This article is going to discuss several WordPress hosting providers that are great options for a fast loading website. There are literally hundreds of WordPress hosts out there, but the vast majority of them offer sub par hardware and optimization, leading to slow loading websites. Because WordPress website loading speed is a major ranking factor, and has a huge impact on user experience, you definitely want to choose a WordPress host that will result in a fast website.
This article will cover 4, in different budget ranges. With it, you can read into each of them further, making the best choice for your use case. We're going to chat about hypothetical usage scenarios for each, but the best way to make a decision is by trying out some of them for yourself. Everyone here offers a money back guarantee, so you can test out your site on each of them, figure out how it loads and choose the one that is the fastest.
The thing that makes this article unique is the fact that we have used all of these hosts on client projects. That means we have direct experience with the quality, speed, support, and user interface that these hosting companies provide.
The best WordPress hosting for speed is hands down Servebolt. Servebolt is a company based in Sweden that offers performance optimized hosting for multiple CMSs including WordPress.
We did a complete review on the company, which you can read here, but it's 100% managed hosting, extremely fast and lightweight, and has super high quality support and service. There are four main features that lead to this industry leading speed, all with a single defining factor. Servebolt, the company, built their offering from the ground up, meaning that they have direct control over the hardware, software, and optimization that your website is hosted on.
They have incredibly quick processors that use hyperthreading, and a completely customized version of Linux that is optimized for maximum speed and compatibility with the hardware. They use infini band networking which is the fastest way to transfer data between computers in their network, with the least latency (compared to other networking solutions). It doesn't just stop at an optimized version of Linux, they also have optimized Maria DB and PHP. The company claims that most websites see two to six times improvement when moving to ServeBolt, and this is completely valid as the sites that we migrated here had serious performance increases.
This is a company that is dedicated to creating and maintaining incredibly fast WordPress hosting, offering a completely customized solution down to the hardware on their network and the operating system that makes up the hosting server. Because everything is custom made, it all works together to result in the fastest loading performance possible.
At the same time, you're definitely going to pay for this speed, but when compared to other enterprise level hosting solutions for WordPress, they are on par.
If you're looking for mission critical WordPress hosting with an emphasis on speed, this managed hosting offering is our recommended platform. Additionally, it's the one that we use to host our own blogs and ecommerce websites, meaning that we have direct experience with the team behind the product, as well as the speed and optimization that comes with it.
Rocket.net hosting is a smaller company that offers an incredibly optimized product with a native integration to Cloudflare enterprise CDN. This integration brings high geographical performance as well as the industry leading web application firewall for security as well as speed.
Virtually every site that migrates to it, regardless of the hosting that they were using prior, experience a massive increase in speed. For example, customer see an average time to 1st byte increase of 233%, a 45% increase in FCP, a 38% increase in first input delay, and a 29% increase in time to interactive.
The reason why this performance increase is so massive is due to the solid hardware that the company uses to host the web sites, free enterprise CDN, built in caching, and Google font optimization.
This managed hosting offering also provides guaranteed resources, meaning every account is provided with a dedicated CPU, eight never shared ram allocation, and ultimately results in a better solution than shared hosting, but an easier method than managing a VPS. This guarantee is a major selling point to many who use it, as you know that you will always have the best of the best on hand.
The enterprise level servers have incredibly fast solid state drives, 256 gigabytes of ram, 16 cores, and direct peering into an Internet exchange. The optimized stack makes use of an asset proxy, micro caching, enterprise servers, optimized my SQL, and HTTP 2 protocol. All of this culminates in an incredibly fast loading experience, and when coupled with expert optimization and support, you get the fastest loading WordPress website possible.
Finally, the managed aspect goes as far as a team of speed optimization experts applying best practices an increasing performance. There's a page speed guarantee at play here, and a combination of all of these variables is the reason why we use this company to host our own blog and mission critical websites.
Another great speed friendly hosting option for WordPress, and one that doesn't cost a lot, is Cloudways. this is an incredibly unique offering, in that it is not a traditional hosting company. Instead, it's a platform, panel, and support package that allows you to easily provision virtual servers on major enterprise level cloud hosting networks such as Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, and Google Compute Engine.
With this comes economies of scale, and this company offers the lowest cost, highest performance managed hosting that we have found so far. Because it's on cloud networks, you can also easily scale up and down, they bill monthly based on usage, and it's really easy to create new servers or increase the resources on existing ones. You get all the benefits of cloud hosting including self healing, one click scaling, and more.
Plans start at $10/mo, billed month to month.
The platform itself installs several speed and optimization packages such as varnish caching. Additionally, the company offers a free caching plugin for WordPress that integrates directly with their systems, allowing you to easily connect to the Cloudways CDN and varnish systems.
Our agency uses this company to host the majority of our client websites due to the performance to cost ratio. Great performance at a low cost. We typically use Digital Ocean servers, but have slowly been migrating to Vultr High Frequency for increased performance benefits at a minimal price increase.
When compared to the final option on this list, you have a completely managed server with a well designed control panel allowing you to easily access the database, manage packages, and more. And, because it is a fully managed platform, all of this is done for you, the platform is just a benefit for power users. If you have any issues, the 24/7 support can resolve it relatively quickly.
If you're looking for a dirt cheap way to host a WordPress website that loads incredibly quick for visitors, the best way is via cloud hosting. With this, you get access to enterprise level hardware, immense scalability, and dedicated resources, all starting at 2 to $5 per month period in many cases, this is cheaper than shared hosting, but much higher performance.
The main drawback with bare metal hosting is that there is no managed aspect to it, so you are in charge of everything having to do with the server. This includes security, updates, and troubleshooting if anything breaks. It's 100% on you to ensure that everything works as needed, and there's no support to fall back on if there is an issue. Because of this, we recommend trying this out if you are technically skilled, have worked with cloud hosting in the past, or have a ton of time to learn. For mission critical website, you will probably want to go with one of the first three solutions here.
However, if you're looking for WordPress hosting that results in incredibly quick website, and that is cheaper than shared hosting, you should look into DigitalOcean or Vultr.
Vultr starts as cheap as $2.50 per month, and Digital Ocean starts at $5 per month. If you would like $100 in free digital ocean credit to try out the service, feel free to use this link and sign up.
Remember, you are completely responsible for everything that goes on with this server and there is absolutely no support with this service, but at the same time it's a lot cheaper than pretty much anything else out there, and offers you enterprise level hardware.
In our opinion, these are the best WordPress hosting companies for a fast and high performance website. They come in at different price ranges, but we definitely recommend trying out a couple for yourself. Don't just choose one, test with your actual website, get real statistics, and make an educated purchasing decision from that. Whatever the case is, if you're coming from other hosts, these WordPress hosts will have a great impact on the performance of your website period from there, you will know that you have a solid foundation, and can begin other optimizations such as caching, offloading assets, and focusing on fonts.
Hi, nice article! What are the pricing and packages? Does it include a free domain for the first year?
Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround is great to run WordPress