Compare The Best Web Hosting for WordPress
Want to jump straight to the answer? The best web hosting for most people is Hostinger or Cloudways.
While it’s true that you can use any web host for your WordPress website, a WordPress-specific web hosting solution delivers better service, performance, and support for WordPress sites. If you’ve been feeling frustrated with your non-WP-specific web host and want something better suited to WordPress, you’re in the right place.
I’ve gone through dozens of available hosts and ranked the best options on the market today, including providers WordPress itself recommends. The solutions below provide the best security, performance, and reliability for websites built on WordPress.
The Top 9 WordPress Web Hosts for 2023
Best of 2023: Bluehost, Cloudways, Flywheel, Hostinger, Kinsta, Nexcess, Scala Hosting, Siteground, and WP Engine.
My team and I spent countless hours pouring over every detail from price and performance to ease of use, migrations, and features. Along the way, we identified five hosts that outshine the rest.
Our favorite WordPress hosts for 2023 are:
- Hostinger – Most affordable WordPress web host
- Cloudways – Best for flexibility and extensive options
- Siteground – Best for ecommerce websites with easy site migration
- Bluehost – Best for creating your first WordPress website
- Scala Hosting – Most freebies with WordPress hosting plans
Whether you’re looking for something affordable and easy to use, a lot of bang for your buck, or a host with limitless flexibility, you can’t go wrong with any of the hosts above.
Depending on your goals, one of my recommended hosting providers may work better than another for your specific needs.
Below you’ll find in-depth reviews that explain my recommendations, followed by a brief tactical section to help you assess your options.
Hostinger — Most Affordable WordPress Web Host
- Starts at $1.99 per month
- Month-to-month pricing available
- Free domain and SSL certificate
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Hostinger stands out for its low prices and stellar loading times.
How low? Hostinger’s current managed WordPress plan starts at just $1.99 per month for a single website—which is unbeatable compared to other web hosts out there. While that is promotional pricing, even the contract renewal price of $3.99 per month is very affordable.
But here’s the kicker: for just one dollar more per month (currently $2.99), you can build 100 websites along with 100 GB of SSD storage, free email, and unlimited bandwidth.
That’s right, for the price of a single cup of coffee each month, you’ll be able to host up to 100 websites. That’s an amazing deal.
For more information on plans and pricing, check out our in-depth Hostinger web hosting review.
With their great prices, does that mean you’ll be sacrificing quality? Nope. In fact, you’re going to get solid uptime reliability with Hostinger.
Loading times are speedy, too. According to the Hostinger website, server response time clocks in at around 43 milliseconds, which is very fast. To give you a comparison, that’s just 13 milliseconds “slower” than a lightning strike. In our testing, every Hostinger hosting type (shared, VPS, and WordPress hosting) averaged well under one second for loading.
Hostinger recently implemented a new feature for page speed insights, where you can measure your site’s speed and see its performance history with just one click. If you find that you want to improve your loading speed, the new server transfer feature will recommend what to do.
The company also recently added an advanced malware scanner and a WordPress staging tool so you can test changes without actually changing your entire live site.
Overall, this is a great web host if you want good prices with quality hosting. If you want to maximize the number of sites you can host at a low cost, get signed up with Hostinger today.
Cloudways – Best for Flexibility and Extensive Options
- Five IaaS provider options
- Fast and reliable managed hosting
- Only pay for what you use
- Starts at just $10 per month
Cloudways has been providing managed WordPress hosting for over 11 years and has hosted 600,000+ WordPress websites. Another impressive statistic is that Cloudway has access to more than 120,000 active servers!
Cloudways strives to provide flexibility to all of its clients. Some examples of this flexibility are offering unlimited WordPress websites, pay-as-you-go pricing with hourly plans (so you only pay for what you actually use), one click to add more server space, unlimited staging URLs, and more.
And with an extensive knowledge base and 24/7 expert support, you don’t have to be a technical expert yourself to jump in with Cloudways.
Cloudways currently has 62 data centers in 15 countries and 33 cities, so no matter where you are in the world, you will get speedy, reliable performance.
For plans and pricing, the rates depend on several factors, including selecting from five Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, plus the level of RAM, processor cores, storage, and bandwidth you need. The IaaS provider options are:
- Linode
- DigitalOcean
- Vultr
- AWS
- Google Cloud
The managed WordPress plans run the gamut of pricing. The least expensive is $12 per month including DigitalOcean Standard hosting charges, with 1 GB of RAM, 1 core processor, 25 GB of storage, and 1 TB of bandwidth. The most expensive is $3569.98 per month including the AWS hosting charges. That plan includes 384 GB of RAM, 96 vCPU, 20 GB of storage, and 2 GB of bandwidth.
All plans come with 24/7/365 support, free SSL, CDN add-on, free migration, unlimited application installation, 24/7 real-time monitoring, automated backups, advanced caches, auto-healing, and more.
You can try Cloudways for free with a three-day free trial to test their managed WordPress hosting and how it will work for your needs.
SiteGround — Best for Ecommerce Websites with Easy Site Migration
- Starts at $2.99/month
- Free SSL, email, CDN, & backups
- Recommended by WordPress
- 30-day money-back guarantee
SiteGround is another of WordPress’ recommended web hosts. It offers incredibly affordable managed hosting solutions–that are incredibly powerful as well.
Where SiteGround really shines is in how easy it makes:
- Migrating to their host. Their free migrator tool lets you easily port your old website over to their website in just a few days’ time. No development or coding knowledge is required.
- Setting up an online store. With the powerful combination of WordPress and WooCommerce, you’ll be able to set up an ecommerce site to start making money in a snap. Seriously, it just takes a few clicks.
I also like its advanced features for WordPress, like automatic updates and enhanced security on all SiteGround plans. You’ll also get free daily backups. That’s an amazing deal for the lowest-tier pricing.
This covers most of the problems you could run into, freeing up more of your time to focus on your business or project. You can read even more about their offered services in my complete SiteGround hosting review.
I recommend the StartUp plan. It gives you 10GB of space and up to 10,000 visitors for one site. This intro-level plan is $2.99 per month for your first year (paid upfront).
You can boost your WordPress or WooCommerce site even further by going one step up to GrowBig. That lets you tap into SiteGround’s own Ultrafast PHP to speed up the visitor experience even more. Plus, you get the safety of on-demand copies of your site backups, all for $4.99 per month. The biggest plan is GoGeek for $7.99 per month with 40 GB web space, priority support, staging + Git, and the ability to white-label clients.
All told, this is a great host for web stores on WordPress, ecommerce sites who want to switch to a better host, and anyone who wants solid security and easy site backups for their pages.
Get started with SiteGround today.
Bluehost — Best for Creating Your First WordPress Website
- Normally $8.99/month
- Free domain and SSL certificate
- Recommended by WordPress
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Bluehost is a favorite for many because it is one of the three web hosts that WordPress officially recommends for people to use. That’s about as good of an endorsement as you can get for WordPress hosting.
The main reason people enjoy Bluehost? It’s simple to get started. Once you get started, you can install WordPress immediately and you’ll have your bare-bones site live within just 15 minutes. From there, you can follow our full guide on how to create a website so that you can get your site looking and functioning just the way you want it.
Another reason that Bluehost is a fan favorite is that it has millions of users, which means that the kinks and issues with setup and the continued hosting of websites have generally been worked out. In the rare case that you do run into an issue, help is just a call away. You can reach out 24/7 to Bluehost’s award-winning customer support team if you find yourself with any questions or concerns.
If that doesn’t have you convinced to try Bluehost, how about this: Bluehost has some of the lowest pricing around, with plans as low as $2.75/month. That’s incredibly cheap, especially for a brand that’s so reliable, trusted, and easy to use.
As you might imagine, these traits make Bluehost the perfect host to choose if you’re just starting out.
Yes, you will be on shared hosting. So if you or someone else on your server gets a huge spike of traffic, your site could go down. But honestly, this almost never happens. I’ve had websites on shared hosting for over a decade and never had a site go down.
If and when you want to upgrade, Bluehost also offers managed WordPress hosting that starts at $9.95/month. Not the absolute lowest price point I’ve seen, but it’s still one of the lower-cost options out there for managed hosting.
Bottom line: Bluehost is a great option for the vast majority of people reading this—but especially those who are just getting started.
Scala Hosting — Most Freebies with Every WordPress Hosting Plan
- Affordable plans across the board
- Free migration of as many sites as you need
- Seven daily backups
- Robust security features
WordPress hosting can be deceiving. While a lot of providers will boast about WordPress optimization on their servers, what more are you getting from them specifically?
Scala Hosting not only makes sure its servers help your WordPress site perform better, it also throws in a ton of useful features on almost every plan.
It starts with a free website migration, which not every provider offers. And it’s not just one website—Scala’s specialists will carry over as many WordPress sites as you need to their service, free of charge.
These experts will handle the migration and verify everything’s working before you point the site to your new servers. That way, there’s no downtime for your sites whatsoever in the process.
Security features are also prevalent in all Scala WordPress hosting plans. You get a dedicated firewall installed on your behalf, plus a brute force attack blocker, custom security rules that Scala’s team implements without you having to lift a finger, malware scans and removal, and automated updates to prevent vulnerabilities from arising.
All Scala plans also include:
- Seven daily backups with restore points kept for a week
- Free content delivery network
- Free SEO analysis and tools
You can also unlock additional useful features by going with plans above Scala’s entry-level WP Mini (one website, 20 GB storage) package. Those are:
- WP Start: unlimited websites, 50 GB storage, double the CPU power of WP Mini
- WP Advanced: unlimited websites, 100 GB storage, quadruple the CPU power of WP Mini
On those plans, you get managed service, meaning Scala’s support team of WordPress experts will help you with everything from plugin issues to overall troubleshooting.
You also get a free domain if you opt for WP Advanced. And not just one year, either, like most providers. Each year that you prepay for hosting, you get a free year of your domain. That’s a very nice bonus.
Scala’s pricing is also very competitive with other providers on this list and in the WordPress hosting space at large:
- WP Mini: $3.95 per month for a three-year commitment, $4.95 for two years
- WP Start: $5.95 per month for a three-year commitment, $7.95 for two years
- WP Advanced: $9.95 per month for a three-year commitment, $10.95 for two years
Give Scala Hosting a try or get connected with a representative to learn what more they can do for you. If you want worry-free WordPress hosting at a competitive price, Scala Hosting should be near the top of your list.
More Good WordPress Web Hosting Options
WP Engine — Best for Hosting Multiple WordPress Sites with Tons of Traffic
- Starts at $22.50/month
- Biggest name in WP hosting
- A premium product with a premium price
- Easily the all-around best
For pros, I recommend WP Engine. In fact, WP Engine is what we use here at Quick Sprout—and for very good reason. If you’re trying to get serious and build a high-traffic blog or business on WordPress, it’s by far the best managed WordPress host out there.
But I don’t recommend it for anyone who’s just starting out, since it’s much more expensive. We’re talking between $30 to more than $100 each month versus a range of $4 to $15 with other products on my list.
Most WordPress sites would do much better with Bluehost or Siteground. You’ll save a lot of money and won’t be paying for WP Engine’s advanced features you don’t need.
For $20 per month paid annually, you can use the Startup plan to host one 10GB site with a limit of 25,000 monthly visitors. The Professional tier of service is $50 per month for three sites and 75,000 monthly visitors.
That might seem like a lot of money for fewer resources (especially when compared to services like Hostinger and Bluehost, and especially given the fees you’ll pay if you exceed the visitor limits during a big traffic spike) but, remember, this is managed WordPress hosting.
As a managed host, WP Engine professionally maintains speed and security at the server level—meaning you don’t have to do anything to maximize performance on your end.
You don’t have to research and rely on plug-ins to shave seconds off your load time or become an expert on the best practices for building a lean site.
Nor do you have to carve out time to install and update your plugins, run backups, or implement security features to ward off brute force attacks. WP Engine takes care of it all behind the scenes.
The customer service is also excellent, with 24/7 support that includes trackable service tickets and a comprehensive knowledge base.
WP Engine’s support staff are WordPress experts, providing detailed answers to your questions and issues.
Every time I’ve had to reach out to customer support, I’ve always been impressed. The speed, thoroughness, and expertise are world-class.
Overall, WP Engine is an excellent solution if you want to get serious about growing your WordPress sites. Refer to our complete WP Engine web hosting review to learn more about this top-rated provider.
Nexcess — Best for Effortless Website Staging
- Price starts at $12.67/month
- Designed for advanced users
- Extremely customizable
- Server-level access
Nexcess, by Liquid Web, is a powerhouse designed to service other powerhouses, like if you’re an enterprise customer or are charged with manning multiple WordPress sites.
What I really love about Nexcess, though, is how easy it allows you to stage a website. Its one-click staging tool allows you to easily create a facsimile of your website that you can edit and test to your heart’s content—without worrying that you’re screwing up the actual website.
The company also offers a ton of great plans that make it easy to scale. Prices start at just $15.83 per month for one website (as long as you pay for the entire year up front). You also can pay $19 per month if you prefer to pay month by month.
If you need more features than the lowest-priced tier provides, the cost jumps quite a bit. The Maker tier costs $65.83 per month in the annual plan, but you get up to five sites and 40 GB storage with that plan. Nexcess calls its most popular plan the Designer tier, which offers up to 10 sites and 60 GB of storage for $90.83 per month. These plans offer a discount for the first three month.
In all, the platform offers seven plans. The most expensive plan is the Enterprise tier, which provides up to 250 sites and 800 GB of storage. If you’re an agency or freelancer who plans to host websites for clients, one of the higher-end plans is a great solution for you.
If you need more control but doing everything yourself through AWS isn’t appealing, then Nexcess is for you, too. You won’t have to do nearly as much setup and upkeep as AWS while still having a lot more control than other hosts give you.
It also automatically updates WordPress and your plugins. That’s fewer headaches for you and your team.
You’ll get all-level access to MySQL, SFTP, and SSH. You also get Git version control. Security, speed, and customer support are virtually unparalleled.
Nexcess is obviously not right for everyone. Small businesses should choose one of the other options, as Nexcess plans would be overkill.
For power users, though, Nexcess is the WordPress hosting that you’ve been looking for. Use coupon code QUICKSPROUT to get 40% off 2 months of any Nexcess hosting plan.
Flywheel — Best If You Want Experts to Migrate Your Site for You
- Price starts at $14/month
- Geared toward freelancers and agencies
- Easily build and transfer sites to clients
- User-friendly interface
Flywheel is a managed WordPress host that really puts the “support” in customer support.
The company offers a great migration service that takes care of the often stressful process of site migration for you. It has a dedicated team that handles the entire process of moving your site to its web host so you don’t have to.
The best part: it’s absolutely free.
That’s right. They’ll take care of everything at no extra cost.
Flywheel is also fantastic because of great features like “blueprints” that allow you to save customized themes and plugins you use over and over again.
You’ll also have 14 days on a free, password-protected demo site to show your work before having to pay. You can also easily transfer billing on any of your sites to a client.
That makes FlyWheel an excellent option if you’re an agency or freelancer working on client websites. If you build sites for clients, we highly recommend you start using Flywheel.
Flywheel offers a single-site plan with 5,000 monthly visitors and 5GB of disk space for $13/month. From there, you can scale up to a souped-up single-site plan for $25/month, or accommodate more sites in the two highest packages. If you need more than 30 sites, you will have to reach out to Flywheel for a custom quote.
Bottom line: I’d use Flywheel if I were looking for a hassle-free migration experience and/or developing websites for clients.
If that sounds like you, go with Flywheel as your web hosting provider.
Kinsta — Best for Managing Unexpected Surges in Traffic
- Price starts at $30/month
- Premium managed WordPress hosting
- All features included across all plans
- Built for scalability
Kinsta is a great alternative to WP Engine if something about WP Engine doesn’t gel with you.
What truly separates it from WP Engine, though, is its auto-scaling feature. In the event of an unexpected surge in traffic, its servers will automatically allocate more CPU and RAM to your website.
That means you won’t have to worry about your website slowing down or crashing when you get an influx of readers. Instead, Kinsta takes care of it for you.
That’s great for websites that frequently see infrequent spikes in traffic like when a blog post goes viral or if you have sporadic product launches in your ecommerce store. It can also be very good for websites that experience inconsistent traffic performance (e.g., viral videos, big product launches).
Kinsta also offers a ton of pricing plans for excellent scalability. In fact, it offers a whopping 10 plans as well as a customizable enterprise solution.
Pricing starts at $35 per month for 25,000 monthly visitors and scales up from there. If you need more than 2.5 million visitors per month, you can contact the Kinsta sales team to put together a custom plan. All plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Bottom line: Kinsta can handle any volume of traffic that you need. You won’t have to worry about outgrowing them.
One especially nice thing about Kinsta is that you get access to the same features across every plan, as opposed to upgrading to a higher-priced plan to unlock something.
It also makes Kinsta’s pricing super simple. Pick the plan based on your traffic and you’re good to go.
How to Choose the Best Web Hosting for WordPress
Now that you know about some of the best choices for hosting your WordPress site, it’s time to find the best one for you and your business. Here are some of the major considerations to decide among the top options.
Note: We intentionally didn’t include speed, security, and uptime on the following list of WordPress hosting factors. They are certainly important, but our recommended hosting providers have these responsibilities locked down. We wouldn’t recommend them otherwise.
Multi-Site vs. Single-Site Hosting
Every provider on our list offers different solutions if you plan to host multiple sites. That’s why it’s important to make sure the provider you choose can support all the sites you’ll be hosting in the future. The price and features for each package must be taken into consideration here.
For example, WPEngine offers a few great packages if you’re managing multiple websites. Their multi-site hosting packages start at $44.25 per month with three sites included. You’ll also get 125 GB of bandwidth each month along with 15 GB of storage.
It scales up from there to their Growth package that’s $86.25 per month—quite the jump. But you end up getting 10 sites included in that package with more bandwidth and storage.
Kinsta is also another excellent option to consider if you’re looking for multi-site WordPress hosting. These packages are also built to scale. So if you end up getting more clients who need websites, you can just upgrade your package as needed.
Providers like Bluehost offer unlimited websites at just $5.45 per month. But there’s a catch—it is completely unmanaged.
That means it doesn’t come with the level of customer support and automatic maintenance you’d get with managed hosting.
Customer Support That’s Actually Supportive
You want your website must operate as smoothly as possible. This is especially important if you’re making money from it. So when something goes wrong, like an outage or security breach, you want someone in your corner to get you out of the jam.
That’s why good customer support is an important consideration when you’re deciding on a WordPress host.
WordPress hosting platform WPEngine offers one of the best-reviewed customer support teams. The team is on hand 24/7/365 to help you with any and all issues that arise.
The trade-off here is that it’s a managed WordPress host, which means it comes at a steeper cost. With that price tag comes a stellar hosting service, though, along with a support team that’ll be at your disposal whether you need to optimize your website or guide it through any down times.
Even better, the help desk and support staff of a managed WordPress site are WordPress experts. They understand your site and the plugins you’re using. They are essentially trained to help you—unlike a general host with customers running all sorts of applications.
Managed hosts have built their business model on providing timely, reliable service. Conversely, cheaper hosts don’t put much of an emphasis on helping customers in their time of need.
That’s not to say that all unmanaged options offer inferior customer support. In fact, hosts like Bluehost offer award-winning 24/7 customer support for all of your needs. They just might not know your site as well as a managed WordPress host does.
Managed vs. Unmanaged Hosting
This is one of the most important decisions to make when it comes to choosing a WordPress web host from this list. It determines everything from your level of customer support to security to price.
First, let’s talk about the WordPress hosting most people are familiar with. You get a regular web host and that host usually gives you an easy way to install WordPress. You have a host, WordPress is installed, and that’s it.
This is known as unmanaged WordPress hosting—and most WordPress hosting works like this. After a one-click install, you get the basic version of WordPress, the same version that you’d get if you installed WordPress on a server that you owned.
Managed WordPress hosting takes things up a notch and offers several additional features.
Instead of a basic host with WordPress installed, everything is built from the ground up with WordPress in mind. This hosting infrastructure is tailored specifically to WordPress, and the hosting provider usually customizes WordPress itself to make it better.
Your site will be a lot faster and more secure with a managed plan. You’ll also benefit from much better support since the hosting team specializes in WordPress.
The downside is that managed WordPress hosting is more expensive, but this makes sense. You’re getting more value for the higher price tag.
Headache-Free Site Migration
WordPress hosting is typically an upgrade from old shared hosting solutions. So there’s a good chance you’re migrating your website to a new web host altogether.
A quality web host will help you migrate your website between web hosts easily and seamlessly. You might get a dedicated technician work through the process for you, or have a customer support team to guide you through the process yourself. Some might even charge you a little more in order to migrate your site—and it’s usually worth the price in my opinion.
See which hosting providers offer site migration as you’re reaching different options. For example, SiteGround has a free migrator tool you can use to get your website over to its host.
WPEngine is another host that offers a migration plugin. Once downloaded, the plugin takes care of all the complicated work for you.
Flywheel has experts on hand to help you migrate your website. Their migration team will take care of the whole process, so you don’t have to.
If you want to transfer your website to a new host, be sure to check what the WordPress hosting provider offers to help transfer your website. You’ll want as much assistance as you can get to make the transition smooth.
Best Web Hosting for WordPress: Your Top Questions Answered
The Top Web Hosting For WordPress in Summary
WordPress web hosting puts your site on a server that’s only used for WordPress. This improves security and performance and enhances the overall experience for your website visitors.
Factors like site traffic, technical experience, and scalability are all important factors to consider here. Beginners launching a new WordPress website likely won’t use the same solution as a high-traffic site that wants to switch hosts.
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