8 Fastest WordPress Hosting in 2023 (Performance Tests)

Rocket.net performed especially well in the stress test, and most of the other services maintained a stable load during the test.

Our test site loading speed was a fraction of a second at 181 milliseconds, which is great. But keep in mind that this test was performed when the website had no traffic. Let’s take a look at how that speed is affected by more visitors.

Here are the Pingdom speed testing tool results for Hostinger.

Here are the Pingdom speed testing tool results for Bluehost.

WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting, and 5 different levels are available, starting at $20/month and going up to $194/month.

In this article, we will share our performance test results to help you find the fastest WordPress hosting for your website.

Why Fast WordPress Hosting Is Important

You can see that the blue server load time line remained stable even though traffic and page requests increased. There was an average response time of 156.45 milliseconds.

Cons:

• Renewal prices are a bit higher

WP Engine specializes in VIP managed WordPress hosting, which is an ideal choice for people looking for hassle-free, premium WordPress hosting. They provide automatic backups, security updates, caching, WordPress security, and more.

Cons:

Pros:

• Reliable web hosting
• Free domain and SSL certificate
• Free business email address
• 1-click WordPress install
• 45-day money-back guarantee

Bluehost offers a shared hosting package suitable for starter websites. Their shared plan is available at 4 different levels starting at just $2.75/month.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Here are the Pingdom speed testing tool results for HostGator.

DreamHost is a popular, award-winning hosting company and one of WordPress.org’s officially recommended hosts. Their plans include automatic daily backups, a free SSL certificate, a free domain name, WordPress privacy features, and more.

We sent up to 100 users at once to our test site using the k6 tool to see how HostGator performs under load. Here are the results:

Here are the Pingdom speed testing tool results for DreamHost.

This poor result happened because we turned off DreamHost’s pre-installed WordPress caching solution. So, we tried enabling a caching plugin, and the stress test result improved dramatically. Notice how much lower the light blue line is in the graph below.

Pro Tip: WPBeginner users can get the best price using our Hostinger coupon code.

2. DreamHost

k6 Load Impact Test

This means that WordPress blogs, small business websites, and eCommerce stores hosted on Dreamhost can easily handle sudden traffic spikes.

Every website that you see online uses a web hosting provider.

We then used the k6 tool to test how Bluehost servers respond to increased traffic. We gradually sent up to 100 visitors to the site to see how it would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.

Bluehost is often ranked the #1 web hosting provider by many websites. They offer a wide range of hosting options with tons of features that help you easily build your website. All their hosting plans include expert 24/7 customer support from knowledgeable staff. Most importantly, they offer affordable starter plans that fit any budget requirement.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Hostinger is a great option for beginners who want to start a website without spending too much money. Their low-price shared hosting options offer good value for money with great performance and an extremely easy-to-use control panel.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Cons:

• Their phone support isn’t available 24/7

How do I install WordPress on my WordPress hosting account?

Page Load Time

Now that you know our testing process, let’s compare the performance of different hosting companies to see which is the fastest WordPress hosting company on the market.

1. Hostinger

WPBeginner users can get the best price using our WP Engine coupon code.

4. SiteGround

As you can see, Hostinger performed really well on this test. As we increased virtual users (purple line), the response time (blue line) remained steady, with an average of 460 milliseconds.

Do you want a fast WordPress website? One way to do that is to choose a reputable WordPress hosting provider that is optimized for speed.

HostGator has grown quickly due to their great shared hosting plans, reliable web hosting, and quality customer service. Here are some of their pros and cons.

DreamHost’s shared hosting plans start at $2.59 per month (for a 3-year billing period). You can also pay monthly for the Shared Starter plan, which costs $4.59 per month.

According to a case study that involved Amazon, Google, and other larger sites, a 1-second delay in website speed can reduce your conversions by 7%. A delay of 3 seconds can cost you 50% of your traffic.

Response Time During Peak Times

Based on our performance tests, these are all good choices for fast hosting.

Yes, there are several free website hosting companies out there, but we highly recommend that you stay away from them.

Bitcatcha Server Response Time

Without additional traffic, our test site loaded in about half a second (527 milliseconds), which is great. Next, we ran a k6 stress test to see how extra traffic affects the site performance.

Installing a WordPress caching plugin may help a little. But it won’t make a significant improvement on a slow web server.

Fast hosting can help your website load more quickly. Fast loading pages improve user experience, increase your pageviews, and help with your WordPress SEO.

We also tested GreenGeeks’ response time around the world using Bitcatcha. Here are the results:

DreamHost Pros and Cons

Our test GreenGeeks site responded quickly for visitors in North America. It was slower in other parts of the world, such as India and the Asia Pacific region, but these times are still quite fast.

Cons:

Our top web hosting recommendations are:

Unfortunately, GreenGeeks didn’t perform well during this test. Performance started to degrade after there were 30 users visiting the site. The response time became too slow, and the server started giving errors.

DreamHost has been around for 18 years and is known for making web hosting easy. Now that you have seen their performance test results, you might like to see some other pros and cons.

Learn more in our complete Bluehost review.

We also tested each provider’s response times from different locations around the world. That’s because the response time will be slower the further your users are away from the company’s web servers.

Our test site loaded in less than half a second with a total of 335 milliseconds, which is excellent. This test was done during low traffic, so let’s now see how DreamHost responds during peak traffic times.

This is partly because of some of the innovations they use. For example, most of their servers are hosted on the Google Cloud Platform, and they have a custom plugin for optimization called SG Optimizer.

GreenGeeks Pricing Plans

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Next, we used Bitcatcha to test our Dreamhost test site’s response time from different geographic locations.

You can see that the response times were great across the board. They were particularly fast in Europe and North America.

Do I need WordPress hosting to start a website?

While our site remained available throughout the test, the response time went up as users increased. The average response time was 2,193 milliseconds.

Your visitors in Europe will have the fastest experience with Rocket.net and Hostinger, and the Asia Pacific users will enjoy the fastest speeds with Rocket.net.

In most cases, free WordPress hosting providers put advertisements on your website. They may even distribute malware to your users. Last but not least, they can shut down your website at any time without any notification.

SiteGround and Bluehost are good options anywhere in the world because you can choose a data center location where most of your users are.

Response time is also affected by how far your visitors are from the server. We ran a Bitcatcha test to measure response time from 10 locations around the world.

GreenGeeks is the most eco-friendly web hosting. It is a good hosting solution for anyone who is just starting out. For higher traffic volumes, you may need to upgrade to a high-performance plan or move to a managed WordPress hosting provider.

Bluehost is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world and an official WordPress-recommended hosting provider. They are a great option for beginners, and their budget-friendly plans are suitable for all kinds of websites.

HostGator Pricing Plans

This is an excellent result. Our test site responded quickly, regardless of the number of users and page requests. It also had an average response time of 13.91 milliseconds.

Yes, you can absolutely switch if you are unhappy with your WordPress hosting company.

Most WordPress hosting companies offer free migration services, which makes the process fairly smooth. However, if you want to do the migration yourself, then you can follow our step-by-step guide on how to move WordPress to a new host with no downtime.

Best WordPress Guides for Web Hosting

k6 Load Impact Test

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Why We Chose DreamHost

Rocket.net recorded blazing-fast speeds around the world.

The Bitcatcha test measures how fast a server responds from different locations around the world. Here are the results for WP Engine:

Hostinger Pros and Cons

Rocket.net offers 4 levels of managed WordPress hosting plans starting at $25/month (billed annually).

Bitcatcha Server Response Time

Avoid anyone who offers to give you free WordPress hosting, especially if you are serious about your site. Here are reasons why having a ‘free website’ is a bad idea.

Here are the average response times for each provider during our stress test.

Hosting Provider	Average Response Time
Rocket.net	13 ms
WP Engine	67 ms
Dreamhost	77 ms
Bluehost	156 ms
HostGator	235 ms
SiteGround	250 ms
Hostinger	460 ms
GreenGeeks	3450 ms

Bluehost Pricing Plans

On top of that, Google and other search engines penalize slower websites by pushing them down in the search results.

WPBeginner users get an exclusive 70% discount and free SSL with our SiteGround coupon code.

5. GreenGeeks

If you want to build a WordPress website, then you need web hosting. Your hosting server is where your website files are stored.

Bitcatcha Server Response Time

We used the k6 tool to measure how GreenGeeks performs during peak traffic, gradually building up to 100 unique visitors.

Rocket.net is a managed WordPress hosting company offering super-fast and fully managed WordPress hosting solutions. Their plans come with a custom, user-friendly hosting dashboard, a CDN, automated backups, and more.

You can learn more in our complete Rocket.net review.

This means slow sites get less traffic, while a fast WordPress website will help you get more traffic, subscribers, and revenue.

How We Tested Website Performance for the Fastest WordPress Hosting Providers

Here are the Pingdom speed testing tool results for Rocket.net.

WPBeginner users get an exclusive 60% off with our HostGator coupon code.

8. Bluehost

However, if website speed and performance are your highest priority, then you should also look carefully at Rocket.net. They have a better response time under load and around the world than any other provider.

FAQs About WordPress Hosting

GreenGeeks has a wide range of hosting plans for customers of every size, starting at $2.95/month.

Hostinger is a robust platform to host your website. Now that you have seen their performance test results, you might like to see some of their other pros and cons.

Here are the response times (measured in milliseconds) for each provider from 8 locations around the world.

Host	US (W)	US (E)	UK	Singapore	Brazil	India	AU	Japan	CA	Germany
Hostinger	147	83	10	280	192	126	270	255	90	10
Dreamhost	18	81	153	182	190	283	158	112	83	168
WP Engine	56	30	95	189	140	23	190	128	30	109
SiteGround	60	34	104	254	157	257	200	161	29	114
GreenGeeks	50	27	89	214	147	212	185	152	20	101
Rocket.net	2	1	3	7	4	5	1	2	2	2
HostGator	26	71	152	189	193	262	163	128	92	159
Bluehost	46	35	107	212	140	226	179	159	47	116

We wanted to accurately measure performance across all WordPress hosting companies, so we created the same sample WordPress site on each hosting provider and used the default WordPress theme.

Rocket.net Pricing Plans

Now that we’ve shared our performance test results for each hosting provider, let’s take a look at which services are the fastest.

The page load times above were tested during low-traffic periods. So, we also tested how each provider’s response time changed when we sent multiple users to the site.

Hostinger is a popular web hosting provider with a reliable and user-friendly platform to launch websites. They offer affordable shared hosting plans with great customer support, a free domain name, a free SSL certificate, and more.

SiteGround offers fast and reliable web hosting with great customer support. They have hosting plans for every budget, and each plan comes with super fast servers and the option to pick your datacenter.

Learn more in our complete SiteGround review.

Why We Chose Hostinger

k6 Load Impact Test

Fastest Overall WordPress Hosting Providers

HostGator Pros and Cons

HostGator is one of the largest and most popular hosting companies in the world. They offer all kinds of hosting plans, including shared, managed, and VPS hosting.

DreamHost Pricing Plans

As you can see, our test WP Engine website maintained an incredible response rate throughout the test, with an average response time of 67.01 milliseconds. It performed really well with only minor spikes.

You can be confident that a HostGator website will load quickly around the world.

k6 Load Impact Test

Why We Chose Rocket.net

WP Engine Pros and Cons

In the United States, our HostGator testing site responded in just 26 milliseconds. Times from other locations were also fast, and the slowest speed in India was still a respectable 262 milliseconds.

Here are the results:

This means that if you have a small business website, an online store, or a growing blog, your Hostinger website will easily handle sudden traffic spikes.

Bitcatcha Server Response Time

k6 Load Impact Test

Pros:

• Affordable hosting prices
• Free domain name
• Free CDN + SSL certificate
• Great customer support
• Officially recommended by WordPress
• 1-click WordPress install

SiteGround is one of the most recommended WordPress hosting companies, and we use them ourselves on WPBeginner. Among other features, they allow customers to choose between 6 different datacenters worldwide.

These results are incredibly fast. Our test site responded in just a couple of milliseconds for all locations.

Cons:

• No free domain
• WP Engine doesn’t allow you to install some WordPress plugins

Why We Chose SiteGround

SiteGround Pricing Plans

Can I switch my WordPress hosting provider later?

Here are the Pingdom speed testing tool results for WP Engine.

It responded quickly in other locations as well. Plus, SiteGround lets you choose a data center closer to your target audience so you can get the best response times in a particular region.

Want to learn more about WordPress hosting? Here are our best guides on the topic:

GreenGeeks Pros and Cons

This means that GreenGeeks will work well on a small website but isn’t recommended for sites with lots of visitors. Traffic spikes will significantly degrade your website performance and may cause downtime.

Rocket.net offers a fast and reliable platform to host your website. Now that you have seen their performance test results, here are some of their other pros and cons.

The cost of building a WordPress website varies based on your needs. It can range from $100 to as high as $30,000. We have created a detailed guide explaining how much it really costs to build a WordPress website.

A more important metric is the page load time. Here, Hostinger was quickest, with the page loading in just 181 milliseconds.

You can learn more in our complete WP Engine review.

Hostinger Pricing Plans

Bitcatcha Server Response Time

WP Engine can be a great option if you are looking for a completely hassle-free web host for your WordPress site. Their advanced features will save you time, and there is plenty of room to scale as your traffic increases.

Here are the k6 performance overview results for Hostinger. To see how more visitors would impact the site’s speed, we gradually built up to 100 unique visitors at once.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Cons:

• Higher monthly pricing
• HostGator uses a lot of aggressive upselling tactics

WPBeginner users can get the best price using our GreenGeeks coupon code.

6. Rocket.net

WPBeginner users can get the best price on shared hosting using our DreamHost coupon code and shared hosting using our DreamPress coupon code.

3. WP Engine

Pros:

• Environmentally-friendly hosting
• A free domain name
• Great customer support
• 1-click WordPress install
• Free SSL certificate, CDN, and website backups
• Built-in performance tools, including LiteSpeed caching

DreamHost is highly rated for their fast and reliable hosting, which is great for bloggers, online store owners, developers, and web designers. They have won many awards and get excellent reviews from their customers. But they may not be the right choice if you need a lot of help getting started.

Response Time Around the World

Pingdom Website Speed Test

The average response time of 234.99 milliseconds is particularly good for a shared hosting account.

Three other services, DreamHost, WP Engine, and SiteGround, had loading times of less than half a second.

Why We Chose Bluehost

You can learn more in our complete Hostinger review.

Why We Chose GreenGeeks

To test how SiteGround servers would respond to increased traffic, we used a tool called k6 to gradually send up to 100 users to our test website.

Bitcatcha Server Response Time
We also ran a Bitcatcha test to see the response time around the world. Here are the results:

We found SiteGround to be fast and reliable. Here are some of their other pros and cons.

Having helped over 400,000+ users start their websites, we have answered quite a lot of questions. Below are some of the answers to the most frequently asked questions about WordPress hosting.

GreenGeeks is affordable, and their plans include plenty of useful features. Now that you have seen their performance test results, you might like to see some pros and cons.

Then, we used independent third-party tools to test the performance of our sample website on each hosting provider:

1. We used Pingdom, an industry-leading website speed test service, to get a performance grade for each provider and measure how long it took a page to load.
2. We used the Load Impact (k6) service to send virtual users (VU) to each website to see how the hosting server would handle multiple connections at once, like peak traffic times of up to 100 visitors at once.
3. We used Bitcatcha to test server response times across many geographical locations, including the United States, London, Singapore, São Paulo, India, Sydney, and Japan. This helps us decide which hosting company is best for each geographical location.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

The server responded in just a fraction of a second in the United States, making SiteGround a great choice if your target audience is mostly in North America.

We also used the Bitcatcha server response test to see how the server response time varies around the world.

The web server’s response time will vary depending on how far your visitors are from the server. The Bitcatcha test measures how fast the Hostinger server actually responds from different locations around the world without loading the web page.

The fastest response times were for users in the United States and Canada. In other parts of the world, the time was higher, but still acceptable.

Our SiteGround test site loaded in 491 milliseconds, which is less than half a second. This speed is incredible, but the website had no traffic during this test. Let’s see how more visitors will affect the speed.

However, GreenGeeks did not perform well when encountering a lot of visitors at the same time. You can address this by installing a WordPress caching plugin. However, if your web server is slow, then caching alone won’t make much difference.

WP Engine’s server response time was fastest on the east coast of the United States (30 milliseconds), and even its slowest speed of 235 milliseconds in Bangalore is very fast at less than one-quarter of a second.

Cons:

• Higher domain renewal price

Pros:

• Very fast servers
• Excellent customer support
• 1-click WordPress install
• Free SSL certificate and CDN
• WordPress staging tools
• Integrated firewall and WordPress security features

Pros:

• Award-winning hosting
• Excellent customer support
• Officially recommended by WordPress
• 1-click WordPress install
• Free domain name, SSL certificate, and privacy
• Automatic daily WordPress backups

This time, our test site handled 97 requests per second (16,000 requests total), and the average response time was a very fast 77 milliseconds.

SiteGround Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Most affordable hosting on the market
• Performance-optimized hosting
• Excellent customer support
• 1-click WordPress install
• Free domain and free SSL certificate
• Many datacenters across the world

The most important performance indicator is your website’s speed. It not only affects user experience, but it can also hurt your site’s search engine optimization (SEO). Users may leave a slow website before it even loads.

Note that this test was performed with a Bluehost server in the United States. If your users come from other parts of the world, then you can change the server location to improve the response time.

GreenGeeks is a web hosting provider whose goal is to be as environmentally friendly as possible. Their hosting plans also offer great performance, managed updates, a choice of 5 datacenters, and more.

Our test site loaded in just 1.03 seconds. This is a great result without traffic, so we also ran a k6 stress test to see how extra users affect our site’s performance.

Note that this test didn’t time how long it took the page to load, just how long it took until the server could respond. It also measured how that response time changed as we sent more and more users.

Here are the k6 performance overview results for DreamHost. We built up to 100 unique virtual visitors at once to see how the server would handle more requests and connections at the same time.

Here are the Pingdom speed testing tool results for GreenGeeks.

DreamHost’s response times remained consistent around the world and were fastest in North America and Europe.

Next, we used Bitcatcha to measure response times for Rocket.net from different geographic locations.

However, all providers had loading times of well under 2 seconds, which is very good.

Here are the results:

WP Engine offers fast servers, security, and peace of mind that users need from a managed WordPress host. Now that you have seen their performance test results, you might like to see some of their other pros and cons.

This test shows that SiteGround is a good choice if you are looking for a really fast website. It performed consistently throughout the test without any hiccups, and an average response time of 249.71 milliseconds.

To find the fastest WordPress hosting providers, we actually signed up with each provider and thoroughly tested their services.

Our test site loaded in well under two seconds. However, this test was performed when the site had little traffic.

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