Why you Need to Take your WordPress Hosting Seriously

Updated on Apr 13, 2020

6 min read

Did you know that choosing a fast Wordpress host is critical to the success of your website?

That’s right.

Your hosting provider has a direct impact on website loading times.

With a fast website, you can gain higher:

Search engine rankings
Pageviews
Conversion rates
Profits

That’s why you need to make sure you’re selecting the fastest WordPress hosting provider. Choosing a slow solution is like burning a hole in your pocket. It can cost you profits and damage your business.

In this article, I’ll elaborate on the importance of having a good WordPress host and I’ll go through the results of my Top WordPress Hosts Testing Experiment.

Let’s begin!

Why You Must Have A Good WordPress Host

When you’re selecting a WordPress host, you need to look out for 2 main factors:

Website Speed
Customer Support

Site Speed

Did you know a one-second delay in website speed can lower conversions by 7%?

For example, according to Google’s Test My Site, by increasing my site speed by 1 second…I would be able to earn an extra $28,464 each year!

Site speed is so important to all online businesses because it affects SEO rankings and your visitor’s user experience.

Here’s the thing.

Your website hosting provider will have a direct impact on your site speed.

When you sign up for website hosting, you’re essentially storing your site’s files on your provider’s web servers. The faster the server, the faster your users can access your website.

Technical Support

Setting up website hosting can be a tricky and complicated process.

You’re going to face problems along the way. If you’re not a fan of site downtime and a bad user experience, you need to find a reliable, knowledgeable, and quick-reacting customer support team.

Below I’ll show you how I tested the customer support team for each WordPress Host and reveal which providers came out on top.

Testing the Top WordPress Hosts

Here, I tested the 12 fastest WordPress Hosting Providers:

I built a test blog with:

11 high-resolution photos
1,000 words of dummy content
The Astra Theme
The Elementor Plugin

I cloned the website across all 12 WordPress hosts and ran 5 distinct tests:

GTMetrix Website Speed
Pingdom Tools Website Speed
Load Impact Stress Test
WP Performance Tester
Support Quality

Test 1

First, I ran 12 test blogs through GTMetrix 3 times, from 7 global locations. I averaged the times and compared the providers against each other.

The results were incredibly close. In first place was WPX Hosting (0.8 seconds). Pantheon (0.81 seconds) came in a close second, while Kinsta (1.60 seconds) landed third place.

Test 2

For the second test, I ran a similar experiment. However, I used Pingdom Tools for this test. Like Test 1, I ran the 12 test blogs through Pingdom 3 times and averaged the results.

It was interesting to see that the top 4 hosts in the GTMetrix and Pingdom Tests were the same. WPX Hosting (357ms) & Pantheon (359ms) had extremely close results.

Test 3

For the third test, I wanted to see how each host would perform under stress.

To test the hosts, I created a new page on each website with 1,000 words per piece. Then I set up a Load Impact test with 500 users.

While Pantheon (4ms) performed exceptionally well, WP Engine (17ms), WP Engine C2 (23ms), Kinsta (24ms) and WPX Hosting (26ms) all did a fantastic job as well, as they demonstrated their ability to handle large high traffic sites.

Test 4

All the tests above were served up from cached results. For this test, I wanted to perform a stress test to assess every site’s performance from the server itself.

I used Kevin Ohashi’s WordPress Performance Tester Plugin, which tests resources by performing:

100,000 math function tests
100,000 string manipulation tests
1,000,000 loop iterations
1,000,000 conditional logic checks
Basic mysql functions and 1,000,000 ENCODE ()iterations
250 insert, select, software updates and delete operations

It was fascinating to see that, while Pantheon (3.82 seconds) led the charts in the previous tests, they were significantly behind, landing in the last place for this test.

However, Kinsta (0.538 seconds) and WPX Hosting (0.696 seconds) once again performed well in the charts. Green Geeks (0.81 seconds) & Siteground (0.965) also came in before 1 second.

Test 5

For my final test, I assessed the support quality of each site. While they all claim to have WordPress site experts (except Pantheon & CloudWays), I wanted to put these statements to the test.

Here, I asked them to solve 3 common problems:

Can they take care of website transfers?
Can they remove malware?
Can they stop other sites hotlinking images?

These questions were sent on a support ticket to the support team of all 12 hosts.

The only host that was able to complete all three tasks was WPX Hosting.

The Top 3 WordPress Hosting Providers

After these tests, I was able to compare all the vital features you should take into account when selecting a WordPress Provider.

These features include:

Price per month
Speed
Sites allowed
Daily Backups
Customer support
Staging Environment
Migrations
SSL Certificates
Email Hosting
Trustpilot Rating

WPX Hosting

For this challenge, WPX Hosting was the clear winner. They offered the fastest WordPress hosting, coming out on top for both loading speed tests and did well in the performance benchmarker test. However, WPX Hosting doesn’t provide phone support. If you need help, you’re going to have to reach out via 24/7 live chat or email. WPX Hosting starts at $24.99/month.

Kinsta

In second place is Kinsta . They did a great job for all the tests from speed, performance, load, and customer support. However, Kinsta is fairly expensive per site. They don’t offer phone support, email accounts, and have a list of banned plugins. Kinsta starts at $30/month.

Pantheon

While Pantheon had lighting fast load times, they fell short in the site performance benchmark and support tests. Pantheon starts at $50/month for 5 websites.

Wrapping It Up

So if you’re wondering which WordPress Hosting is the best option for those taking their website seriously…it’s WPX Hosting.

I hope I’ve helped you understand the importance of taking WordPress hosting seriously, and the features you should look out for.

Other than that, don’t forget.

A fast website can lead to higher:

Search engine rankings
Page view numbers
Conversion rates

…and profits!