Kinsta Review 2024: Our #1 Recommend Managed WordPress Host
Kinsta Review Summary
Kinsta is our top recommended Managed WordPress hosting service. During our test, we found that Kinsta TTFB and uptime are excellent. It also handled our load test exceptionally well. When it comes to user experience, Kinsta offers the best feature loaded WordPress control panel to manage your site. The dashboard is extremely useful for agencies and developers, and it can help save a lot of time managing the bulk of WordPress sites. The customer support is unparalleled with the most knowledgeable people, and I’ve enjoyed speaking out. Yes, there are some cons, like there will be upselling for features like Redis, external backups, etc., but it’s not an essential thing for most sites. Overall, Kinsta is a powerful managed WordPress host where you can put your trust.
Kinsta Review Pros
Kinsta Review Cons
Starts at $35/month
Kinsta Plans and Pricing
Kinsta plans to start from $35 per month with two months of free hosting on annual plans. Whether your website is small or big, Kinsta covers you with multiple plans. Their plans are mainly categorized into
- Starter – Starts at $35 per month
- Pro – Starts at $60 per month
- Business – Starts at $100 per month
- Enterprise – Starts at $600 per month.
Kinsta Performance
TTFB
The Kinsta site recorded an average TTFB of 378 ms last year. The score is absolutely faster and better than its direct competitor, WP Engine, which scores 414 ms in the same period.
Last 12 months average speed of Kinsta:
- September 2024 average TTFB: 579 ms
- August 2024 average TTFB: 498 ms
- July 2024 average TTFB: 484 ms
- June 2024 average TTFB: 435 ms
- May 2024 average TTFB: 404 ms
- April 2024 average TTFB: 419 ms
- March 2024 average TTFB: 451 ms
- February 2024 average TTFB: 440 ms
- January 2024 average TTFB: 419 ms
- December 2023 average TTFB: 418 ms
- November 2023 average TTFB: 427 ms
Uptime
In the same period, the Kinsta site recorded an uptime of 99.99%, again better than its competitors’ scores.
Last 12 months average uptime of Kinsta:
- September 2024 average uptime: 99.99%
- August 2024 average uptime: 100%
- July 2024 average uptime: 100%
- June 2024 average uptime: 100%
- May 2024 average uptime: 100%
- April 2024 average uptime: 100%
- March 2024 average uptime: 100%
- February 2024 average uptime: 100%
- January 2024 average uptime: 100%
- December 2023 average uptime: 100%
- November 2023 average uptime: 100%
Load Testing
The Kinsta site recorded an average response time of 27 ms. The score is obtained by sending 500 simultaneous visitors to the site.
Global TTFB
The Kinsta site recorded a global TTFB of 654 ms. The score is obtained by testing the Kinsta site from 40 global locations.
Core Web Vitals
The Kinsta site recorded a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 677 ms, a ‘Total Blocking Time’ of 0 ms, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.
Kinsta Features
Control Panel
Kinsta offers one of the fastest and easiest-to-use custom control panels to manage WordPress sites. Most settings can be accessed within 1-2 clicks from the main menu.
Restoring a backup requires two clicks while enabling CDN or Edge Caching requires a single click. The tools menu is my personal favorite where I can Perform 14 actions with a single click.
The left sidebar Menus are neatly placed, and when you click any of the options, a popup opens on the same page on the right sidebar, giving a detailed explanation about the option and its use case.
APM is a great option for monitoring the performance of WordPress sites. When I click Learn More, a right-sidebar popup opens with detailed information about APM.
Edge Caching
Edge Caching is the most recent feature improvement at Kinsta.
Powered by Cloudflare, the Edge caching caches the entire site content (HTML, CSS, JS, and images) on their 275+ global edge locations and delivers fast-loading pages.
After enabling it, our site improved its TTFB speed by 35%, thus improving the overall page load time.
Kinsta Staging
Kinsta offers two types of staging environments. The free staging environment is suitable for most site owners to test the new updates on staging.
The staging site can be moved to the production site with a single click.
Kinsta also offers a premium staging environment with 12 CPUs and 8GB of Memory to work on big-sized sites on the staging environment.
Kinsta Migrations
Kinsta offers unlimited migrations on all its plans. Inside the dashboard, Click on Add Site and then Request Migration (simple as that).
Based on your plan, you’ll be offered a limited number of premium and basic migrations.
The basic migration is suitable for most sites, and Kinsta can migrate your site from any popular hosting provider, such as WP Engine, GodDaddy, Pagely, Pantheon, etc.
On the next page, Kinsta will ask for the required details. Depending on your site size, the migration may take up to 2 business days to complete.
Overall, there is little to discuss here as Kinsta does all these migrations at the backend.
Kinsta Backups
Kinsta offers up to 30 days of automated backup copies based on your plan. While starter and Business plans have 14 days of copies, the Enterprise plans have 30 days of backups.
The daily backups can be seen under the Backups Tab.
Kinsta offers daily, 6-hour, and hourly backups at an additional cost. They also offer the option to upgrade your site to external backups of Amazon S3 and Google Cloud storage.
There is also an option to generate manual backups, which site owners can create before upgrading to new WordPress versions.
Kinsta Security
Kinsta uses Cloudflare as a security feature. The company integrates Cloudflare’s Firewall and DDoS protection to block malicious traffic on all sites.
It also incorporates a Google Cloud Platform firewall for IP-based protection. Kinsta also mentions that it has a dedicated Malware Team that provides malware removal service free of charge on all its plans.
Data Centers
Kinsta offers its customers the most data center options. It utilizes all 35 Google Cloud data center locations.
The company also uses Google’s most powerful C2 Virtual machines in all its data centers. WP Engine also uses Google Cloud as its data center partner, but it uses slightly underpowered Virtual machines.
Kinsta Alternatives: How Kinsta Compared to its Competitors
The most popular Kinsta alternatives are WP Engine, Cloudways, and SiteGround.
Compared with our in-house performance data, Cloudways offers a slightly faster TTFB but average in load tests where Kinsta greatly excelled.
Though Cloudway’s price looks affordable at first sight, you need to buy CDN and backups at an extra cost. Cloudways support is sometimes HIT or MISS, but Kinsta support is always of high quality.
WP Engine is a direct alternative to Kinsta. During our test, Kinsta outperformed WP Engine in all performance tests. When Kinsta offers Edge caching free of cost, WP Engine upsells this feature, making me recommend Kinsta more than WP Engine.
SiteGround is a cheaper alternative to Kinsta. However, we generally don’t recommend it due to various factors explained in this review. Our data shows that SiteGround is often slow in most tests and has average uptime results. They also have many restrictions on contacting customer support and upselling features like CDN and Dynamic Caching.
Kinsta Support
Kinsta offers 24/7 multilingual support in five languages. The best mode of support is Live chat. They don’t have phone support, which might disappoint some customers.
I have chatted with multiple support Engineers on various occasions, and Kinsta hires the most knowledgeable people in the industry. All their suggestions and solutions are straightforward.
They sometimes explain to some extent what caused the issue and educate me on it. In a single term, I can say Kinsta support means quality.
Concluding Kinsta Review
If you look into our data, Kinsta has nothing to complain about. They have got the best speed and uptime. Their backend performance is even faster and uncomparable as Kinsta is the only brand to use Google’s most potent C3D CPU machines. The have got the highest quality of customer support. Overall, Kinsta is like a dream hosting services for any type of WordPress sites.