Best Hosting for WordPress Websites
Like many products, finding a good web host can be hit or miss, but website speed is also one of the few things that are guaranteed to help your website in Google. In fact, Google made this announcement about the importance of page speed.
The challenge of choosing a web host, like many products, can be hit or miss –– sometimes you get what you pay for –– and sometimes you don’t.
This article helps you get around by describing the two best current options for WordPress hosting – SiteGround and Kinsta.
Check out the comparisons below, but the Bottom line is this…
These two hosts are the best options available – by far. If you want a fully “hands-off” approach and don’t mind paying a little more, try Kinsta. If you have multiple sites, can do a little work yourself, or want a cheaper option and still get a great solution, go with SiteGround.
CHOOSING THE BEST WEB HOST
I want you to think about your website for just a second.
How much are you currently paying for your web host? $4.99? Or even less?
If your website is important to you then you shouldn’t just settle for whatever is the cheapest. Look at your website as your digital storefront where your salespeople could sell and promote your products and services to prospective customers. No serious entrepreneur would build a store in the cheapest retail space they can find.
Think about it: Do you want to save money and compromise quality or do you want a beautiful and efficient website that can impress your visitors?
Your website is where you’ll get your top leads and make sales so you should treat it with utmost importance. Don’t choose a web host based on what’s the cheapest in the market because then you’ll just get what you pay for.
I’ve been hosting and working with websites for over 15 years now and my favorite hosts have changed through time. That’s because what’s great today may not be as good as it is tomorrow.
For instance, there are smaller hosting companies that provide great service but once they were bought by a bigger company, customer service quality just drops. Because of this and some other reasons, I’ve been through at least half a dozen different web hosts in 15 years.
Now let’s talk about the web hosting platforms that I personally recommend.
SITEGROUND HOSTING
I’ve been using Siteground Hosting for a few years now and I must say, it’s one of my top favorite web hosts.
If you look at their site under hosting, they have a couple of different plans. They offer web hosting and WordPress hosting but don’t be fooled––there’s actually no difference between these two.
Whichever plan you choose, you’ll end up on the same checkout page. I personally use the WordPress hosting offer. What I like about SiteGround is that its servers are really fast. What’s more, they offer a free SSL for every plan.
That’s not something all web hosting platforms offer for free. If you go with GoDaddy, for example, you have to pay an extra 80 bucks a month just to have an SSL. And having an SSL is a must for every website because if you don’t have it, then you’re going to seriously hurt your search engine rankings. Without an SSL, website visitors will get a warning that your site is potentially unsafe to visit and that will significantly bring down traffic.
So it’s a big plus for me that it’s already included with any plan you choose to purchase from SiteGround. They also conduct free daily backups to help your site load faster.
SiteGround also has a Staging Environment that allows you to make a duplicate of your site where you can apply and see changes before deciding to have them all go live. This is a great feature because you won’t have to worry about messing up your website in case you want to do an overhaul or make major changes.
And if you’re happy with the changes that you did with the duplicate site, you can apply it to your original website with just a single click!
You can also add collaborators to your hosting account so you can work with your team when maintaining your website.
SiteGround also comes with a free WordPress Migrator tool that is pretty easy to use––even a non-techy person can do the trick. But if you don’t want to do that, you can also pay them 30 bucks to migrate it for you.
SiteGround offers a StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek plan and all of these are pretty solid but I personally always go for the GrowBig plan.
A note on the prices: The prices displayed on the page are only good for the first year. After the first year, they will return to their original price. It’s more expensive than other popular web hosts like GoDaddy but considering that a free SSL certificate and backups already come with each SiteGround plan, it’s pretty much a steal! Those two features alone will cost you at least 10 bucks a month!
KINSTA
Kinsta is the web host that I recommend to people who don’t want to deal with hosting themselves. Kinsta offers pretty much the same things as SiteGround but here you can host one site for $30 flat.
BOTTOM LINE
Out of these two, I think you can’t go wrong with SiteGround. Just on website speed alone, you can see how much it helps with this before and after picture of our client’s website:
Desktop Scores
Before = 66
After = 81
Mobile Scores
Before = 20
After = 34
Having a good website speed is necessary for any business that wants to thrive. A slow-loading site can frustrate customers and lose potential clients, so investing in faster hosting may be the only way forward if you want to stay competitive.
> Check out SiteGround features & prices
> Check out Kinsta features