Fastest WordPress Hosting – 5 Best Web Hosting Providers
It is a good idea to use WordPress for your website, it is a fast, reliable and open-source content management system (CMS), used by more than 30% of the websites. You don’t need anything else to start, just a domain name and a web host.
But having a good web host can be more difficult to find, since there are ten thousand of hosting companies on the internet and many of them use aggressive marketing to catch you. It is not sure that you will find the most reliable web hosting by clicking on Google or Facebook ads.
One of the most important attributions of hosting is the server speed. The faster server you find, the faster your website will be loaded. Loading time, next to content quality, is the most critical factor in search engine optimization. Site speed is also important for Google; it considers your website better if it loads faster. And better placements on Google search result pages mean more free visitors from the search engine.
Also, your visitors need content very quickly and your website will have only a few seconds to catch them. If your site is slower, your visitors will leave, and you lose them. So, in few words: website speed is more than important. It is vital.
In this article we are going to cover all threats what can slow down your website and review few reliable WordPress web hosting providers to choose from.
5 Best & Fast WordPress Host Reviewed
We’ve analyzed and tested top WordPress hosting providers and here are the 5 best hosting companies, that will give your WordPress site the best speed and performance:
Hosting Company | Price From | Speed | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
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$2.75 / mo |
481 ms | |
2 |
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$3.95 / mo |
449 ms | |
3 |
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$3.99 / mo |
476 ms | |
4 |
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$3.95 / mo |
534 ms | |
5 |
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$3.92 / mo |
603 ms |
You can use the best WordPress templates and ask the most talented programmers to make your site, but it won’t be fast without a good host. Having a reliable WordPress web host is vital and it can be confusing to find the best ones from the market.
As we already mentioned, in most cases the worst companies do the most aggressive advertising to catch new customers. To not be fooled, you should also make a short research and read reviews before purchasing a package. We compiled the list of best WordPress web hosting companies, highlighting those services that are essential for a well working website.
1. HostGator
HostGator was founded in 2002 and currently has more than 400,000 users and maintains over 9,000,000 domain names.
Why do we recommend HostGator?
- more than 16 years in hosting business
- all hosting packages come with unlimited bandwidth
- you can add unlimited sub domains, FTP accounts and email accounts
- 45-day money-back guarantee
- 7/24 support
HostGator offers 3 types of cheap WordPress hosting packages:
- Hatchling Plan is the smallest package of the company and it is ideal for a single website. It is available from $2.75/month.
- Baby Plan is the economy package where you can add unlimited number of websites, for a $3.95/month starting price.
- Business Plan gives you more extra than Hatchling and Baby Plans. It can serve unlimited number of websites and provides a free private SSL & IP and a free dedicated IP address. It is available from $5.95/month.
The above enumerated plans are suitable for small WordPress sites. However, if you need more speed and better performance, you should opt for one of the WordPress Cloud Hosting plans offered by HostGator:
- Starter Plan is a good choice for hosting a WordPress site with up to 3,300 daily visitors (100k / mo). This plans includes 1GB backup space as well free SSL certificate.
- Standard Plan allows hosting two WordPress sites, summing a total daily visits of around 6,500 (200k / mo). It comes with 2GB backup storage and free SSL, just like the previous plan.
- Business Plan is similar to the other two, with the difference of suiting up to 17,000 daily (500k monthly) visitors to 3 hosted websites.
The WordPress cloud plans offer 2.5 times more speed than the shared plans. If you plan moving your website from another host to HostGator, they will assist you with the migration, offering Free Migration service.
2. BlueHost
BlueHost was founded in 2003 and they host more than 2 million websites. The company’s owners are big WordPress fans, and you can find a real professional support team for your questions.
Why do we recommend BlueHost?
- more than 15 years of experience in hosting
- super quick SSD storages instead of classic hard disks
- all WordPress packages contain a free domain name and an IP address
- no limit in bandwidth usage
- 24/7 support and 30-day money-back guarantee
BlueHost offers the following managed WordPress packages:
- WP Standard is ideal for serving up to 100 million visits per month. It gives you 30 GB storage, 2 GB memory and 30 GB storage for backups. The package is available from $19.99/month.
- WP Enhanced can be good for websites that are having up to 300 million visits per month. It comes with 60 GB web space, 60 GB backup storage and 4 GB memory. Its starting price is $29.99 a month.
- WP Premium can serve up to 600 million visits monthly and offers 120 GB storage, 120 GB backup and 6 GB memory. It is available from $39.99/month.
- WP Ultimate is suitable for you, if you want to serve unlimited views with your websites. The biggest package gives you 240 web storage, 240 GB backup space and 8 GB memory. The package price starts at $49.99/month.
BlueHost also have unmanaged WordPress hosting plans with the following specs:
- Basic is great for startup your first WordPress sites. This plan allows hosting a single website, comes with free SSL certificate, 50GB SSD storage and offers a really good speed for WordPress websites. The Basic plan costs $3.95 / month with a 3 years subscription.
- Plus is similar to the Basic Plan, though this allows hosting multiple domains and has unlimited SSD storage. In terms of speed and performance, you will get the same results as with the previous plan. The Baisc plan starts at $5.95 with a 3 years hosting plan.
- Choice Plus is similar to the Plus plan in terms of speed, reliability and performance. This plan comes with the CodeGuard basic backup included, which is very handy to backup your website regularly on autopilot. The Choice Plus plan is not available at discounted price, at only $5.95 / month (just like the Plus plan) with a 3 years contract.
For a high traffic WordPress site, you might need to opt for the managed hosting service, but for smaller WordPres sites, the shared plans will provide you enough speed and performance to keep your visitors happy.
3. InMotion Hosting
InMotion has been in business since 2001, starting with shared hosting services. It quickly realized that there is a big need for WordPress packages, so they introduced highly customized WordPress hosting offers as well.
Why do we recommend InMotion?
- more than 17 years in business
- all WordPress packages come with a free domain name
- unlimited bandwidth usage
- unlimited number of assigned email accounts
- super quick SSD storage
- 90-day money-back guarantee
- 7/24 support
InMotion offers 6 WordPress hosting packages:
- WP-1000S is the smallest package, thus ideal for a single website with up to 20,000 monthly visitors. It gives you 40 GB storage for $4.99/month starting price.
- WP-2000S can be a home of 2 websites, up to 50,000 overall monthly visitors. The package contains 80 GB and a Jetpack Personal license in value of $39/year. You can buy it from $8.99/month.
- WP-3000S is ideal for up to 3 websites, with a maximum of 125,000 monthly visitors. You will get 120 GB web storage and the Jetpack Personal license for a $11.99/month starting price.
- WP-4000S is even bigger; you can add 6 websites to this package and serve up to 600,000 monthly visitors. The storage is 160 GB big and the extras include a free dedicated IP as well. Instead of Jetpack Personal, you will get a Jetpack Professional license in value of $299/year. The package price starts at $29.99/month.
- WP-5000S can serve 10 websites with 600,000 overall visitors monthly and gives you 200 GB storage. This package also contains the free IP and Jetpack Professional license. It is available from $59.99/month.
- WP-6000S is the biggest WordPress package and can be a home of 20 websites, serving up to 1,200,000 overall monthly visitors. You will get the free IP and Jetpack Professional license too; the package is available from $114.99/month.
You can setup a WordPress website on InMotion’s business hosting plans. These plans will give you really good performance too, though they are not managed WordPress hosting plans:
- Launch is the standard web hosting plan offered by InMotion Hosting, which comes with a free domain name, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, unlimited emails, free SSL and more. This plan allows hosting two websites. It costs $3.99 / month with a 2 years contract.
- Power is their next level shared hosting plan. It differs significantly from the Launch plan, because it allows hosting 6 websites and offers twice the performance. The cost is also higher, starting at $5.99 per month with a 2 years subscription.
- PRO is advertised as the “best value” plan. It is similar to the Power plan, with the difference of 4 times the performance and access to Pro Level Support. This plan is available at a higher cost, starting at $13.99/mo with one year subscription period.
InMotion’s Business plans are great for hosting smaller WordPress sites, keeping a good balance between cost and website performance.
4. SiteGround
SiteGround was launched in 2004 and nowadays hosts more than 1,600,000 domain names. Its story started in a dormitory and became one of the biggest industry members.
Why do we recommend SiteGround?
- more than 14 years in hosting business
- unlimited bandwidth usage
- unlimited sub domains and email accounts
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- super-fast SSD storages
- above industry standard 99.99% server uptime
- 7/24 support
SiteGround offers 3 WordPress web hosting packages:
- StartUp is the smallest package and suitable for a single website with up to 10,000 visits per month. It comes with 10 GB space and a WordPress service-pack for a $3.95/month starting price.
- GrowBig is ideal if you want to add more than 1 website to your hosting package. It offers 20 GB web storage and can serve up to 25,000 overall monthly visitors. The WordPress service-pack was extended with premium features, the package is available from $5.95/month.
- GoGeek is the biggest WordPress package, designated for real geeks. It can be also a home of multiple website, with a maximum 100,000 visits monthly. The 30 GB storage gives you more space and geeky WordPress features mean other add-ons to previous 2 WordPress service-packs. It is available from $11.95/month.
5. A2Hosting
A2Hosting was founded in 2003 and is a big fan of environmental protection solutions. It focuses on strong services and provides the most up-to-date server environment, even for developers as well.
Why do we recommend A2Hosting?
- more than 15 years in business
- unlimited web space
- unlimited bandwidth usage
- super-fast SSD storages
- anytime money-back guarantee
- 7/24 support
- up to 20x faster running environment for bigger packages
A2Hosting has 4 WordPress web hosting packages:
- Lite is the smallest package and ideal for a single website. You can add up to 5 databases and reach your site via the free SSL service. It is available from $3.92/month.
- Swift package was designed for serving unlimited number of websites and there is no limit for number of used databases. The 2 times more server resources give more strength, for only a $4.90 starting price.
- Turbo is the biggest unmanaged WordPress package and it comes with unlimited server resources. The A2 Site accelerator can speed your site up to 20 times, by utilizing site, memory and other type of caches. It is available from $9.31/month.
- Managed package means managed WordPress hosting and it is available with different service parameters. The storage size varies from 10 GB to unlimited and extra services include a free Jetpack Personal license too. The main element of this package is the full WordPress management. The starting price is $12.97/month.
How to Speed Up WordPress Websites
If you have successfully chosen your WordPress hosting provider, then we can move forward to other vital elements of a fast website.
Speed Up WordPress with a Content Delivery Network
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a technical solution to speed up your website’s display for visitors. It uses a single physical fact; the shorter distances can be taken faster.
As your website grows, you will have visitors around the World. Some of them will live far away from your website server’s physical location, and the data from the server will need some time to arrive to those visitors’ computer. It is true, that electronic data moves quickly on the Internet, but still, it will need some time to arrive to the target computer.
This problem was solved by utilizing content delivery networks, where different servers were placed at different locations of the World. If you use a CDN, your server’s content will be copied over to member servers around the World and your site or the static parts of it will be alive in many instances. Next time a visitor from far away visits your website, not your original server will serve the data, but the nearest CDN server to the visitor’s location. For example, if your server is in Europe, it will serve your website for European visitors. If your CDN has a server in Asia, then the CDN server will serve your website for Asian visitors. And so on.
CDN is available for a small fee so it is worth to use it. Most of WordPress web hosting providers also offer you CDN solutions, by partnering the biggest networks of the market. You won’t have extra tasks by purchasing a CDN service, since everything is automatized. The member servers of content delivery network synchronize the data between each other and your original server, so your visitors will be served with the up-to-date version of your website.
Use Only Few, But Reliable WordPress Plugins
WordPress is a one-armed giant without plugins, these code add-ons give those extras to the original content management software we like the most. There are ten thousand of plugins on the market, so it can be confusing to choose the best ones.
Also, some WordPress site owners install dozens of plugins to their sites, but you should avoid such behavior. There can be many disadvantages to use many plugins without control:
Plugins can use too much resources
Since plugins are code pieces, server resources are needed to process and execute them. The PHP functions should be interpreted and the HTML output of them should be used on the site. You don’t see these processes, but thousands of actions taken place in the background by your server package’s CPU and memory.
If you use too many plugins, they will use more CPU or memory than you have in your WordPress hosting package, and the server will throw an error. It may cause your site to stop working and your visitors will just see a blank white space or some error message.
Plugins can conflict each other
Plugins use the same memory and disk areas, and the processes continuously read those parts and write back some data. If you use too many plugins, sooner or later some of them will want to use the same memory piece or disk part and they will conflict with each other.
In such cases, they can cause server error and a website halt. It is also possible, that you won’t be able to recover your site without your provider’s tech support, and it will need some time.
The list of essential WordPress plugins
To avoid a site crash, use only those plugins which are crucial. Here’s a list of essential WordPress plugins, based on our experience, use them if they fit your purposes:
- W3 Total Cache: this is the ultimate WordPress cache plugin, used by millions
- Jetpack: statistics, management tools and other assets
- Akismet: for protecting your site against spam
- Contact Form 7: you can add nice forms with only few clicks
- WP Smushit: this plugin automatically optimizes your images’ size and quality
- Yoast SEO: for controlling your SEO work
You can add gallery, guestbook or other special plugins too, but the above mentioned 6 plugins are those ones, which every WordPress site should have.
Use a Good Lightweight WordPress Theme
Having a good theme is just as important as having well performing plugins. The theme is responsible for showing a nice look for your visitors, so it is vital to choose a good one. But the design is not the only thing that’s observed, it should also be fast and well coded.
If you choose a slow theme, many of your visitors won’t wait until your website loads. Also, we can’t say enough times, Google gives penalty to slow sites, so you risk the free visitors from Google with a bad theme.
We reviewed many WordPress themes so far and one of our favorites is Divi from Elegant Themes. It is a premium theme, fully packaged with extra features and assets, plus it is responsive and super-fast. You can’t go wrong by choosing it.
Why we recommend Divi?
We recommend Divi because it works reliably and it is good – real good. It will save you a lot of money, effort and time, since you won’t need to handle the continuously upcoming problems. You can focus on your work instead.
If you are curious which features are added into Divi, we can highlight the most important ones to you:
Advanced Visual Builder
You can add new elements to your site by clicking on the desired area and you will see the result in real time. The Divi Builder has just got a new version, so it is now even more advanced. You can easily customize the whole look, including font type, colors, space between the elements and more.
Import and Export elements
Once you made your perfect layout, you can export it for your other sites. You can easily import other layouts as well, and you can even sell your nice look to other people. Of course, there are pro designers who already made their super layouts and you can buy and import them only with a few clicks. 20 additional layouts were already packed into the theme by the developers, so you can choose them for free, too.
Content elements
46 pieces of content elements were packed into this theme that you can use for many purposes. There are many widely used ones, such as blog, button, call to action, contact form, gallery or different sliders, but you can find special ones too, like bar counter or accordion. The type of elements shows well the multipurpose use of Divi, you can even add a pricing table, a portfolio or a shop element as well.
Responsiveness
It goes without saying, that a modern WordPress template should be fully responsive. One more special feature that can be banded to this function; when you edit your theme and you can see the changes in real time; you will see the responsive preview too. As a plus, you can instantly add mobile breakpoints to your custom layout, right at the middle of editing process.
The above covered main features show well, why Divi is a modern theme. Because Divi is a top seller item, the programmers already have enough resources to find out and code state of the art features. The advanced builder, the real time view during editing, the responsiveness of the tools are something that not many other themes can give you. Before launching Divi, only programmers were able to add such assets to your site for great amount of money.
Resize and Optimize Images for Web
We already covered, why site speed is important and won’t repeat it. Also, because images are one of the biggest objects on your site, it is important to handle them with care to not slow down your website. By adding too many images that were not optimized properly, you can totally kill your website’s load time.
After you chose a good web hosting provider, utilize a CDN network, install a super quick theme and use only the must have plugins, don’t let big images slow down your website.
When we are referring to handle images with care, we mean a few basic measurements that you can also do easily:
Choose suitable dimension for your images
Modern digital cameras make very big images, because in special cases, like posters or billboards, buyers need them. But this doesn’t mean you should use them as they are. Modern devices use Full HD resolution width 1920 px width so unless you are an artist who wants to show the masterpieces in 4K, it is enough to show your images in maximum 1920 pixels.
And this already means the whole site width. If you know that your website’s part that shows images is never going to be bigger than the half of the width, you can simply cut the Full HD width to half. The 1000 px wide images will mean much less data, than the 1920 px wide or bigger ones.
Choose suitable type for your images
There are many image types available on the Internet and all of them have different purposes. When we talk about web pages, you should use only .png, .jpg and .gif files. In some cases, you can use .ico files too (for favicons for example), but basically you should use the mentioned 3 types.
- JPG (.jpg) files are bigger and ideal for showing nice pictures with great colors and tones. Basically, all normal images on your site should be in JPG.
- PNG files are bigger if you use them instead of JPG, but in some cases, they are the ideal choice. This file type can contain transparent background; JPG is not transparent, so whenever you want to use transparent background, use PNG format. Otherwise use JPG.
- GIF files can contain motion elements, so if you want to show animations, choose them. Animation means bigger file size; therefore, many GIFs can slow down your site. Typical good usage of GIF files: animated emoticons, flags or similar small, icon-sized elements on the site.
Slightly related topic in image types section is CSS. We should mention that in many cases you can use CSS definitions instead of images. If you want to show a big blue background on your site, it can be a big image or 2 lines of CSS code. The latter one would be 1000 times smaller.
Optimize the images
Once you cut your images to the perfect dimension and chose the best file type for them, you should also make the image optimization. It is about human eyes’ imperfectness. Our eyes can’t see the small differences between a perfect and a bit worse quality image. Optimization means the process when we make the image quality lower until the result still looks the same for the readers. These optimized images will be much smaller files than the original images.
You can optimize your images one-by-one but there are tools that can do it instead of you, in bulk. For example, TinyJPG is an online tool to optimize JPG or PNG images and you can add there up to 20 images with few clicks.
We already mentioned WP Smushit plugin under the must have plugins section of this article, it can automatically optimize your images on your WordPress site.
If you successfully utilized the above mentioned 3 image handling steps, then you can be sure, your images won’t slow down your website. Let’s move to caching!
Use a Caching WordPress Plugin
As your website develops, you will get more and more traffic and you will have to use more server resources. Because adding newer and newer resources to your hosting package costs money, you should use caching to reduce the server load. This way you can serve your visitors better and should not have to pay more for hosting.
There are many caching plugins on the market, but W3 Total Cache is one of the best for WordPress. It offers advanced customization options and makes your site faster:
Page caching
When your website is displayed, many elements are generated dynamically. This needs some time and server resources. W3 Total Cache generates a static version of your site and serves it to your visitors. It needs fewer resources and when something is changed on your site, W3 Total Cache updates the static version with changes.
Minifying
W3 Total Cache can minify your CSS, HTML and JavaScript files. It removes the whitespaces and all unnecessary elements from code, thus they can be loaded quicker.
Database caching
The plugin can also cache the database queries, so your site will use less database actions.
All the 3 mentioned methods can be utilized on your website; however, page caching is what most websites use. Code minifying and database caching should be applied with care and make sure to always create backups of the files and databases before making any actions with them.
Block Unwanted Visitors
Sometimes happens that your audience lives in only few a countries, or at least, you don’t want to accept visits from some parts of the World. It is also possible that your website is under a continuous attack and the source of attacks can be traced to exact countries or IP ranges.
If you want to ban unwanted visitors to save server resources, or block the attacks that kill your site, you should use some blocking method. There are different solutions to do it, for example, editing the .htaccess file can be a good idea. However, it needs server knowledge and should be taken with care to not block your target audience too.
Since you use WordPress, you can use a plugin to make the ban-list, one of the best assets for this task is WP-Ban. With it, you can block users by IP address, or ban whole IP ranges, countries or forwarders.
Conclusion
If you arrived at the Conclusion section, then you already know there are many things that can slow down your website. We covered all the possible threats and gave you solutions to avoid them. Be sure to use the above-mentioned elements, technologies and products and your website will be always healthy, serving your visitors quickly!
Thanks for sharing this awesome blog post. I totally rely on the list that you has shared here with us. All of them are great iaas provider and are a great option for wordpress hosting. However, I think you missed couple of names as the likes of DigitalOcean web server, AWS, Cloudways, etc. As they are also considered among top iaas providers available in the industry.