Quality Virtual Private Servers for web developers and designers

By Cronos Editorial Staff on Sep 28, 2022
Est. Reading: 19 minutes
Contents

9 Best WordPress Hosting Compared (Sept 2022)

Finding the best WordPress hosting can be a painful process. Finding a solution that will do justice to your content, offer rock-solid reliability and hopefully not break the bank is a task that requires lots of research.

The good news is, now that you’re here, you don’t have to do any of that research. Because we did all the work for you by testing the best WordPress hosting platform available today.

In this article we feature some of the best WordPress hosting companies out there:

  1. InMotion Hosting: Affordable hosting with good performance for the price
  2. WP Engine: Fast and reliable hosting with excellent performance
  3. Kinsta: Fast and reliable hosting with great features and a beginner-friendly dashboard
  4. Nexcess: Good value managed WordPress hosting with a stellar performance
  5. Flywheel: Managed WordPress hosting with special features for freelancers/agencies building client sites
  6. Bluehost: Beginner-friendly, affordable hosting with unlimited space and bandwidth
  7. A2 Hosting: Another affordable option with unlimited resources
  8. DreamHost: Affordable option for cheap month-to-month billing
  9. HostGator: Cloud hosting with unlimited storage

We went ahead and created an account with each and every one of these platforms. We set up a test website and ran some tests to see which one offers the best performance.

Keep reading to find our results.

Quick Summary

In a hurry? Here’s a quick summary table of our top picks for budget hosting and premium managed WordPress hosting.

Our findings reveal that InMotion Hosting (for budget hosting) and WP Engine or Kinsta (for managed WordPress Hosting) are the clear winners for WordPress users.

Budget WordPress Hosting Managed WordPress Hosting Managed WordPress Hosting
Host InMotion Hosting WP Engine Kinsta
TTFB 246 ms 123 ms 122 ms
Fully Loaded Time 759 ms 630 ms 569 ms
Load Focus Avg. Response 435 ms 249 ms 474 ms
Starting Price/mo. $6.99 $30 $30
Visit Go to InMotion Hosting Go to WP Engine Go to Kinsta

1. InMotion Hosting offers excellent performance for a surprisingly low price. Starting at just $6.99 per month, you can get stellar managed WordPress hosting that was able to hold up under our load test, which caused most of the other cheap hosts to slow down. Beyond that, you also get useful features like staging sites, free SSL certificates, automatic backups, and more.

2. WP Engine is one of the most expensive WordPress hosting providers on the market, but its quality more than makes up for the high cost. This WordPress-centric web host is especially well-suited to rapidly growing sites. In addition, they offer enterprise-grade security features, albeit at a cost of disallowing a few popular plugins due to security vulnerabilities. You can get started with their cheapest plan, then upgrade as necessary.

3. Kinsta is also another solid option in the premium WordPress hosting space that put up near-identical numbers to WP Engine. In addition to similar performance, Kinsta also has an identical starting price to WP Engine. Honestly, at this price point, both WP Engine and Kinsta are top-notch options and you won’t go wrong with either.

What Is Managed And Shared WordPress Hosting?

While going through the article, you’ll come across terms like managed WordPress hosting, shared hosting, and cloud hosting. There are a few differences between these options.

A managed WordPress hosting plan includes lots of benefits for building WordPress websites. Such as hosting on servers optimized for WordPress software with high-tech caching systems. Automatic WordPress software updates and daily website backups. And much more. Basically, managed WordPress hosting offers faster and more reliable hosting features.

Shared WordPress hosting plans are much cheaper compared to managed hosting. However, they don’t offer the same benefits of managed hosting plans. When you use a shared hosting plan to host a website, your website usually gets stuffed on a server full of hundreds of other shared websites. This, of course, means slower website performance.

Overall, it’s best to use a managed WordPress hosting plan if you have big plans for your website. Or you can start with a shared plan and upgrade to a managed plan later, depending on the hosting platform you choose.

What To Look For In A Hosting Provider

We’ll kick things off here with a look at features that should simply be non-negotiable in any solid WordPress hosting setup.

  • Speed: Web users are notoriously impatient so speed is vital. Google is also cracking down on slow sites so you really can’t afford to be slack in this area. This is especially the case when it comes to WordPress hosting. Left unoptimized, WordPress can be a resource-heavy application so you need top-notch hardware in place to get the most bang for your buck.
  • Useful features: This isn’t specific to WordPress hosting of course, but look for useful features like free SSL certificates, staging sites, automatic backups, etc..
  • Security: Nothing ruins a day quicker than discovering your site has been pawned by script kiddies. Your host should have verifiably secure systems in place to deter common attacks.
  • Support: Excellent support is essential in a hosting provider. You should be able to reach friendly and knowledgeable support people at any hour of the day or night. Waiting around on email tickets isn’t good enough if there’s a real problem.
  • WordPress-friendly hosting: WordPress has its own specific requirements and peculiarities and not every host is set up to handle it optimally. Right now, WordPress ideally needs to be running on PHP 7.3 (or greater) and MySQL 5.6 (or greater) to avoid security vulnerabilities and potentially broken features. Look for a host with a strong track record in dealing with WordPress sites.
  • Pricing and value for money: It’s all very well having a super-fast, super-secure server, and an awesome site, but if you’re spending ten times as much on it as you can ever hope to get back, all that effort is in va

 

Best WordPress Hosting Providers to Choose From (2022)

Let’s quickly talk about how we tested these hosts. Then, we’ll share more detail on all nine hosts that we put through the paces.

How We Tested Hosting Platforms

Unlike many other hosting guides that are biased in favor of one particular provider from the get-go, we’ve reviewed each of the hosts totally independently. One of our key focuses is performance, as how quickly a host can load your websites is one of the most important factors in choosing a host.

To assess performance, we used two different tools:

  • WebPageTest – this lets us run a one-off test to collect important metrics like Largest Contentful Paint, Fully Loaded time, and Time to First Byte (TTFB). We used a throttled FIOS connection to get more realistic load times, which will naturally lead to slightly “slower” load times than a tool like Pingdom that uses an ultra-fast unthrottled connection. These loads times are more relevant to what your site’s actual human visitors will experience, though.
  • Load Focus – this lets us see how a host holds up under a high-traffic scenario. We hit the hosts with 20 visitors in a 60 second period, which is a fairly difficult test and more traffic than most sites receive. You’ll see that the more expensive hosts handled this test with ease, while a lot of the budget hosts experienced slow-downs in comparison to the one-off tests.

We used an identical test site for all the hosts. To create a realistic test scenario (rather than just testing a blank site), we created our test site using the Astra theme and its block editor-powered Sierra Industry demo site, which includes common plugins like a form plugin.

Now, let’s get to the hosts!

inmotion hosting 1024x517 1

1. InMotion Hosting (www.InMotionHosting.com)

  • Starting Price: $6.99 per month
  • Website Loading Speed: 759 ms
  • Best Feature: Affordable pricing

InMotion Hosting is one of the biggest names in hosting. Their WordPress plans are particularly attractive due to their budget-friendly prices.

Their prices are a lot lower than premium managed WordPress hosts, but InMotion Hosting still manages to offer surprisingly good performance for their low prices. The performance isn’t quite as good as pricier options like WP Engine or Kinsta, but it does offer very good value for the money.

Their cheapest plan comes in at a surprisingly low $6.99 per month. For the features they offer, that’s one of the best prices around.

Main Benefits of InMotion Hosting

  • SSD and Nginx: Powered with SSD storage and Nginx, InMotion offers faster website load times for websites.
  • Automatic updates: InMotion offers automatic updates for both the WordPress system and plugins.
  • Free backups: Your website will get backed up automatically, every day.
  • Free SSL, CDN, and Domain: You get a free domain name, SSL, and CDN integration with all accounts.
  • Staging sites: You can use staging sites to safely test changes to your site(s).
  • Unlimited email hosting: Host unlimited custom email accounts at no extra cost.

How Fast is InMotion Hosting?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 0.518 s
  • Fully Loaded Time: 0.759 s
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.246 s
  • Load Average Response: 0.435 s

InMotion Hosting performed surprisingly well in our performance tests when you consider its prices. In WebPageTest, it had excellent metrics across the board, though its TTFB could be a little bit faster.

Most surprisingly, though, it passed the Load Focus tests with flying colors. This is impressive because a lot of the other budget WordPress hosts failed in the load tests. This shows that InMotion Hosting will still be able to load your site quickly even in high-traffic scenarios.

InMotion Hosting Pricing

  • WP-1000S: $6.99 /mo for hosting 1 website with 50 GB space
  • WP-2000S: $7.99 /mo for hosting 2 websites with 100 GB space
  • WP-3000S: $9.99 /mo for hosting 3 websites with 150 GB space

VISIT INMOTION HOSTING

wp engine

2. WP Engine (www.WPEngine.com)

  • Price: $28 per month
  • Website Loading Speed: 630 ms
  • Best Feature: Top-notch performance

WP Engine is the biggest name when it comes to premium managed WordPress hosting. It’s a big company, with a valuation that’s likely over a billion dollars. It offers top-notch features, performance, and support. You also get goodies that other hosts don’t offer, such as free access to the Genesis Framework and all 30+ StudioPress child themes.

Overall, if you want top-notch WordPress hosting and you’re willing to pay for it, WP Engine is a great option.

WP Engine offer a number of standard packages split out by traffic, storage, and the number of sites that you can host. These range in price from $30 to $290 per month, with discounts if you pay annually. For our tests, we ran on the entry-level StartUp package.

Main Benefits of WP Engine Hosting

  • EverCache: This in-house built caching technology help speed up your website performance with Varnish and Memcached.
  • Free exclusive themes: With WP Engine you get access to a collection of over 30 exclusive themes built using Genesis framework.
  • Automatic updates and backups: WP Engine provides automatic WordPress system updates and daily backups.
  • Free SSL and CDN: You also get free HTTPS and CDN for your website.
  • Staging sites – easily test changes using a built-in staging site.

How Fast is WP Engine Hosting?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 0.556 s
  • Fully Loaded Time: 0.630 s
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.123
  • Load Focus Average Response: 0.249 s

As you’d expect from a host at this price level, WP Engine nailed all of our performance tests, including the load testing from Load Focus.

Basically, if you pay the premium for WP Engine, you’re going to get your money’s worth when it comes to performance.

WP Engine Pricing

  • Startup: $30 /mo for hosting 1 website with 10 GB space and 25,000 visits.
  • Professional: $59 /mo for hosting 3 websites with 15 GB space and 75,000 visits.
  • Growth: $115 /mo for hosting 10 websites with 20 GB space and 100,000 visits.
  • Scale: $290 /mo for hosting 30 websites with 50 GB space and 400,000 visits.

VISIT WPENGINE

kinsta

3. Kinsta (www.Kinsta.com)

  • Price: $30 per month
  • Website Loading Speed: 569 ms
  • Best Feature: Top-notch performance

Kinsta is one of the rising stars in the managed WordPress hosting industry. It offers a range of services for all sizes of websites at an unmatched price range.

Even though Kinsta is a fairly new contender to the industry, it’s already being recognized as a solid hosting provider. And is trusted by major brands such as Ubisoft, Ricoh, and more.

Their pricing starts at $30 per month for hosting one website and goes all the way up to $1500 a month for hosting 150 websites.

Main Benefits of Kinsta Hosting

  • WordPress-optimized architecture: Kinsta uses state-of-the-art technology such as Nginx to provide faster performance to hosted websites.
  • Automatic scaling: Kinsta also uses automatic scaling to keep your site live during traffic spikes.
  • Hack fix and backups: In addition to full security protection, Kinsta also offers to fix your website in case of a hack. And provide daily backups as well.
  • User-friendly dashboard: Kinsta has a beginner-friendly dashboard for managing all your websites in one place.

How Fast is Kinsta Hosting?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 0.506 s
  • Fully Loaded Time: 0.569 s
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.122 s
  • Load Focus Average Response: 0.474 s

Like WP Engine, Kinsta put up excellent performance results to justify its higher price tag. Especially in the load test, you can really see where you get your money’s worth when it comes to WordPress hosting.

Whether you have a low-traffic or a high-traffic site, you should be very happy with the performance that Kinsta provides.

Kinsta Pricing

  • Starter: $30 /mo for hosting 1 website with 10 GB space and 25,000 visits.
  • Pro: $60 /mo for hosting 2 websites with 20 GB space and 50,000 visits.
  • Business 1: $100 /mo for hosting 5 websites with 30 GB space and 100,000 visits.
  • Business 2: $200 /mo for hosting 10 websites with 40 GB space and 250,000 websites.
  • …additional plans – Kinsta offers ten different plans in total.

VISIT KINSTA

4. Nexcess (www.Nexcess.net)

  • Price: $19+ per month
  • Fully Loaded Time: 955 ms
  • Best Feature: Great performance for the price

Nexcess is the brand that Liquid Web uses for its managed plans. If you’re not familiar with Liquid Web, it’s a popular and well-respected hosting company.

Nexcess offers managed plans for both general WordPress sites and also special managed plans for WooCommerce stores (complete with a lot of unique options)

Overall, Nexcess had some of the best performance in our tests, but it’s plans are still quite affordable starting at just $13 per month for managed WordPress hosting.

Main Benefits of Nexcess

  • Excellent performance: Nexcess had some of the best performance of any host on our list.
  • No visitor limits: Unlike most managed WordPress hosts, Nexcess doesn’t place any arbitrary visitor limits on your plans – you’re only limited by storage and bandwidth.
  • Safe plugin updates: Safely update your plugins on autopilot with built-in visual regression testing.
  • iThemes plugins: Get access to premium iThemes plugins at no extra cost (Liquid Web/Nexcess acquired iThemes a few years ago).
  • WooCommerce plans: Nexcess offers dedicated managed WooCommerce plans, which are great if you’re running a WooCommerce store.

How Fast is Nexcess?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 0.554 s
  • Fully Loaded Time: 0.955 s
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.400
  • Load Focus Average Response: 0.435 s

Overall, Nexcess had excellent results in our WebPageTest runs. The TTFB was a little higher than WP Engine and Flywheel, but the overall load times were quite impressive.

Nexcess was even more impressive in our load testing from Load Focus, where the average response time across the entire test was just 400 ms, which puts it in the same area as WP Engine and InMotion Hosting.

Nexcess Pricing

Nexcess offers seven different pricing plans, so there’s something for everyone. However, the higher-tier plans run in the hundreds of dollars, so we’ll just focus on the first four plans. You can also save some money if you pay for a year upfront.

  • Spark: $19/mo for 1 website, 15 GB of storage, and 2 TB of bandwidth.
  • Maker: $79/mo for 5 websites, 40 GB of storage, and 3 TB of bandwidth.
  • Designer: $109/mo for 10 websites, 60 GB of storage, and 4 TB of bandwidth.
  • Builder: $149/mo for 25 websites, 100 GB of storage, and 5 TB of bandwidth.

VISIT NEXCESS

flywheel

5. Flywheel (www.getflywheel.com)

  • Price: $15 per month
  • Website Loading Speed: 523 ms
  • Best Feature: Special tools for freelancers and agencies

Flywheel is a managed WordPress host that markets itself more towards creative freelancers and agencies building client sites, though it also makes a great option to host your own sites.

If you are building client sites, though, you can take advantage of Flywheel’s Growth Suite offering, which is a really unique option in the WordPress hosting space.

Note – Flywheel was acquired by WP Engine (an earlier entrant on this list) in 2019. The two companies are still run separately for the most part. One area where they’ve homogenized, though, is pricing. Flywheel and WP Engine now have very similar pricing plans and limits, though there are still a few differences.

Main Benefits of Flywheel Hosting

  • Powered by Google Cloud: With the power of the Google Cloud platform, Flywheel offers faster and reliable hosting for websites of all sizes.
  • Flycache: Flywheel’s in-house caching system also optimizes websites for better performance.
  • Free backups and security: Flywheel also provides free nightly backups and protection from malware and hackers.
  • Free migration: Flywheel will even offer to migrate your site from another host for free.
  • Tools for agencies and freelancers: If you’re building client sites, Flywheel has a lot of unique tools to make your life easier.

How Fast is Flywheel Hosting?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 0.458 s
  • Fully Loaded Time: 0.523 s
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.023 s
  • Load Average Response: N/A (Flywheel’s firewall automatically blocks load testing to prevent DDoS attacks)

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to test Flywheel using Load Focus because Flywheel’s security kicked in to block our load test because load testing can look a lot like a DDoS attack. Honestly, this is a great thing from a security perspective because it shows that Flywheel is proactively protecting your site…but it does mean we can’t test Flywheel’s ability to hold up under load.

With that being said, Flywheel’s performance in the one-off WebPageTest tests was excellent and, based on experience, you can expect those same results to hold true under load just like you saw with WP Engine (Flywheel’s parent company).

Flywheel Pricing

  • Tiny: $15/mo for 1 website with 5 GB storage and 5,000 visits.
  • Starter: $30/mo for 1 website with 10 GB storage and 25,000 visits.
  • Freelance: $115/mo for 10 websites with 20 GB storage and 100,000 visits.
  • Agency: $290/mo for 30 websites with 50 GB storage and 400,000 visits.

You can get a discount if you pay for a full year upfront.

VISIT FLYWHEEL

bluehost

6. Bluehost (www.Bluehost.com)

  • Price: $2.95 per month
  • Website Loading Speed: 1,098 ms
  • Best Feature: Very beginner-friendly experience

Bluehost is a beginner-friendly budget WordPress hosting option. In addition to offering unlimited resources on most of its plans, one of Bluehost’s standout features is just how user-friendly it is.

Simply put, Bluehost makes it super easy to launch a WordPress site, even including its own drag-and-drop WordPress website builder tool. Or, if you already know your way around WordPress, you can just install the regular version of WordPress.

In terms of performance, Bluehost is good enough for low-traffic sites. But for serious, high-traffic sites, you’ll probably want to invest in a host that offers better performance.

Overall, Bluehost can be great when you’re starting out, but you might need to migrate to something like WP Engine or Kinsta once your site starts growing.

Bluehost also offers its own managed WordPress hosting plans though, at those prices, you’d probably be better of just moving to WP Engine or Kinsta.

Main Benefits of Bluehost Hosting

  • Unlimited everything: With Bluehost, you get unlimited space and bandwidth to make unlimited websites.
  • Beginner-friendly features and interface: Bluehost builds user-friendliness into the entire experience, even offering their own custom WordPress website builder.
  • Caching: Bluehost builds in caching via its companion plugin.
  • Free SSL and CDN: You also get free HTTPS and CDN with all plans.
  • Security: Bluehost also provides a service to detect malware and remove them from your website.

How Fast is Bluehost Hosting?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 0.949 s
  • Fully Loaded Time: 1.098 s
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.333 s
  • Load Focus Average Response: 3.867 s

Bluehost had some interesting results in our performance tests. In our one-off WebPageTest tests, Bluehost actually did quite well, with respectable load times and TTFB. If you look at just this single test, you’d be rightfully impressed by Bluehost’s performance.

However, in the load testing, Bluehost showed some cracks, with an average response time over 3.8 seconds, which was one of the slower hosts on this list.

This suggests that Bluehost might be a solid option for simple low-traffic sites, but probably isn’t a good host for high-traffic sites because of its poor load testing results.

Bluehost Pricing

  • Basic: $2.95 /mo for a single site and 50 GB storage.
  • Plus: $5.95 /mo for hosting unlimited websites and unlimited storage.
  • Choice Plus: $5.95 /mo for everything in plus with the addition of automatic backups

These prices assume a three-year commitment – you’ll pay slightly more for shorter-term commitments.

VISIT BLUEHOST

a2 hosting

7. A2 Hosting (www.A2Hosting.com)

  • Price: $2.99 per month
  • Website Loading Speed: 1,241 ms
  • Best Feature: Affordable prices for unlimited resources.

A2 Hosting is another popular shared WordPress host. With low entry-level prices, it can be a solid option for cheap WordPress hosting. Like Bluehost, they offer unlimited websites and resources on most of their plans, as well as some user-friendly features like staging sites and free SSL certificates.

On their higher-tier shared plans (called Turbo), they also offer LiteSpeed server, which will offer even better performance than the plans that we tested.

Main Benefits of A2 Hosting

  • Unlimited resources: With the exception of the cheapest plan, all of A2 Hosting’s plans support unlimited resources.
  • Free automatic backups: Get automatic backups on all plans except the cheapest one.
  • LiteSpeed server: The Turbo plans offer LiteSpeed server, which offers much-improved performance for a still-affordable price.
  • Staging sites: Use staging sites to safely test changes.

How Fast is A2 Hosting?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 1.112 s
  • Fully Loaded Time: 1.241 s
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.625
  • Load Focus Average Response: 6.633 s

A2 Hosting’s performance looks a lot like the other cheap WordPress hosting options on this list. It performed fine in the one-off WebPageTest run, but it struggled to handle our load testing scenario from Load Focus.

Again, our Load Focus scenario is pretty difficult, so it’s a tough task for any shared host to handle. But when you look at A2 Hosting’s 6+ second average response time in Load Focus, you can really see that you get your money’s worth when using the more premium managed WordPress hosts.

A2 Hosting Pricing

A2 Hosting offers four different plans The prices below are for a three-year commitment, but you can also pay yearly or monthly for a slightly higher rate.

  • Startup: $2.99/mo for 1 website and 100 GB storage.
  • Drive: $4.99/mo for unlimited websites and unlimited storage.
  • Turbo Boost: $9.99/mo for unlimited websites, unlimited storage, and LiteSpeed Server.
  • Turbo Max: $14.99/mo for unlimited websites, unlimited storage, LiteSpeed Server, and 5X resources.

VISIT A2 HOSTING

dreamhost

8. DreamHost (www.DreamHost.com)

  • Price: $14.95 per month
  • Website Loading Speed: 1,335 ms
  • Best Feature: Affordable shared hosting price with cheap month-to-month billing

DreamHost offers multiple WordPress hosting plans, including cheap shared hosting and an affordable managed WordPress hosting product called DreamPress.

For our testing, we looked at the shared plan, which is one of the better budget options. A standout of the shared plan is that it offers affordable month-to-month billing, whereas most other shared hosts will force you to pay for at least a year upfront (or charge a really high monthly price).

Main Benefits of DreamHost Hosting

  • Month-to-month billing: Pay for one year at a time rather than a full year upfront.
  • Custom hosting dashboard: DreamHost built its own custom dashboard to help you manage your hosting.
  • Built-in caching: This ensures fast performance and helps your server stand up under load.
  • Automatic backups: DreamHost automatically backs up your site’s data to keep it safe.

How Fast is DreamHost Hosting?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 1.187
  • Fully Loaded Time: 1.335
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.658
  • Load Average Response: 1.981 s

In the one-off WebPageTest, DreamHost did pretty well for being shared hosting. It’s similar to Bluehost and A2 Hosting, which is what you’d expect at this price range.

For being cheap shared hosting, DreamHost did fairly well in the load test. It didn’t perform anywhere close to WP Engine or Kinsta, but it did beat out a lot of the similarly-priced shared hosts such as Bluehost and A2 Hosting.

DreamHost Pricing

  • WordPress Starter: $4.95 per month (month-to-month) for one website and unlimited traffic.
  • WordPress Unlimited: $8.95 per month (month-to-month) for unlimited websites and unlimited traffic.

VISIT DREAMHOST

hostgator

9. Hostgator Cloud (www.HostGator.com)

  • Price: $5.95 per month
  • Website Loading Speed: 2,072 ms
  • Best Feature: Affordable cloud WordPress hosting option

HostGator is a renowned name in the web hosting world, but not a beloved one. Lots of experienced users tend to look down on their hosting plans, but they’ve now come out swinging with a strong offering for WordPress users – their WordPress Cloud Hosting plans.

Their basic plan obtained decent results during our tests (more of which later), and they start at a reasonable $5.95 per month, going up to $9.95 per month.

Main Benefits of Hostgator Hosting

  • Cloud hosting: Hostgator boasts 2.5X faster load times thanks to its cloud architecture and low-density servers.
  • Unlimited storage: You also get unmetered storage space with all plans.
  • Free migration: Hostgator offers free migration services for moving your site from a different host.
  • Free CDN and SSL: You can optimize your site for better protection using free SSL and CDN as well.

How Fast is Hostgator Hosting?

  • Largest Contentful Paint: 1.251 s
  • Fully Loaded Time: 2.072 s
  • Time to First Byte (TTFB): 0.506
  • Load Average Response: 4.220 s

HostGator’s test results look a lot like similarly-priced hosts such as Bluehost and A2 Hosting. You can see that, in the one-off WebPageTest runs, HostGator had quite respectable load times, though its TTFB was a little bit higher than you’d like.

However, things aren’t quite so smooth when the heat is on, and you can see HostGator struggle in the load tests with an average response time over 4 seconds.

Overall, this indicates that HostGator can be a good budget option for low-traffic sites, but it’s probably not the best spot for important high-traffic sites.

Hostgator Pricing

  • Starter: $5.95 /mo for hosting 1 website with unlimited space, 1 GB backups, and 100,000 visits.
  • Standard: $7.95 /mo for hosting 2 websites with unlimited space, 2 GB backups, and 200,000 visits.
  • Business: $9.95 /mo for hosting 3 websites with unlimited space, 3 GB backups, and 500,000 visits.

VISIT HOSTGATOR

Overall Hosting Platform Comparison

We’ve summarized the results of our tests in the following table with leading results highlighted in green and lower-ranking results in red.

Web Hosting Starting
Price
Fully Loaded
Time
SSL Email Hosting Free Domain
1. InMotion Hosting $6.99/mo 759 ms
2. WP Engine $30/mo 630 ms X X
3. Kinsta $30/mo 569 ms X X
4. Nexcess $19/mo 955 ms X
5. Flywheel $15/mo 523 ms X X
6. Bluehost $2.75/mo 1,098 ms
7. A2 Hosting $2.99/mo 1,241 ms
8. DreamHost $4.95 1.335 ms
9. HostGator $5.95/mo 2,072 ms X

Which Hosting Platform Is Best?

Choosing the best WordPress hosting is tricky because a lot of it comes down to your own unique situation.

If you asked us to pick the absolute best hosting without thinking about price, it would be WP Engine  or Kinsta. These two hosts had the best performance, have the best features, have top-notch support, etc.

However, most of us can’t afford to ignore price, and you might be motivated by something else.

With that in mind, we think InMotion Hosting is a great budget option for most people. Is it as fast as WP Engine or Kinsta? No it isn’t…but it is still pretty fast and less than one-third of the price of those two hosts. So if money is tight, definitely give it a look.

Or, Nexcess is another option that offers managed features and top-notch performance at a more accessible price than WP Engine or Kinsta.

On the other hand, while we think performance is king, it might not be what you value most in a host. If you’re a total beginner just building a hobby website, you might value affordability and beginner-friendliness above performance. In that case, Bluehost might be the best option for you. Are they the fastest host? Definitely not. But Bluehost did have respectable load times in the one-off test and Bluehost stands out for its user-friendly experience.

WordPress Hosting: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

The followings are some of the most common questions and answers that’ll help you understand WordPress hosting a little bit better.

Is WordPress Really Free To Use?

The WordPress software itself is completely free to download and use. Make sure that you download it from wordpress.org website. When using a WordPress hosting provider, you can install it directly from your hosting account dashboard. It only takes a single mouse click.

Do I Need Hosting For WordPress?

Yes. Even though WordPress software is free to use, you need to install the software on a server to set up your website using the software. And to make your website accessible to everyone on the Internet. There are many different types of hosting you can use to set up a WordPress website at different price ranges.

Are There Free WordPress Hosting Websites?

Unless you set up a website with WordPress.com, which puts lots of restrictions and limitations, you won’t find free hosting to make a professional WordPress website. Even if you come across any free hosting sites, avoid them. Because they will only offer slow hosting and fill your website with advertisements.

How To Backup WordPress Website?

Managed WordPress web hosting platforms offer free daily backups of your website. However, it’s always a good idea to have an alternate option. You can use a free plugin to set up an automatic backup system for your website.

Can I Add Translations In WordPress?

Yes. Using third-party plugins such as WPML and Polylang you can easily add multilingual support to your website. And offer translations in dozens of languages.

Difference Between WordPress Hosting And Shared Hosting

The main difference between WordPress hosting and shared hosting is that WordPress hosting includes servers that are specially optimized to boost the functionality of WordPress software. They also include special caching systems to speed up your websites. Shared hosting, on the other hand, doesn’t provide any special features but offers affordable pricing.

How To Move WordPress Website To A New Host?

This is a complicated process that involves multiple steps and it can also differ depending on the type of hosting you use. It’s best to contact your web hosting provider and ask for their help. Most WordPress web hosting providers will even offer to move your site for free.