Searching for the best WordPress hosting?
Because WordPress is so popular, there are hundreds of hosting providers out there offering everything from cheap shared hosting for the price of a cup of coffee to premium managed WordPress hosting that can range into the hundreds per month.
So – how can you wade through all of those options to pick the best host for your specific needs, budget, and knowledge level?
To tackle this issue, we went hands-on and tested ten of the best-known WordPress hosts. Our goal is to go beyond the marketing copy and find hosts that offer quality services at different price points.
We’ll start with a quick summary of our top picks for different use cases and some general thoughts on hosting. Then, we’ll dissect each host, with the main focus on performance, support, security, notable features, and pricing.
To collect the performance data, we set up our own site on each host and ran multiple performance tests using different testing tools.
Let’s dig in!
We’re going to go much more in-depth in this post with our hands-on tests and experience-backed opinions. However, if you’re in a rush, we want to start things off by giving you a quick summary of our top picks.
So – you can either use this simple summary table as a jumping-off point. Or, you can keep reading to learn exactly why we’ve chosen these hosts and see the test data.
Best budget host with solid performance
👉 GreenGeeks
From $2.95/mo. with promo pricing and $10.95/mo. with regular pricing.
👍 Low prices
👍 Good performance for the money
👍 cPanel and LiteSpeed Web Server
👎 Big difference between promo price and regular price
Best managed WordPress hosting
👉 WP Engine
From $30/mo. for one website and up to 25,000 visitors per month.
👍 Useful managed features
👍 Fast load times
👍 Best performance under scale (great for high-traffic sites)
👍 Expert WordPress support
👎 More expensive than other hosts
Best hosting for beginners
👉 Bluehost
From $2.75/mo. with promo pricing and $9.99/mo. with regular pricing.
👍 Low prices
👍 Very simple for beginners
👍 Offers a dedicated WordPress website builder
👎 Big difference between promo price and regular price
👎 Performance is not good compared to others
Best budget managed WordPress hosting / WooCommerce hosting
👉 Nexcess
From $19/mo. for a single site with no arbitrary visit limits
👍 Excellent performance
👍 No visit limits like other managed hosts
👍 Special WooCommerce hosting plans
👎 Support is OK, but not as good as Flywheel or WP Engine
*Promo vs Regular prices explained – the cheaper promo price only applies to your first billing cycle, which can be up to three years if you pay it all upfront. After that billing cycle expires and you need to renew, you’ll need to pay the regular price. We recommend always factoring the regular price into your plans, especially if you’re only going to pay for a year at a time.
You may have noticed that many web hosts offer general shared hosting plans and WordPress hosting plans. These are two very different things. To illustrate why, let’s walk through their differences one by one:
These days, there’s arguably no good reason for a WordPress user to opt for generic shared hosting. WordPress hosting plans usually start at competitive prices, so they’re the best choice – even if you’re on a tight budget.
Each of the web hosts we’ve chosen for this roundup are very well-known in the WordPress hosting industry, but we didn’t want to base our comparison on reputation alone. To be as thorough as possible, we went through the following process with all ten of them:
When we report the performance data, we’ll share five different metrics:
Let’s check out how each WordPress host performed through our tests.
After concluding our testing, something became very clear – some providers performed considerably better than others. With that in mind, we decided to rank them below from best to worst, to help you make an informed decision. It’s worth mentioning, however, that our rankings are certainly not just based on raw performance – we also need to factor in price and features.
In some situations, you might be better off choosing a host with slightly slower performance if you’re on a tight budget. For example, WP Engine is one of the top hosts on this list in terms of features and performance, but we only ranked it third because its pricing puts it out of reach for a lot of casual WordPress users, especially beginners.
We’ll be sure to note these variables in our analysis – for example, HostGator can be a good option for low-traffic sites, but we don’t recommend it for high-traffic sites.
With that in mind, let’s dig into the best WordPress hosting providers…
GreenGeeks is a popular budget web hosting provider that, as the name suggests, has a special focus on using green energy and creating an environmentally-friendly WordPress hosting solution.
That focus doesn’t distract from offering fast load times, though, and GreenGeeks also offers pretty good performance for the price.
We put GreenGeeks as our top option because it offers the best combination of performance, low prices, and user-friendliness. Basically, it’s an all-around solid option that offers good value for your money. If you’re willing to spend more, you can find faster hosts. But for the price that GreenGeeks charges, it’s hard to do much better.
GreenGeeks offers 24/7 support on all plans via chat, ticket, or phone.
In terms of security, GreenGeeks runs regular malware scans and puts in place proactive firewalls to stop threats before they happen.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.298 s | 0.951 s | 0.818 s | 2.234 s | 2.701 s |
For the price, GreenGeeks offers pretty solid performance. It’s definitely not up there with Flywheel or WP Engine, but the load times are good for cheap shared hosting and GreenGeeks performed better in the load testing than most other budget hosts. So if you want performance on a very tight budget, GreenGeeks offers good value for the money.
One big factor in GreenGeeks’ solid performance is likely that they use LiteSpeed Server on all their plans.
GreenGeeks has low prices, especially when considering its performance. This makes them a great host for people on a tight budget who still want at least solid performance.
The WordPress hosting plans start at just $2.95 with promo pricing, which includes free backups and a CDN.
However, there’s a big jump between the promo prices and regular prices. Once you renew, the entry-level plan will cost $10.95 per month.
It still offers good value even at $10.95 per month, but it’s important to factor the regular price into your decision.
GreenGeeks is a great budget WordPress. So if money is tight but you don’t want to sacrifice on performance, it can be a good option. The green energy focus is also great for people who want to limit the environmental impact of their website(s).
Just make sure to factor in the regular prices along with the promo prices.
Flywheel is a WordPress hosting company that targets both regular users and agencies. It offers a wide variety of plans at different price points and incorporates advanced features across all of them. These features include nightly backups, free security scans, and the ability to create staging sites.
As of 2019, Flywheel is now owned by WP Engine (the next entry on our list). However, the two are still run separately and have separate features, though their prices are almost identical now.
Fun fact – Flywheel is the host that we use here at WPKube, so we really believe in Flywheel as a quality hosting product.
Flywheel offers 24/7/365 live chat support. You can quickly access their support channels from any page in the Flywheel dashboard, whether you need a quick chat, to check the status of a ticket, or reference their handy help docs.
This host also takes security very seriously. They enforce significant login measures and take great pains to keep your site stays safe and malware-free.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.134 s | 0.397 s | 0.542 s | N/A | N/A |
Flywheel performed amazingly in the WebPageTest analysis, beating out all of the other hosts on this list for the lowest times by far.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t test Flywheel with Load Focus because of Flywheel’s firewall/DDoS protection. This firewall is great for protecting your site from malicious actors – it’s only bad for load testing.
With that being said, personal experience lets us know that Flywheel can maintain the same great performance under scale – after all, we do host WPKube on Flywheel and WPKube is a pretty high-traffic site.
Flywheel is one of the fastest hosts we tested. That benefit, combined with their wide range of plans, makes them a good choice for anyone that’s looking for a safe, fast WordPress host.
However, Flywheel is definitely a premium service; the cheapest plan is $15 per month for a single site install and a limit of 5,000 monthly visits. If you’re looking to host multiple websites with significant traffic, Flywheel will get pretty expensive pretty fast as their other plans are identical to WP Engine’s pricing.
Flywheel is a great managed WordPress host for anyone, which is why we use it for WPKube. The performance is excellent and we like they way they use full-page caching in conjunction with the built-in CDN.
However, it’s especially great for agencies or other people building client sites because of the agency-focused features that Flywheel offer.
👉 Our full Flywheel review
💰 Our exclusive 33% off Flywheel coupon
When it comes to advanced features such as automatic performance enhancements, scalability, and high-grade security, WP Engine is second to none. The catch, however, is that unlike most of the other hosts on this list, these features do come at a premium.
WP Engine prides itself on its customer service, and the support staff certainly lives up to the hype. We waited a mere two minutes for an agent to connect with us via live chat, and he easily guided us through a few WordPress-related security queries.
One of WP Engine’s most encouraging offerings is its built-in security features, meaning you don’t need to depend on potentially unreliable third-party plugins.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.144 s | 0.641 s | 0.739 s | 0.347 s | 0.516 s |
Since WP Engine is a premium managed WordPress host, you’d expect excellence from the performance tests and WP Engine certainly didn’t disappoint. They nailed both the one-off WebPageTest analysis as well as the load testing from Load Focus.
In fact, WP Engine had the best load testing times of any host that we tested, which shows that WP Engine will make a great option even for high-traffic websites.
WP Engine is definitely not a budget web host. The cheapest plan starts at $30 per month, which gives you top-notch security and high speeds. You can also get two months free if you pay for a year upfront.
Make sure to use our special link to get 20% off your first payment. If you pay for a year, you’ll get a whopping four months free.
To be frank, WP Engine would probably make the top of this list if it weren’t for a small detail – their prices. This is a web host built for serious WordPress sites that need top-notch speed and security, and their prices reflect that fact. If you have the budget for it, you probably won’t find a better option on this list (except maybe Flywheel).
👉 Our full WP Engine review
💰 Our exclusive 20% off WP Engine coupon
InMotion Hosting is one of the largest names in the world of WordPress hosting. They offer only a few select plans, but plenty of WordPress-exclusive features, including WP-CLI support, a collection of free themes, and automatic backups.
Most of the time, InMotion Hosting offers swift support service via live chat, but in some cases, the wait can get quite long. We attribute this to their overwhelming popularity, but it can be jarring if you’re a new customer looking to fix a simple issue.
Despite the (occasionally) erratic wait times, InMotion Hosting’s support is friendly and knowledgeable. We’d even go as far as to say that it’s their strongest point.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.267 s | 0.545 s | 0.950 s | 0.445 s | 0.542 |
InMotion Hosting performed very well in our performance tests, especially when you consider their price. The one-off WebPageTest analysis was very good, especially when it came to LCP. More impressively, though, InMotion Hosting also aced the Load Focus test, which shows that InMotion Hosting can still deliver top-notch performance even in higher-traffic situations.
InMotion Hosting’s managed WordPress hosting plans (which are what we tested) are very competitively priced, starting at $7.99 per month for up to two websites and improved features/performance.
InMotion Hosting’s standout achievement is its page load times, especially under scale. Beyond that, InMotion Hosting offers a decent set of WordPress-specific features, as well as competitive prices. Sadly, they drop the ball a bit when it comes to their support experience. We would recommend this host to webmasters on a budget who want solid performance for the money and are willing to sacrifice a bit when it comes to support.
👉 Our full Inmotion Hosting review
💰 Our exclusive 40%+ off InMotion Hosting coupon
WPX Hosting is an interesting WordPress hosting option because it offers performance that rivals premium managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine and Flywheel, but it doesn’t limit you to a single website on its entry-level plans like those hosts do.
This can make WPX Hosting a great option if you have 2+ sites as you can save a lot of money vs hosts like WP Engine and Flywheel.
WPX Hosting offers above-and-beyond support that’s available 24/7 via live chat. They boast a 30-second average response time, which is one of the faster times that you’ll find.
In terms of security, all of their plans come with automatic daily backups, daily malware scans (and free malware removal), DDoS protection, and a built-in firewall.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.182 s | 0.814 s | 0.844 s | 0.437 s | 0.580 s |
WPX Hosting’s plans start at just $24.99 per month for five websites, 10 GB storage, and 100 GB bandwidth. That five website limit is the most unique thing, as most managed WordPress hosts only give you a single site for that price.
One thing to note, though, is that WPX Hosting counts staging sites as “regular” websites for billing purposes. So if you have one live website and one staging site for it, that counts as two websites for billing.
Overall, WPX Hosting is a great option if you have more than one website and you still want premium performance without breaking the bank. You get performance that can rival WP Engine and Flywheel but at an affordable price that still allows for multiple websites.
👉 Our full WPX Hosting review
💰 Our exclusive 50% off WPX Hosting coupon
Nexcess is a subsidiary of Liquid Web that offers managed WordPress hosting and managed WooCommerce hosting. The managed WooCommerce hosting plans are especially interesting because they’ve been built for WooCommerce from the ground up.
Liquid Web has also been making huge investments into the WordPress space, so you can be confident that Nexcess will keep adding useful new features.
Overall, it’s one of the more affordable managed WordPress hosting providers that you’ll find, but it still offers excellent performance.
Nexcess offers 24/7/365 support on all plans. The support is fine and better than what you’d get with a cheap shared host, but it’s not quite as good as the support from more premium managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine and Flywheel.
In terms of security, Nexcess is a managed platform so it builds in proactive security rules and firewalls to protect your site. You also get useful features like automatic backups and automatic plugin updates with visual regression testing.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.159 s | 0.546 s | 0.725 s | 0.396 s | 0.512 s |
Nexcess is priced competitively for the managed WordPress hosting space. One unique thing about its pricing is that it doesn’t apply arbitrary visit limits like many other managed WordPress hosts. Instead, you’re only billed based on your bandwidth.
The entry-level plan starts at $19 at full price with monthly billing for one site and 2 TB bandwidth. However, you’ll get 50% off for your first six months.
Like WP Engine and Flywheel, Nexcess is another great option if you’re looking for managed WordPress hosting. The performance is excellent, you get all the features you’d expect, and the entry-level plan is one of the more affordable options for managed WordPress hosting.
If you have a WooCommerce store, the special managed WooCommerce hosting plans are also definitely worth a look.
👉 Our full Nexcess review
💰 Our exclusive 40% off Nexcess coupon
HostGator is one of the best-known names when it comes to web hosting, but not one of the most highly regarded. In the past, the hosting service has experienced issues with site speed, but it has recently turned over a new leaf. HostGator’s WordPress Cloud Hosting plans are some of the fastest around in our one-off tests, and they include both free migrations and free SSL certificates.
HostGator offers 24/7 support on all of their plans. When we tested support, they were very friendly and helpful, though we did have to wait about 10 minutes to get in touch with a representative.
Their WordPress plans also come with useful features such as automatic backups and the option to add protection from SiteLock and CodeGuard.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.192 s | 0.545 s | 0.770 s | 3.908 s | 15.809 s |
HostGator is a bit of a mixed bag in terms of performance. They performed quite well in the WebPageTest analysis, with one of the fastest Largest Contentful Paint times of any host on this list. However, they didn’t do nearly as well in the Load Focus test.
This suggests that HostGator can be a good budget option for low-traffic sites as it offers stellar performance in low-traffic situations. However, for high-traffic sites, you’ll probably want to choose a different host that can perform better under scale.
The Starter plan offers the best bang for your buck when it comes to WordPress hosting ($5.95 per month when you commit for a year), but prices increase sharply once you move into the enterprise-level range of plans.
That’s not to say HostGator is a bad option, but you may be mindful of the costs.
HostGator knocks the ball out of the park with low prices and great one-off speed tests. However, they didn’t perform well in the load testing, so we only recommend them for low-traffic sites. Still, most WordPress websites are low traffic, which makes them a solid budget pick for the average webmaster.
👉 Our full HostGator review
💰 Our exclusive 30% off HostGator coupon
Bluehost is one of the biggest and most popular WordPress web hosts around, with a decent variety of plans at mid-to-high prices. WordPress-specific features include dedicated backups and an enhanced cPanel interface.
Bluehost offers the SiteLock suite of security tools to its users, which takes care of malware detection, removal, and firewall duties.
Moving on to support, Bluehost provided one of the worst experiences for us. Waiting times for the live chat often stretched beyond half an hour, and from our experiences, the staff isn’t particularly knowledgeable about WordPress.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.236 s | 0.993 s | 1.308 s | 4.569 s | 15.818 s |
Like HostGator (from the same parent company), Bluehost performed well enough in the one-off test from WebPageTest but had really poor results in the Load Focus test.
This suggests that Bluehost can be fine for low-traffic sites, but will really struggle in high-traffic situations. So if you have a high-traffic site, you’ll probably want to choose one of the hosts that performed better in the Load Focus test.
Bluehost doesn’t lead the pack when it comes to speed or support. What they do offer, however, is a wide variety of plans at midrange prices and adequate security features.
You can choose from:
Make sure to factor the regular prices into your decision, as the difference between the promo price and the regular price can be quite large.
You also get a very beginner-friendly dashboard and setup experience, which makes it easy to get up and running with a site. This part makes them appealing for beginners who might feel overwhelmed at the thought of trying to start a WordPress website.
Bluehost is far from the lead when it comes to WordPress hosting. That being said, it offers a very user-friendly experience and a wide variety of WordPress hosting plans to choose from. The new WordPress website builder also might be attractive to some users. This can still make it a viable option for beginners who value ease of use and low prices over top-notch speeds and support.
👉 Our full Bluehost review
💰 Our exclusive 30% off Bluehost coupon
Most web hosts focus on either regular or managed WordPress plans, but not DreamHost. They offer plans of all different kinds, from stripped-bare shared hosting plans to superior managed plans replete with all the bells and whistles.
DreamHost offered decent support times. You can connect with a live chat agent in a matter of minutes – approximately six, in our case – and the support reps were fairly knowledgeable about WordPress security.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 1.372 s | 1.657 s | 2.000 s | 2.359 s | 3.632 s |
DreamHost performed “ok”, but you can definitely see the drop-off in performance between it and more expensive hosts. One bright spot was the load test – DreamHost performed a lot better than HostGator and Bluehost under scale, though it was still way behind hosts like WP Engine and WPX Hosting.
DreamHost fills a particular niche when it comes to WordPress hosting. They offer a decent service at reasonable prices:
However, DreamHost won’t blow you out of the water with any particular feature.
One nice thing is that DreamHost’s regular prices are still pretty cheap. While there is a small difference between promo pricing and regular pricing, it’s nowhere near as severe as the difference at hosts like GreenGeeks and Bluehost.
DreamHost offers a unique experience when it comes to WordPress hosting. It offers only two plans: one shared, and one managed. Their service is decent, except when it comes to loading times. We can only recommend this host to users who don’t want to choose between too many plans and aren’t too concerned with loading times.
Or, it can be a good option if you’re looking for cheap month-to-month payments.
A2 Hosting is a popular budget web host that offers affordable shared WordPress hosting. One of the unique things about A2 Hosting is that they offer LiteSpeed Server on their high-tier “Turbo” shared plans, which can offer big performance improvements over the cheaper plans that we tested.
A2 Hosting offers 24/7 support on all of their plans. You can get support via phone, live chat, or email.
In terms of security, they offer automatic backups on higher-tier plans along with built-in security rules.
| TTFB | LCP | Fully Loaded | Load Focus Avg. | Load Focus 90% |
| 0.932 s | 1.416 s | 1.351 s | 5.774 s | 7.308 s |
Unfortunately, A2 Hosting disappointed in both the one-off WebPageTest analysis and the load testing from Load Focus. With that being said, you would likely have much better results if you used one of A2 Hosting’s Turbo servers powered by LiteSpeed server. So if you’re considering A2 Hosting, you might want to spring for those Turbo servers.
While the A2 Hosting plan that we tested didn’t do great in the speed tests, it does have the advantage of being very affordable. The shared plans start at just $2.99 per month with promo pricing. Or, you can upgrade to the Turbo LiteSpeed Server plans starting at just $6.99 per month with promo pricing.
Make sure to pay attention to the regular prices, though, as A2 Hosting has huge jumps between promo pricing and regular price. For example, the cheapest plan jumps from $2.99 per month to $10.99 per month.
A2 Hosting offers very affordable hosting, but the performance was disappointing so you’ll probably want to only go with the cheap shared plans if you’re on a tight budget. With that being said, the Turbo plans offer much-improved performance if you can afford them.
👉 Our full A2 Hosting review
💰 Our exclusive 51%+ off A2 Hosting coupon
To make it easier to see how the different hosts compare in terms of performance, we’ll rank them in order from fastest to slowest for two metrics:
Fully Loaded Time:
Load Focus Average Response:
Having covered each web host in detail, there’s nothing left to do but rank the ten WordPress hosts we’ve discussed. We’ve included an informative snippet alongside each to help you make your final decision:
Which WordPress web host are you leaning towards? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!
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View Comments
When it comes affordable and reliable hosting for bloggers then name of Siteground comes first. Once Bluehost was at #1 but now siteground has taken over the position.
It seems a lot/most of the U.S hosting providers have become treadmill-type hosts, with slow speeds and offshore support. I look for European Hosting Co's now. I've been with Site5.com for 6yrs, but it's time for a change with a $250+ price tag, and little to no support, it seems all these providers are owned by the same company, or under the same 'support umbrella'.... SHAME!
Thanks a lot for a comprehensive and amazing review.
Just a small question
Does it matter where the server of the host is located, compared to my target audience?
I personally experienced using SG and WPEngine. Both of them are good but very costly. SG will offer attractive price for the 1 year, but for renewal price, they are 3 times higher. Now, I'm using asphostportal. My main project now is using ASP.NET so I need to use them and I can host WP site too.
I was on SiteGround for at least 3 years, loved em, but they got too pricey.
I've just migrated to Hostinger, off to a bad start, support speed/response time, but I'm in for a number of years, so I'm keeping an open mind.
You guys should check em out and do a review on Hostinger.
Great detailed full post about WordPress hosting providers. You have compared so many hosting providers. I use Bluehost and it is too good. Thanks for sharing.
What is the reason wpkube changed hosting providers from Siteground to Flywheel?
Siteground isn't as good as it used to be, got too pricey and slow. Not recommending them anymore.
Dev, I used Hostgator before. I didn't know about most of them here. I will check it out and see if it would fit our sites. Would you suggest WPEngine as I have seen it a few times these days.
Hey John,
If you have the budget and prefer managed hosting, I would recommend going with WPEngine or Flywheel.