB RAM, 80GB storage)
• DO 8GB Plan: $88/month (4 cores, 8GB RAM, 160GB storage)

The starting prices mentioned above are for DigitalOcean. Other Cloud providers are available at different price points, like Vultr and Linode at $14/month, AWS at $20.56/month, and Google Cloud at $37.45/month.

Cloudways is also the best WordPress hosting platform, offering AWS and Google Cloud hosting options for its customers. We say this after testing all the Cloud providers offered by Cloudways, and the performance scores are almost identical. WP Engine is the only other best option for WordPress hosting to host on AWS and Google Cloud. However, they offer AWS only on custom plans.

Best For: Cloudways is best suited for website owners who need more power and flexibility over shared hosts and are not ready for the cost of premium managed WordPress hosts.

Best WordPress Hosting For Agencies – Kinsta Nexcess

Kinsta is our recommended WordPress hosting for agencies. If you are an agency, Kinsta’s agency perks are not match to any other host. Starting first, agencies can get up to $10,000 credits based on the factors like client volume, existing portfolio and growth potential. These credits can be utilized while onboarding client sites. Second, agency sites can get free hosting account to host their very own business websites, adding more saving options.

However, we don’t simply recommend them as the best host for agencies because of perks, but their performance is top notch across all the tests with 446ms TTFB, 99.96% uptime and 27ms load handling capacity.

My most favourite part of using Kinsta is the option to host client closer to their visitors through their 37 global data centers. Their latest automatic WordPress update feature is going to save lot of human work for agencies where it will automatically run the theme and plugin update and if something broken after the update, it will revert back to previous version and notify you on the issues. If the site didn’t breakout, the update will be applied with no human intervention (learn more here). They also use the most powerful Google Cloud VMs which enables Kinsta to offer the fastest hardware performance, which can be verified through our benchmarks.

[ON HOLD]

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting Review

★★★★★

8.4/10

Best for: Bloggers & small businesses seeking affordable performance

Starting from

$2.99/month

Performance Metrics

Average TTFB

439ms Strong tier

Uptime

99.99% Elite tier

Load Test

44ms Strong handling

Performance Score

8.4/10 Very Good

Visit A2 Hosting

Key Features

Speed Optimized WP

NVMe Storage Options

Cloud Backups

Free SSL

24/7 Customer Support

LiteSpeed Servers

Limitations

Regular SSDs on starter plan

1 website limit on starter plan

No free domain

Slightly slower than premium hosts

If you think WP Engine is pricey and need an affordable WordPress host with similar performance scores, the A2 Hosting is an excellent choice. Our A2 Hosting test site recorded an average TTFB of 439ms, which is just 83ms slower than WP Engine, falling into our “strong” tier category. Their uptime is 99.99%, and the load handling speed is 44ms, which is not as great as WP Engine’s 19ms, but it still outperforms several premium-priced hosting services. Considering the fact that A2 Hosting costs just 1/12th the cost of WP Engine, its performance scores are highly laudable. 

Performance Metrics (Jan – Feb 2025):

• TTFB: 439ms (Strong tier)
• Uptime: 99.99% (Elite)
• Load Test: 44ms (Strong handling)
• Global TTFB: 527ms (Strong)
• Hostinstep Performance Score: 8.4/10 (Very Good)

A2 Hosting has a strong history of offering the fastest performance for the last four years. Let it be the TTFB, uptime, or load handling, they performed consistently faster, making them a strong contender in the best shared hosting for WordPress. Even before speed was a thing in the WordPress community, A2 Hosting was the earliest to offer speed-optimized WordPress installations, meaning the sites are pre-optimized for speed right from the moment the site goes live. 

Coming to features, A2 Hosting plans are mainly differentiated based on storage types. Their Ignite Starter plan comes with regular SSD drives and LiteSpeed Lite server, while the Turbo plan comes with NVMe storage and LiteSpeed Pro and Plus servers. The rest of the things are pretty common, like Cloud backups, free SSL, 24/7 customer support, etc. 

Pricing: 

• Ignite: $2.99/month (1 website, 10GB storage)
• Accel: $5.99/month (unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage)
• Turbo Velocity: $7.99/month (unlimited websites and NVMe storage)
• Turbo Nitro: $14.99/month (Higher specs, Turbo servers)

Best For: A2 Hosting is best for bloggers, small businesses, and performance conscious site owners who want near-perfect performance at affordable prices.

WordPress Hosting Performance Comparison Table

Expert Validation

Our testing methodology has been reviewed by many WordPress experts. 

Anton Aleksandrov, developer at WPBenchmark.io (https://wpbenchmark.io/) quoted 

“Very interesting WordPress hosting comparison article – the author spent quite a bit of time looking through various speed and performance aspects. If you are doing your own research, check out what things have been tested; they all make sense.”

Notable Mentions

Templ Hosting: It has an overall performance score of 9.6. Templ Hosting is our primary hosting partner, where we host Hostingstep.com and other sites. They are very similar to Kinsta and WP Engine but are affordably priced at $15/month. They are the only hosting industry that offers Google Cloud, DNS, and CDN edge caching. I personally feel Google CDN edge caching is better than Cloudflare Enterprise, and that’s one of the reasons why I use Templ for my group of sites, including Hostingstep.com. The downsides: they are not so popular might not be convicing for many businesses.

Rocket.net: Offered the first of its kind Cloudflare Enterprise powered Managed WordPress hosting but competitiors are catching up. WP Engine now integrates CF Enteprise and managed to offer better TTFB performance than Rocket. This could be due to various reason but I see WP Engine’s Google Cloud platform makes the difference here. With similar pricing of WP Engine and not able to load test, we didn’t make them in our top recommendations.

Nexcess: We recommended them as a solid option for agenices but the performance is little bit let down for the price. The inconsistent support is also a let down and truly not a great fit for agencies. Their pricing seems affordable at initial stage but as renewal comes in, they are on par with WP Engine and Kinsta.

WPX: The company has a very good performance score of 9.6. However, we noticed that first-time visitors are often served with very high TTFB due to low cache-hit ratio. We didn’t see such varying discrepancies among other hosts with CDN services. This makes their CDN not worth the hype but we acknoweldge their CDN is faster for returning visitors.

Their control panel is one of the slowest we have experienced where it shows a buggy loading screen for more than 10 seconds every time when we crawl between options, making their hosting experience not so pleasant. The USP of WPX is to offer 5 site hosting for $25/month but it’s not the only option now. You could consider Cloudways (DO 2GB RAM plan) or Hostinger Cloud Startup or Bluehost Pro as an alternative with much better server specs and similar performance.

How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting?

Final Verdict: The Best WordPress Hosting of 2025

While no WordPress hosting is perfect, we picked the seven best WordPress hosting out of the seventeen hosts we’ve tested so far. Our recommendations are based on extensive testing:

Best Overall: WP Engine got a perfect 10/10 performance score. Their introductory discounted pricing is the highest among its competitors. So, easily the best combination of performance and pricing to get started. 

Best Budget: Hostinger got a performance score of 8.4/10, the top host among shared hosting companies. Their prices are often less than $3/month, which is suitable for anyone looking for affordable hosting options.

Best Managed: Kinsta is the best and most powerful managed WordPress hosting. Their hardware offerings are second to none, a great host to run your resource-hungry WordPress sites.

Best Mid-Range: Cloudways is the best mid-range WordPress hosting with the affordability of shared hosting and the performance of managed WordPress hosting.

The WordPress hosting requirements often vary due to the specific needs of website owners. A simple WordPress blog can run well on A2 Hosting or GreenGeeks, while WooCommerce, membership sites, or critical WordPress applications require maximum performance, and premium hosts like WP Engine or Kinsta suit better.

Unlike many review sites, we don’t favor companies based on commissions. This is evident from the fact that we don’t recommend most of the popular WordPress hosting providers, which are recommended everywhere else.

Which is your existing WordPress hosting provider? Does our guide help you to learn something new related to choosing your hosting partner? Let us know in the comments.