If you wanted to find out on your own where particular web hosting providers came in the race, you would have to perform two things:
- Ask the real users of several major hosting services what their experiences are.
- Do some testing yourself on various hosts and evaluate the performance you’re receiving.
We did both:
a) We found out what actual users think about finest WordPress hosting
In our point of view, you can’t truly call any company the best WordPress hosting available unless you’ve seen that company rated highly by actual users (and a lot of them) – individuals who have tried the company themselves and have received top results out of it.
So to find out who really comes on top according to the users, we’ve undertaken the largest WordPress hosting study to date. That study has taught us a lot about the nature of WordPress hosting, what people’s expectations are and who’s best at fulfilling them.
So that’s the first piece in our jigsaw to find the finest WordPress hosting on the market. The other element: performance tests.
b) We performed performance testing ourselves
For each hosting company, we’ve signed up for their most popular or entry-level WordPress hosting plan and built a simple WordPress website on it.
We opted to go for a very stripped-down WordPress setup to make comparisons as fair as possible.
Each setup utilized WordPress with the default theme, a bundle of example data, plus a handful of popular WordPress plugins (Contact Form 7, Yoast SEO) activated.
For the sake of testing customer service, we placed each site on a temporary URL with the WordPress hosting provider, and reached out to them for help on how to set it up.
In terms of performance, each WordPress install was evaluated in the following ways:
- UptimeRobot: Used for checking the uptime of our hosts on a regular basis.
- Pageload testing using Pingdom: The homepage is loaded from a handful different places and the results collected.
Disclaimer. Due to the nature of WordPress hosting, there is no magic single definitive test that will hold true in all situations. What we were looking for here were demonstrative page load times and acceptable overall performance metrics at modest use levels. Remember that your mileage may, and certainly will, vary.