Templ Reviews 2023: why I Use Templ for My sites?

If you are looking to buy Templ hosting to host your WordPress sites, then our expert review helps you to find out if Templ is the right choice for you.

In this expert review of Templ, you’ll learn about

• Overview of Templ
• Templ Tech Stacks
• Performance reports
• Features & Support
• Good and Bad of Templ
• Pricing & User Reviews

Templ Review Summary

Templ is the only managed WordPress host to use Google CDN along with Google Cloud Hosting. Their performance is super impressive, their tech support is top notch with 24/7 availability via live chat. With all such resources, Templ pricing starts at just $15 per month. 

I forget to tell you, they will do a speed optimization of your sites when migrating to Templ. Overall, if you like to use fast managed WordPress hosting at an affordable pricing, the Templ should be your ultimate choice.  

Further proof to this review, our site Hostingstep.com is hosted on Templ with utmost satisfaction. 

What is Templ?

Templ is a Managed WordPress Hosting powered by Google Cloud. Templ comes with features like auto-scaling, server based cache, on-demand and manual backups, security, all bundled inside an easy to use control panel. With pricing starts at $15 per month, Templ offers one of the most affordable managed WordPress hosting in the industry. 

Templ Pricing

Templ offers five different WordPress hosting plans. They are

• Micro: $15 per month, 5 GB SSD Storage, 10 GB Bandwidth
• Small: $29 per month, 10 GB SSD, 20 GB Bandwidth
• Small Plus: $54 per month, 18 GB SSD, 40 GB Bandwidth
• Medium: $79 per month, 25 GB SSD, 80 GB Bandwidth
• Large: $149 per month, 50 GB SSD, 160 GB Bandwidth

Managed WordPress Hosting: This is the major offering and they emphasis a lot on their premium support. Plans starting from $15 per month, strategically priced lower than Kinsta and WP Engine which offers similar services at some high prices. At Hostingstep, I’m going to test their cheapest plan.

Managed WooCommerce Hosting: Similar to their WordPress plans, explains the uniqueness of hosting WooCommerce on Templ

WordPress Hosting For Agencies: Suitable for agencies who manage a lot of clients sites. If you like the performance of Templ WordPress hosting, then it’s a good choice to get started.

Templ also provides custom WordPress hosting plans which you can check out inside their control panel. You can also try them for free without spending any dollars.

Templ Tech Stacks

• Ubuntu, Nginx, MariaDB
• PHP 7.4, Let’s Encrypt SSL
• Google Cloud + Google CDN
• Brotli compression 
• Redis object caching

Templ Performance Test

At Hostingstep, we focus on performance to find the best Managed WordPress hosting. I choose the Templ $15 per month plan and did the following performance tests

• Server Response Time
• Core Web Vitals
• Load Testing
• WordPress Benchmark Test
• Uptime
• Global TTFB

Server Response Time

Templ site recorded an average response time of 309 ms for this month. To measure the response time, I deployed a demo site on their Templ, started monitoring the response time from 20+ USA locations through Pingdom.

Lower the response time, faster is your server. The response time of Templ (309 ms) is faster than Kinsta and WP Engine, although Templ hosting is available at half of their price.

Core Web Vitals

With Core Web Vitals going to be a ranking factor, you can’t simply ignore it. In fact, Hostingstep is the first site to report those metrics of hosting companies. The Core Web Vitals scores of Templ are 

Load Testing

Through load testing, I’ve sent 1000 concurrent visitors to the site for 1 minute. This test ensures how good the server responds when you get viral traffic.

The site recorded an average response time of 71 ms and offered a consistent performance throughout the testing time. You can see there are no 4xx/5xx errors, that means, all the 409959 requests are successfully processed without any issues. The test is done at the Micro plan of $15 per month and it’s a great feeling to get sub-100ms response time. 

Uptime

Templ sites recorded 100% uptime over the entire period of testing.

Since this site hostingstep.com too hosted on Templ, you can check our last 90 days of uptime data to double-confirm the effectiveness of Templ when it comes to uptime.

Global TTFB

If your site is having visitors from multiple countries, then this Global TTFB is a great test for you to take a final decision. This tool checks the TTFB from 10 global locations. Templ rocked with sub-400ms low TTFB in six out of ten global locations. The scores are absolutely better than Kinsta and WP Engine. 

Summary: The overall performance of Templ hosting is impressive and reliable. 

Templ Pros

Power of Google Cloud + Google CDN

Templ is the only Managed WordPress host to use Google Cloud and Google CDN. What is the special about Google CDN? It’s the fastest CDN in the globe beating the likes of Cloudflare, AWS Cloudfront etc.

In fact, Google claims, these CDN locations are the same as they use to run Gmail, Youtube, and all other Google Properties. 

Have you ever faced slowness with Gmail or Youtube? I bet, the answer will be NO. That’s the power of Google CDN. In fact, Cloudflare has got more CDN locations than Google, but they lag behind Google when it comes to speed.

Cache-to-Hit ratio is the major factor in CDN. This shows how many requests are passed through CDN and how many requests it missed to process. Whenever Cloudflare misses the Cache and the initial response time will be higher, thus it affects the Core Web Vitals score.

In case of Google, they use the Cache Fill feature through which if one CDN location misses the cache, it will try to cache HIT from the nearest location, thus the ratio of Cache-to-Hit Ratio is always higher. This is one of many interesting features of Google CDN for ultimate performance.

Friendly Customer Support

Templ provides live chat support and it just takes 2-3 minutes for them to respond back. Their speed optimization is a top-notch service where they will do a series of optimization to improve your site performance, for free. Some of the major optimizations are

• WordPress Configuration
• Plugins Audit
• Database Optimization
• Server log issues
• Image Optimization
• Before and after optimization report

I use them to host a few of my sites and here are samples of my chat. I moved my first ever site and they did the speed optimization. They shared the before and after optimization reports. The speed has been improved by nearly 50%.

They also cleaned up the databases, removing unwanted plugins which have speed issues. They also came up with further suggestions to improve the performance. I asked them about PHP workers limit and Templ replied, there is no fixed limit of PHP workers and it scales when needed. I’m sold here and that’s the time I’ve started moving a few more sites to Templ.

The below chat is during my next site transfer. They’ve changed the database engine from myISAM to InnoDB for faster processing, deleted post revisions and optimized all the images. The database size went down from 337MB to 64MB after all the optimizations. Remember, this service comes for free of charge when you migrate to Templ.

Since Templ offers access to all Google data centers, I requested for a data center transfer and the change is done for free of charge. You can see they respond well to all my queries and do all possible things to satisfy the customers.

Overall, Templ offers the best support for WordPress and WooCommerce.

Affordable Pricing

Templ plan starts at $15 per month. If you see around other hosts, they charge based on visits but Templ just uses the Bandwidth limit and they offer enormous bandwidth limits for each plan. The overage bandwidth charges also economical at just $0.20/GB. So, you won’t get shocking bills at the end of month.

Templ also has an auto-scaling feature, so your site can handle additional real-time users with no issues. Though Google CDN is powerful as we discussed above, it is also the most expensive CDN in the market. So most hosts use Cloudflare or other CDNs for savings, but Templ manages to provide Google CDN for free is a great game changer. There is also a 10 days free trial where you can test Templ before getting started.

Powerful Performance

This is an excerpt section of Performance testing reports. Templ secured 100% uptime throughout all the months and recorded an average response time of 313 ms. 

Their Core Web Vitals scores are excellent and there is a great chance for your sites to get a “Pass” score in the search console (remember, it’s a ranking factor by May 2021). In fact, one of our site got a “Pass” score after moving to them. I tried a different set of combinations but nothing worked. After moving my site to Templ, the site has really passed Core Web Vitals even though I’m using heavy page builders in my site.

The site handles 1000 concurrent visitors without any single issues at an average response time of 71 ms. The WordPress benchmarking recorded 6.8 out of 10 which is not great but good.

Overall, Templ offers the best in class performance, solid support, enormous resources and a great tech stack all at an affordable pricing.

Templ Cons

No hosts is perfect and here is the cons of Templ

Control Panel Improvements

Templ comes with a neat control panel with most features available in just 2-3 clicks. But it lacks a few advanced features when compared to WP Engine and Kinsta. There is no direct option to enable CDN from dashboard or WordPress backend. Although the support team is active all time and does CDN activation in seconds, an option would be great.

There is no option to access log files from the dashboard. We need to use SFTP to access the log files. With more people getting into Technical SEO, this feature will be a great addition in the dashboard.

No Email Hosting

This is not a new thing in the hosting industry. It’s better to keep emails away from the server but still I see agencies or small businesses hunt for managed WP hosts with email hosting. If you’re in such a scenario, Templ is not for you. 

Templ Features

Managed WordPress Hosting Control Panel

Templ comes with their own control panel and it’s simple, easy to use. The primary dashboard displays the fast access to each site’s dashboard and the bandwidth usage of the month. There is also an invoice area and then the listing of Templ Blog Posts.

Inside the site dashboard, there are six sections named Overview, Backups, Staging, Plan, Import and Tools.

Overview – Shows a glance of site details, IP address, storage space. Next to it is the one-click access to WordPress Admin dashboard and the SFTP/SSH, database details are included. 

There is an “Edit Website Details” button where you can change site name, change from temporary domain name to production domain. You can also change WordPress details and enable/disable HTTP authentication and SSH/SFTP access. Coming back, there are two options either to restart or delete the sites.

Backups help to create manual backups or restore an existing backup. Templ stores the daily backups in a remote server and doesn’t count towards your plan’s disk space. At single click, you can enter a backup file name and start taking manual backups at remote servers.

To restore a backup, you need to choose the backup website first, then enable Remote Backups to access Templ backups. Templ stores the last 30 days backups compared to 14 days of other hosts and you can choose your date and start the restore process. Based on your site size, the restore process takes some time. 

Staging Sites helps you to test new themes or plugins or design before moving them to product sites. This staging site comes as a part of the plan’s disk space, so you need to make sure the plan has adequate disk space. 

When you click on create, it will ask for a partial copy or full copy of the site and click on continue to complete the staging site creation process. The user interface is the same for Templ staging sites and you can move the staging files to the production site easily.

Plan tab displays the current plan of your site and upon clicking Change Plan you can either upgrade or downgrade. Apart from that, you can also buy disk space alone instead of moving to the next higher plan which is a great saver for sites which exceed disk space.

Import a website using Templ backup or a Duplicator link. Simply use the Type of file or Backup link and you’re ready to import the site.

Tools section comes with a list of tools. You can check for Vulnerabilities in WordPress core, themes or plugins. If you have a list of banned IPs, you can clear it in a single click. Templ offer a caching plugin and a token plugin for one-click WordPress. The Fix Domain option sets the correct WordPress URL replacing the old or temporary domain URLs.

Global Data Center Locations

Templ uses Google Cloud and provides access to all data centers. At the time of writing, Google Cloud has got 24 data centers and 8 future regions that are in development. The list of data centers are

1. Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1) 
2. The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1) 
3. Salt Lake City, USA (us-west3) 
4. Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4) 
5. Los Angeles, California (us-west2) 
6. Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4) 
7. Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1) 
8. Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
9. Eemshaven, Netherlands (europe-west4)
10. São Paulo, Brazil (south america-east 1) 
11. St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1) 
12. Hamina, Finland (europe-north1) 
13. Switzerland (europe-west6) 
14. London, UK (europe-west2) 
15. Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3) 
16. Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1) 
17. Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1) 
18. Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1) 
19. Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1) 
20. Mumbai, India (asia-south1) 
21. Hong Kong (asia-east2) Zürich, 
22. Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2) 
23. Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3) 
24. Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2)

Google Cloud also expanding into Warsaw (Poland), Doha (Qatar), Toronto(Canada), Melbourne(Australia), Delhi (India), Paris(France), Milan (Italy), Santiago(Chile) and Madrid (Spain). Since Templ provides access to all locations, I expect this future locations too included.

Global CDN Locations

Google Cloud CDN caches websites from 100+ locations across the globe. In some cities, they’ve got more than one CDN POPs for better delivery. 

Custom Plans

Inside the Templ dashboard, you can build your own cloud plan with resources of your need. Starting from a minimum of 1 CPU, 4GB RAM, 10 GB Disk Space and 10 GB Monthly data transfer.

All the plans include the free staging sites, automatic backups and the classic Templ support.

Auto Scaling

Templ provides auto-scalable hosting. Templ offers a different set of CPU cores based on your plan.  Whenever your site gets high real-time users, Templ allocates 100% of the CPU automatically for your sites. This feature helps the site to go offline during peak traffic.

If your site is getting consistently high real-time traffic, you can upgrade to the next higher plan that might come with multiple CPU cores, thus the auto-scaling will be more effective.

Managed Security

Templ provides managed security to your site. That means, Templ will take care of all security features. By default, Templ disables XML-RPC which has become a popular way for hackers to target WordPress sites. They also follow a lot of security measures and if in case, if your site hosted on Templ gets hacked, then they will offer free help to rescue hacked websites.

How to Launch a site in Templ?

Head over to the Websites menu and click on the “Create Website”. Now give your website a name, choose website location and the website plan. You can choose the default disk space or create a custom disk space.

Your site will be created in a few minutes. In the meantime, check Domain Tab, enter your domain name. If you use Cloudflare or other DNS configuration, select the option of “Use External Name Servers”. If not, click on and continue using the fastest Google DNS to your site.

At the end, your site will be completely powered by Google Cloud + CDN + DNS for ultimate speed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Templ?

Templ is a managed WordPress powered by Google Cloud hosting. They allow access to host your sites in any of the Google regions around the globe. Templ also provides excellent WordPress support for all plans.

Is Templ host any good?

Templ sites provided excellent performance and reliable uptime is our tests. Their pricing is affordable and the support is top notch, thus Templ host gives you the good value for your money.