When looking for a WordPress hosting, performance is the major factor you should look for rather than a brand name. 

For example, Bluehost is the most recommended and popular host by all our competitors but our test shows that its performance is below average. Though they’re not that bad, there are better options available at an affordable price with better performance. And I help you find such hidden gems.

Over the last five years, we have been rigorously testing and analyzing over 15 WordPress hosting providers to bring you unbiased, no sugar-coated, just hard data-based WordPress hosting reviews. 

Our team signed up at hosting companies, set up test WordPress sites, and tracked crucial metrics like uptime, speed, load test, and hardware performances. We don’t do one-time tests but rather perform 24/7, 365 days of testing in the last five years.

WordPress Shared Hosting

A2 Hosting

If you are starting or moving from an existing shared hosting, A2 Hosting is our most recommended hosting provider. It has perfectly matched performance and pricing. We’ve been testing them for the last five years and not for a single year, we’ve seen a decline in their performance.

Performance:

• 336 ms (#2 in Fastest shared hosting TTFB)
• 99.99% ( #1 in highest shared hosting uptime)
• 185 ms (#1 in shared hosting load test)

We have bought the Startup plan for our testing and it comes with Apache web server and SSD storage. We are pretty much satisfied with its performance, but we also recommend you to try their Turbo plans, which come with NVMe drives and Litespeed web server.

However, we stand by what we see with our naked eyes, so if you are just getting started, the Startup plan is enough to make your site reliable and speedy.

• Read A2 Hosting Review

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks is our next recommended choice for new to mid-level WordPress sites. Their performance and pricing are very similar to A2 Hosting, but it comes with a Litespeed server on all their plans, so the caching comes pretty much built-in. They’re also a green host, meaning they will plant a tree for each hosting account sold.

Performance:

• 332 ms (#1 in shared hosting TTFB)
• 99.97% ( #4 in shared hosting uptime)
• 185 ms (#3 in shared hosting load test)

• Read GreenGeeks Review

Hostinger

Hostinger is our final shared hosting recommendation. If you want a managed WordPress type of control panel with a shared hosting price, Hostinger is the ultimate choice. It comes with a custom hpanel developed in-house by Hostinger. The panel is futuristic and easy to manage sites on the go.

With such rich features, there is a reason why we don’t recommend them at the top of their average load-handling capacity. Compared to A2 Hosting and GreenGeeks, Hostinger handles the load 10x slower, which means their premium plan, which we are testing, is not suitable for handling bulk concurrent visitors. 

Performance:

• 375 ms (#4 in shared hosting TTFB)
• 99.99% ( #4 in shared hosting uptime)
• 1228 ms (#5 in shared hosting load test)

However, they come with a cheaper renewal fee and decent TTFB and uptime, so it’s good for sites that don’t get concurrent visitors.

• Read Hostinger Review

Managed WordPress Hosting

Rocket

Rocket is the fastest and best managed hosting for WordPress. We have been testing their starter plan and since then, they’ve secured the top spot in our WordPress hosting benchmarks. Many companies claim to offer Cloudflare Enterprise, but Rocket does best integration, offering the highest range of speed and uptime. If you are moving from shared to managed hosting, then Rocket should be your ultimate choice.

Performance:

• 279 ms (#1 in managed WordPress host TTFB)
• 100% ( #1 in managed WordPress host uptime)
• 19 ms (#1 in managed WordPress host load test)

Their plan starts at $30/month and you can try them for $1 for the first month.

• Read Rocket.net Review

Kinsta

Rocket is faster, but Kinsta offers a similar performance to that of a mature WordPress platform. Their control panel is one of the industry’s best, and it will take some years for other hosts to catch them. Kinsta uses Google’s top CPU servers, which have been unbeaten in many performance benchmarks. They also provide you with the most extensive 37 data center locations to host your sites closest to your visitors. 

Performance:

• 378 ms (#3 in managed WordPress host TTFB)
• 99.99% ( #2 in managed WordPress host uptime)
• 27 ms (#2 in managed WordPress host load test)

They don’t run any black Friday sales, which indicates their confidence in their product lineup. Their plan starts at $30/month and the best way to save money on Kinsta is to pay annually where you can save a minimum of $70 to a maximum of $1350 based on your plan.

• Read Kinsta Review

WP Engine

WP Engine is a known name in the WordPress industry, and we can’t ignore them. Their performance is not superior to Rocket and Kinsta but comes at an affordable price.

Performance:

• 414 ms (#4 in managed WordPress host TTFB)
• 99.98% ( #3 in managed WordPress host uptime)
• WP Engine load test incomplete.

If you are an agency or multi-site owner looking to host over 10 websites, WP Engine comes with an affordable price tag. Also, WP Engine is the only host to offer a huge upfront discount for newcomers, which allows you to get four months of free hosting on annual plans. That is like paying for 12 months and getting four months of free hosting.

In numbers, it will cost $77/month to host 10 sites on WP Engine, whereas it costs $183/month on Kinsta and $100/month on Rocket. But please remember that WP Engine is not fast like them and choose WP Engine only based on price factor.

• Read WP Engine Review

Managed WordPress Cloud Hosting:

Cloudways

Cloudways is the only best Managed WordPress cloud hosting we recommend and it has loved by most existing customers. If I need to make a list purely based on performance, Cloudways has a high chance of being on our top list, but the user experience is not suitable for beginners.

Performance:

• TTFB: 332 ms
• Uptime: 99.99% 
• Load Test: 266 ms 

Cloudways is a managed cloud provider and helps you choose between multiple cloud providers (DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS and GCP). Their pricing starts at $11/month and offers superior performance, but they don’t offer the luxury of easy site management.

As a techie, their control panel is easier for me, but most small business owners with whom I’ve interacted say there is a little learning curve required to manage the sites from the Cloudways dashboard. There are multiple steps involved in choosing a server, adding applications, adding domain/SSL and getting the site live. 

We strongly recommend Cloudways for their pricing and performance. If you feel like trying, there is a 3-day free trial available. You can explore the dashboard, install a demo site and see how it looks good for your needs.

• Read Cloudways Review

Honorable Mentions

Nexcess: It’s a great, tightly packed hosting service with a good user interface, affordable plans, an auto-scalable solution, and email hosting. Their plans are very suitable for agencies, in my opinion. Plans start at $21/month, and their performance is above average (not bad, but they can’t beat competitors).

Templ: This is where we have hosted our site. It comes with a complete Google tech stack (Google data center, DNS, and CDN), and we rate its performance highly ahead of that of Rocket and Kinsta. If you are looking for a Cloudflare CDN alternative hosting service, Templ should be your ultimate choice. 

WPX: It targets users looking for affordable managed WordPress hosting. Their plans start at $25/month and they are among the top performers in our benchmark tests. However, their user interface is slow and limited. So, we need to cut them from our top list.

FastComet: They are just another cPanel shared hosting service. They have had mixed performances in the last five years. They performed very well in 2023 benchmarks but showed a poor uptime in 2024 data (till August). Considering the long-term data, we cut them out as A2 Hosting, GreenGeeks, and Hostinger do a better job.

WordPress Hosts Which We Don’t Recommend:

Some might be surprised because we don’t recommend big names like HostGator, Bluehost, SiteGround etc. We have data-driven reasons to avoid them for most user needs.

HostGator: This is the slowest host among all the 15+ hosts we’ve tested so far. Be it TTFB, uptime, or load handling, they come last in performance.

Bluehost: The company has been showing some performance improvements in recent times (we have got better TTFB and uptime in 2023 compared to 2020-2022 data), but it’s not adequate as we have shown good providers on our list.

SiteGround: If we look into performance, their TTFB is not good (ranked #12 out of 16 hosts tested) and is comparable only to Bluehost. Their load test works well without their CDN, but when used along with CDN, the results are mediocre. Considering the price-to-performance ratio, SiteGround is not worth the money. 

DreamPress (DreamHost): The hosting is slow on all the tests. In fact, they are the slowest managed WordPress host we’ve tested so far. It’s definitely not worth paying a premium price of $23/month. 

ChemiCloud: It comes with powerful tech stacks and looks impressive on paper. But we are testing their starter plan, and their uptime is worrisome (99.85%). They also struggle with TTFB and load tests.

How do we test to pick the best WordPress hosting services?

To pick the best WordPress hosting provider, we sign up as a customer and buy a hosting account, which is probably the starter plan. Then we buy a domain for each hosting, for example, hostperf-bh.com for Bluehost and install WordPress, configure the domain and hosting. Once the site goes live, we will put it on for rigorous performance testing. It includes TTFB, Uptime and load tests. We also do some advanced tests like global TTFB, WPBenchmarks and Core Web vitals, which are available in our benchmark reports.

Unlike other sites that never show how the test was done, we are transparent, sharing all the details of our test bench setup and the data obtained from our tools.

The TTFB and uptime are measured using the Pingdom synthetic monitoring tool, where the test sites are pinged every 60 seconds once to calculate the TTFB and uptime. This test was done from 22 North American regions, the data is collected from all these locations and averaged to find the overall average TTFB and uptime of a hosting provider.

The load test is done using the loader.io tool. We send 0 – 500 concurrent visitors to the site and measure the average response time. The lower the response time, the faster the servers. 

With five years of historical data, we can identify the consistent performers and eliminate hosting providers with mixed performance.

How are we different from other sites that review WordPress hosting providers?

Our transparent data is what makes the difference. Unlike other sites, we don’t have favoritism to put favorable companies that pay big in our top list. We are data-driven, so based on the latest data, we keep updating our top WordPress hosting providers irrespective of what the company pays us.

Many other review sites strive to test and share some data, but they can’t be verified. Most sites include some performance data only when Google made it mandatory in 2021 to test things that they recommend.

However, At Hostingstep, we have a long history back to 2016 when we started testing companies and provided valuable insights to our clients through our agency. Then, we refreshed our test bench, started an improved process in 2020, and made our whole data public.