When it comes to websites, speed is important.
How quickly your website loads affects everything from your visitors’ user experience to your conversion rates and ultimately where your site ranks in Google’s organic search results.
All that adds up to the fact that you need to put a focus on making sure your WordPress site loads as quickly as possible. A big part of that is installing tools and plugins to help your site load faster.
Choosing A Fast WordPress Web Host
But the other part is choosing the fastest WordPress hosting possible. Optimizing your site certainly helps, but at the end of the day, your page load times will always be limited by the server that your WordPress site sits on.
So if you’re looking for a place to host your WordPress site that will help it load quickly, read this post for a look at three of the fastest WordPress hosting providers out there.
1. Bluehost Optimized WordPress Hosting
While I recommend Bluehost’s shared hosting to beginners because of its affordability, if you’re looking for even faster page load times, you’re better off going with Bluehost’s optimized WordPress hosting.
While it is a bit more expensive than Bluehost’s shared hosting plans, you get a number of features that can make your WordPress site load faster.
Let’s start with the big reason your site will load even faster on Bluehost’s WordPress hosting:
- Bluehost’s WordPress hosting uses VPS technology.
That means you get your own portion of a server entirely to yourself. With shared hosting, your server’s resources are shared among all the sites on that server. But with the VPS technology, you never need to share, which means there’s no danger of your site slowing down because of what someone else is doing.
But that’s not the only improvement…
Bluehost’s WordPress hosting also uses NGINX web servers, whereas their shared hosting uses Apache web servers. NGINX performs significantly better than Apache, especially for high traffic sites. In this test, NGINX performed 4.2x better than Apache, on average.
Other benefits of choosing Bluehost’s WordPress hosting include:
- Integrated SiteLock features to secure your site.
- Dynamic upgrades if you ever need to quickly scale your server to handle more traffic.
- Automatic backups and dedicated backup storage.
- Free SSL certificate.
Like I said, you will pay more than Bluehost’s shared hosting, but if you’re looking for the fastest WordPress hosting, it’s still a pretty good deal:
Bluehost’s WordPress hosting starts at $19.99 per month and goes up from there.
You can view a full pricing table below:
2. Kinsta
If you want the absolute fastest WordPress hosting and are willing to pay a high price for it, Kinsta is one of the best options out there.
Kinsta is actually where I’ve been hosting ShoutMeLoud for the past two years or so.
If you want a deeper look at Kinsta, I suggest that you read my full Kinsta review.
Everything about Kinsta is optimized for performance.
First, they use the Google Cloud platform to power your site. Yes, that means your website runs on Google’s infrastructure when you host with Kinsta. And Google has a pretty good reputation when it comes to the internet!
But it’s not just about the Google Cloud platform, Kinsta also uses all the right technology to ensure that your WordPress site loads blazingly fast.
That means:
- NGINX – as I told you in the Bluehost section, NGINX performs much better than the slower Apache web server that many shared hosts use.
- PHP 7 – PHP 7 performs significantly better than the older PHP 5.X technology that many shared hosts still use.
- LXD containers – these help your site load faster.
- MariaDB – MariaDB performs better than the MySQL databases used by many cheap shared hosts.
When you put all of those performance-enhancing technologies on top of the Google Cloud Platform, you get incredibly fast page load times.
Beyond performance, Kinsta also has a ton of other helpful features that I talked about in my full review:
- User-friendly admin dashboard – you get a custom dashboard instead of cPanel.
- Staging sites – create a duplicate copy of your site to test changes.
- Great support – I talk about my positive experience with Kinsta support in my review.
- Automatic backups – this will help keep your data safe!
As I said, Kinsta does charge a premium for its premium service.
The cheapest plan is $100 per month:
3. SiteGround
SiteGround offers performance-oriented WordPress hosting that’s more in line with Bluehost’s prices than Kinsta’s prices.
Unlike the other two hosts, SiteGround’s WordPress hosting is shared hosting. And while that fact alone isn’t great for performance, it does include a ton of other high-performing technologies that most hosts don’t offer.
Things like:
- HTTP/2 – HTTP/2 offers better performance than the older HTTP technology used by many shared hosts. Additionally, SiteGround gives you a free SSL certificate so that you can take advantage of HTTP/2 at no extra cost.
- PHP 7 – as I mentioned before, PHP 7 performs much better than the older PHP 5.X technology used by many shared hosts.
- SSD storage – offers a big performance boost over older, physical drives.
And on the higher-tier plans, you’ll also benefit from SiteGround’s three levels of server-side caching to further improve your site’s performance.
Beyond those performance features, SiteGround also gives you:
- Automatic updates.
- Staging sites (on the highest tier).
- Automatic core WordPress updates.
- Free SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt.
- Account isolation to protect your site.
- Helpful 24/7 support.
While SiteGround doesn’t use NGINX like the other two hosts, it’s still one of the fastest WordPress hosting providers that you’ll find in this price range.
SiteGround’s WordPress hosting plans start at $3.95 per month with promotional pricing.
But you might want to go with the $5.95 or $11.95 per month plans for better performance:
Which Of These WordPress Hosts Should You Choose?
All three of these hosts offer fast page load times and great performance. For that reason, I think your decision should mainly come down to price.
If you’re still getting started and aren’t ready to pay $100+ per month for WordPress hosting, then you might be better off going with Bluehost or SiteGround. While I can’t promise that they will be as fast as Kinsta, both offer great performance for the money.
On the other hand, if you want the absolute fastest WordPress hosting and are willing to pay for it, then I think you should choose Kinsta for its amazing performance and support. It’s where I host ShoutMeLoud, so I’m putting my money where my mouth is!
Do you have any recommendations for a WordPress host that loads fast? Tell me about it in the comments!
Like this post? Don’t forget to share it!
Here are a few hand picked articles for you to read next:
- How To Buy Web Hosting With A Free Domain Name For Your WordPress Blog
- Top WordPress Hosting Companies That Offer Free WordPress Host Migration Services
- Which is the Top WordPress Hosting for High Traffic Sites?
Subscribe on Youtube
The 3 Fastest WordPress Hosting Providers + Which One You Should Pick is a post from ShoutMeLoud - Shouters Who Inspires
Comments
Post a Comment