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.
Uptime
The Kinsta site recorded an uptime of 99.99% in the same period; again, its scores are better than its competitors.
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 while clicking 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 to monitor the performance of WordPress sites. When I click the 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 got 35% improvements in TTFB speed, 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 like WP Engine, GodDaddy, Pagely, Pantheon, etc.
On the next page, Kinsta will ask for the required details, and based on your site size, it will take up to 2 business days to complete the migration.
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, in addition to daily backups, offers 6-hour and hourly backups at additional cost. They also provide an 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 part of its security features. The company integrates Cloudflare’s Firewall and DDoS protection to block malicious traffic for all the sites.
It also incorporates a Google Cloud Platform firewall for IP-based protection. Kinsta also mentions they have a dedicated Malware Team to provide malware removal service free on all its plans.
Data Centers
Kinsta offers the highest number of data center options for its customers. Kinsta utilizes all 35 Google Cloud data center locations.
The company also uses Google’s most powerful C2 Virtual machines in all its data centers. The thing to note is 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 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. We generally don’t recommend it due to various factors explained in this review. Our data shows SiteGround is often slow in most tests and has average uptime results. They have a lot of restrictions in place to contact customer support and upsell 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 support. 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 go to some extent to explain what caused the issue and educate me on the issue.
In a single term, I can say Kinsta support means quality.