This article is going to discuss whether Bluehost is a good option for hosting your Elementor website. We're going to take a look at the offering, requirements of Elementor, and the statistics of a test website to come to our conclusion.
We also have personal experience with this host through many client web sites, and will add our own input into various sections. Without any further ado, let's take a look at if Bluehost is good for Elementor.
Elementor has outlined the minimum requirements that their tool needs to run smoothly.
When looking for a host, you should keep all of these requirements in mind:
Elementor requires you to be running PHP version 7+. the current version of PHP is 7.4, and version eight will come out very soon. The most recent version of PHP is always the fastest, and if your host doesn't support it, you should be moving from it immediately due to security/performance concerns.
Elementor needs about 256mb of memory. In our experience, having at least 512 MBS of ram ensures that Elementor loads incredibly quickly on both the front end and the back end.
Elementor need MarinaDB or MySQL. Any WordPress host will support one of these two offerings, so you don't need to worry about that.
The main thing to focus on is that Elementor needs a decent amount of memory to load quickly.
Bluehost offers a bunch of hosting, but their most popular product is shared hosting. This is the sub $10 per month hosting that many people are familiar with period it's also the type of hosting that we are going to be discussing here today, as we purchased a choice plus plan to test out how fast an Elementor website loads on Bluehost.
The Bluehost offering is known as shared hosting. Shared hosting is a style of hosting where a company puts many individual websites on a single server. All of these websites need to share the static amount of resources that the server has to offer. Because there are multiple websites on one server, the company can offer this service for an incredibly low price.
With that, comes a lot of downsides. There are security implications that come with shared hosting, as if one website is hacked, all of the websites can easily be hacked as well.
If one website experiences a massive increase in its traffic, all of the other websites are negatively impacted. Bluehost has a special limiting system. If you find yourself in this situation, your website's performance will be slowed drastically. This isn't good especially if it's your first time having a viral article. In some circumstances, if you use too many resources on the server, they'll kick you off altogether.
Because a bunch of websites are sharing the same amount of resources, shared hosting is very slow for large websites that require resources on servers.
Because it's a single server, if that server goes down, your website will be inaccessible until the company can make it live again. Servers go down for all sorts of reasons, from hacking, to high traffic.
As you can tell, shared hosting isn't the best option out there, but the companies market it well and its low price leads to its popularity. Bluehost isn't the only one offering this type of hosting, GoDaddy, Hostgator and others do as well.
We wanted to test how fast an Elementor website loaded on Bluehost period to do this we purchased the choice plus plan, installed an Elementor website on it , created a home page with the Envato elements kit, and ran the home page through three website speed measurement tools. The three tools we used were Fast Or Slow, GTMetrix, and Google PageSpeed. These were the results:
Bluehost Installation (No Caching Plugin) | First Meaningful Paint: 10.8s First CPU Idle: 10.99s | Fully Loaded Time: 3.6s Requests: 55 Total Page Size: 4.58MB | Speed Index: 5.5s Time To Interactive: 2.6s |
Off the bat, you can tell that these statistics are not great. And these are definitely standard statistics, as we've seen Similar numbers for client websites using Bluehost. Optimization will help it a little bit, but the underlying issue of hosting always remains.
Shared hosting is not a good option when it comes to Elementor, and these numbers show it.
The first column of data comes from Fast Or Slow. Fast Or Slow measures the loading time of a website from 18 real geographical locations, and offers us context into the loading time in each of them. Because it takes 10 seconds for the website to load, we already know that Bluehost isn't a good international option.
We then take a look at GTMetrix, which shows that the web page is fairly large due to high quality image usage. At the same time, the site loads in over 3 seconds which is not good. Any website that loads in over 3 seconds is losing a lot of visitors and has a high bounce rate.
Our final statistics come from Google PageSpeed. The speed index is 5.5 seconds, meaning that Google will penalize it from an SCO standpoint, and our website loads very slowly.
Of course, this data isn't any good if we have nothing to compare it with. We took an exact copy of that Elementor website (using All In One WP Migration), and installed it on cloud hosting called Cloudways. Here are the statistics from that test.
Cloudways offers a cloud hosting service for $10 per month. This makes it a competitor to Bluehost, so we wanted to take a look at how fast an exact copy of the Elementor website would load on this host this will give us good context to compare back to Bluehost:
Cloudways Installation (No Caching Plugin) | First Meaningful Paint: 1.81s First CPU Idle: 2.01s | Fully Loaded Time: 2.9s Requests: 57 Total Page Size: 4.50MB | Speed Index: 2.3s Time To Interactive: 2.5s |
As you can see, all of these numbers are drastically better than Bluehost. This is because this service, while it costs a similar amount, gives Elementor more power. The more power Elementor has, the pastor the site can load. Also, cloud hosting comes with a host of benefits like 100% uptime, easy scalability, and monthly billing period you're not trapped into a terrible three year contract.
First Meaningful Paint (Fast Or Slow) | Cloudways is 142% faster. |
First CPU Idle (Fast Or Slow) | Cloudways is 138% faster. |
Fully Loaded Time (GTMetrix) | Cloudways is 22% faster. |
Requests (GTMetrix) | N/A |
Total Page Size (GTMetrix) | N/A |
Speed Index (PageSpeed) | Cloudways is 82% faster. |
Time To Interactive (PageSpeed) | Cloudways is 4% faster. |
To conclude, we wanted to discuss our thoughts on if Bluehost is a good host for Elementor. After using it in many client websites, and running our statistical analysis here, Bluehost is a terrible choice when it comes to hosting an Elementor website. It simply doesn't offer enough processing power that Elementor needs to load quickly. We recommend staying away from shared hosting, especially because you can purchase cloud hosting for as low as $10 per month.
Is Bluehost a good host for Elementor? No.
You may be asking yourself, why is Bluehost so highly recommended by every blog post I read? there's a very simple answer to this question. Bluehost has a incredibly profitable affiliate program. In a matter of minutes you can sign up to be an affiliate, and for every referral get paid $65 by the company. For example, if you clicked this link and bought Bluehost hosting, we would get $65 immediately. Even if it's not the best option for you, bloggers have monetary incentive to recommend it no matter the circumstances.
This is just something to think about when researching if Bluehost is a good choice for Elementor. After personally using Bluehost and elementor together for many client websites (they are trapped in the three year plan and need to use the service), we've seen the terrible performance first hand. Definitely take a look at competitors, as they only cost $10 per month period that's not much more than what Bluehost costs, and they're much quicker out of the box.