A fast loading WordPress website doesn’t only deliver a great user experience for visitors, but it also gets higher rankings in search results against slower competitors. The website loading speed became one of the most important factors in modern web design. Therefore, choosing the fastest WordPress hosting possible is the first step in the development process of a high performance modern website.
Why does website loading speed matter?
For a long time web developers and website owners didn’t care a lot about website loading speed. Only recently, loading speed became a discussed topic among web designers and developers. There are two main reasons to pay attention on how fast a website loads:
- maximized user experience
- SEO optimization and search results rankings
In the recent years, there are more and more competitive websites offering similar information to their visitors. If visitors of those websites have to wait for more than a second or two for the content to load, they could easily move on to the next website looking for information they need. That’s why web developers should put an extra effort to optimize their website loading speed. Improved user experience by fast loading pages will keep the visitors on the website. A careful selection of a fast WordPress hosting possible will help achieving that goal.
Since Google released it’s page speed algorithm in 2018. , website loading speed also became an important factor in SEO optimization. Between two similarly optimized websites, Google will rank higher the faster loading website. Since in this case each millisecond counts, SEO optimization became probably the most important reason to choose the fastest WordPress hosting available.
Loading speed of your website must not be disregarded any more. Choosing a fast WordPress hosting provider is an essential part of the speed optimization process.
Is the fastest WordPress hosting enough to reach high website loading speed?
The answer to this question is very simple: absolutely not! If a WordPress website is not optimized for speed, even the fastest WordPress hosting won’t make a big difference. Therefore, developers must design and structure the website to achieve the fastest loading speed possible. Only after a website is perfectly optimized for speed, choosing the fa fast WP hosting will help lowering the loading time for a second or half a second. In some cases the improvement will be only a couple of milliseconds, but even those might be crucial to overtake competitors in search result positions.
Optimizing a WordPress website for loading speed is a complex procedure and it has to be planned and implemented from the very beginning of the development process. It includes choosing a fast theme, careful structuring of the website, images optimization, right choice of essential plugins only, reducing server requests, caching, etc. So before you start looking for a fast WordPress hosting, make sure you’re familiar with the process of optimizing WordPress websites for loading speed. We got that topic covered with our WordPress loading speed optimization tutorial.
Recent 3rd party WordPress hosting speed tests and measurements
Which is the fastest WordPress hosting is a well covered topic on the web. Many specialized WordPress online magazines frequently perform hosting speed tests and measurements. Therefore, we decided not to conduct another test, but make an extensive analysis of many recent WordPress hosting speed tests conducted by 3rd parties. Our goal is to figure out which WordPress hosting most tests agree that is the fastest.
We made a selection of tests conducted from March to June 2020 by specialized WordPress blogs such as CodeinWP, WP Beginner or WP101. Also, we compared tests conducted by WordPress development companies such as Athemes and independent developers such as Matthew Woodward. Finally, we checked out what are WordPress users opinions about this topic on the Quora forum.
Now, let’s see and compare the results of hosting speed tests conducted by all those WordPress specialists mentioned above.
Which is the fastest WordPress hosting in 2020 by popular WP blogs
A very popular WP blog CodeinWP conducted a WordPress hosting speed test in June 2020. They compared nine most popular hosting providers basic plans, and here are the fastest three:
- SiteGround (0.4 – 3.7 sec, depending on testing location)
- WP Engine (no measurement data available)
- Bluehost (no measurement data available)
You can read the full test in their article 9 Fastest WordPress Hosting Providers Compared.
WPBeginner is another popular WordPress blog that conducted a WP hosting speed test in June 2020. They compared the performance of five popular hosting providers. Testing locations were chosen to be closest to their servers and here are the results of their measurements:
- SiteGround (0.649 seconds)
- HostGator (0.691 seconds)
- GreenGeeks (0.697 seconds)
- DreamHost (0.760 seconds)
- Bluehost (1.24 seconds)
The details of the WPBeginner fastest WP hosting test are available in their article How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting in 2020.
The WP101 WordPress tutorials website published in their blog a WP hosting speed test conducted in May 2020. Similarly to other specialized blogs, WP101 compared the performance of some of the most popular WordPress hosting providers. Here are the top five fastest WordPress hosting providers according to their measurements:
- EasyWP (0.7 seconds)
- Bluehost (0.8 seconds)
- Godaddy (0.8 seconds)
- WP Engine (0.9 seconds)
- Kinsta (1.2 seconds)
You can find more useful information about choosing the appropriate hosting for your website in their article Best WordPress Hosting in 2020. Which One is Right for You?.
WordPress hosting speed tests conducted in 2020 by relevant web resources
Now let’s see what are the results of the hosting loading speed test conducted by a specialized development company. A well known WordPress themes development company, aThemes took a hosting speed test in June 2020. The top five fastest hosting providers according to their Pingdom measurements are the following:
- Pressidium (0.357 seconds)
- Kinsta (0.811 seconds)
- SiteGround (0.846 seconds)
- DreamHost (0.937 seconds)
- WP Engine (0.989 seconds)
All the details about the aThemes WordPress hosting speed test are available in their company’s Blog.
Matthew Woodward is a UK based web developer with over 25 years of experience in the business. He runs a popular web development blog often focused on WordPress topics. Mathew also conducted a WordPress hosting speed test in June 2020 and here are the results of his GTMetrix measurements:
- WPX Hosting (0.80 seconds)
- Pantheon (0.81 seconds)
- Kinsta (1.60 seconds)
- Godaddy (1.61 seconds)
- Bluehost (2.04 seconds)
- DreamHost (2.24 seconds)
- WP Engine (2.27 seconds)
- SiteGround (2.44 seconds)
Those results are just an excerpt from Mathew’s extensive WordPress hosting loading speed test. For all the details about the test, you can read the whole article on his Blog.
Finally, we went to check what real WP users and developers are saying about the fastest hosting providers on the Quora forum. The ongoing thread started in 2018. and it’s still active with latest opinions as fresh as August 2020. which is the date of writing this article. From dozens of user opinions we made a list of hosting providers most frequently rated as the fastest to use with WordPress. Here’s what the guys at Quora think:
- Bluehost (most recommended)
- Siteground
- Digital Ocean
- Milesweb
- WPX Hosting
- Godaddy
- Kinsta
- Hostgator (fewer recommendations)
To know all the details about this discussion, visit the Quora forum.
Final results of our fastest WordPress hosting in 2020. analysis
After we analyzed most recent 3rd party hosting speed articles available on the internet, all we have to do is some math and statistics to make an conclusion. Most WP blogs, web magazines, developers and users agree that the top three fastest hosting providers to use with WordPress are:
- SiteGround
- WP Engine
- Bluehost
By choosing any of those three, you can be sure that your WordPress website will run smoothly on solid high quality base. Nevertheless, there are more hosting providers recommended by many as very fast and suitable to use with WordPress. The following hosting providers didn’t make it into the top three, but they are still worth considering since a number of users suggest them as fast WordPress hosting providers:
- Kinsta
- DreamHost
- Godaddy
- WPX Hosting
- Hostgator
- EasyWP
There are other hosting providers such as GreenGeeks, Pressidium, Pantheon, Digital Ocean or Milesweb that by some measurements result as super fast. Those were less tested than the more popular hosting providers mentioned earlier, but it doesn’t mean they could not be a good option to host your WordPress website.
Pro Tip: The measured speed of a hosting provider widely depends on the physical distance between the hosting provider’s server location and the website visitor’s location. When choosing the hosting provider, take in consideration their servers location and try to choose the hosting whose servers are closest to where you expect most of the visitors. In some cases your website will load faster on a “slower” hosting provider closer to your visitors location than from a very fast hosting provider distant from your visitors location.
Other aspects of website loading speed optimization
Choosing a fast WordPress hosting for your website is only one step of loading speed optimization for your website. Having your website hosted on a fast server is far from enough if you want to achieve fast loading performance. If other aspects of loading speed optimization are disregarded, even the fastest severs won’t help your website to load fast enough.
We hope this article helped you to choose the fastest possible hosting for your WordPress website. Assuming that you have chosen the hosting provider, before you begin to develop the website, it would be essential to get familiar with the next steps in the speed optimization process.
Before, moving on, we suggest going trough our following articles:
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