How to Choose Best WordPress Hosting? (Complete Guide)

Web hosting is one of the key components of every successful website. Choosing a new WordPress host and selecting a suitable and inexpensive WordPress hosting plan are crucial for you. Additionally, choosing the correct domain name is a key component for a successful website as well. Before creating a website it’s important to know the difference between these two. Check out our detailed guide on what Is The Difference Between Domain Name And Web Hosting

So let’s dive deep into how to choose the best WordPress hosting for your website.

Picking up the best hosting providers for your needs can improve your website performance and keep your website active with good page load speed. Here we have many types of WordPress hosting options available that include Free, Dedicated, VPS, Shared, and Managed WordPress hosting.

If you already have a hosting service and are planning to shift to a better one, check out our guide on how to transfer web hosting of your WordPress.

Thus, to make it easy for you and everyone, we also have hand-picked WordPress hosting companies. These companies are the top and best WordPress hosting companies in the industry.

Let’s get started!

What Does Your Website Need?

Before moving on to choose a WordPress hosting for your website, get the answers to these questions:

  • What is your current website traffic? How much do you expect it to grow in the next few months?
  • How scalable a web hosting provider do you want? This would depend on your answer to the previous question.
  • Do you require your hosting service to be developer-friendly?
  • How much support do you need?
  • What is your allocated budget for your hosting solution?

These should be foremost among the questions that you need to answer before you try to identify the right hosting solution for your WordPress site.

Important Features for Your WordPress Web Hosting?

Speed & Performance

Good hardware is essential to ensure great quality of service from a web host. The memory (RAM), processing power (CPUs), and disk space (HDDs & SSDs) made available to you play a big role in determining the overall performance of your website.

Now the usage of your RAM and CPU depends on the type of content on your website and the number of visitors at any one type. For example, if you create viral content the average hosting plan provided to you at minimal cost is not sufficient to handle such bursts of traffic. It will cause your website to slow down and on rare occasions even go offline. And you can’t have that.

It isn’t disk space that is important, seeing as though many hosting companies provide you with unlimited disk space. It’s rather the ability of your host to get the information quickly to your visitors, in other words, the transfer speed that counts. And it is even better if you have a web host who can keep your site’s data transfer times low, even under high load.

You can check the load on your server’s CPU, RAM, and how much disk space you use. If you are cutting it close, then it is time to upgrade your hosting plan. You can generally check this from your host’s dashboard.

Generally, people choose costly WordPress hosting plans as they can handle larger traffic more effectively.

Support

This depends largely on your familiarity with different hosting solutions. You’ll need less support, if you know your way around WordPress installation, migration, security, caching, site backups, and restorations.

But even if you know everything, there is always the potential for that one glitch to mess everything up and it is advisable to have a web host who cares about ensuring that their product functions as advertised. And most providers of web hosting services ensure some degree of support. They provide support via telephone, support forums, live web chats, emails, and a support ticket system.

Ideally, the best support service is the one that is provided at a moment’s notice and with the quickest turnaround times.

UpTime

Most web hosting services have uptimes over 99.5%. There are very few in the sub 99% region. While it doesn’t seem much if 0.1% has a significant impact on your income from your website it becomes rather important. Otherwise, it is not something you need to concern yourself with. I say this because most web hosting companies of repute have excellent uptimes.

Bonus Features

  • Offsite Backup & Recovery: If ever your website gets hacked or loses all its data for some reason, you need to be able to restore your website to its former glory.
  • Caching: Some web hosting companies provide caching to help ensure increased speeds. In-house caching includes caching on the server-side and the client’s end. There are a few plugins to help with client-side caching, head over to my previous post on the WordPress caching plugins.
  • Git Version Control: This is to facilitate developers.
  • Built-In CDN: Either that or you can opt for, in all likelihood the best CDN service in MaxCDN.
  • Security Features: You can check out how many times they’ve been hacked, a good indicator of their security.
  • Physical Location of Data Center: The closer it is to the majority of your website’s visitors, the better.

The above six are reasonably important criteria that you’ll need to consider carefully before coming to your decision.

WordPress Hosting Requirements

WordPress recommends that your web hosting platform supports the following:

  • PHP version 7.4 or greater
  • MySQL version 5.6 or greater OR MariaDB version 10.1 or greater
  • HTTPS support (SSL)

Officially speaking, WordPress supports PHP 7.0 through 7.4 currently, but it works best with 7.2+.

7 Best WordPress Hosting Providers

Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosts on this list, probably because they’re an official WordPress.org recommended hosting solution. They’re also consistently rated #1 for small business web hosting, so you can’t go wrong here. They’ve got a traditional cPanel dashboard area for you to easily control your hosting.

And with Bluehost, you don’t have to worry about your website being slow just because there’s a spike in traffic, for instance. In addition, their 24/7 customer service is available by phone, email, or live chat and can help you whenever you need it. They also offer a free domain and free SSL certificates.

Bluehost is optimized for WordPress and also has an amazing 1-click install for WordPress, so you can rest assured that’s taken care of easily.

On top of that, prices start at just $2.75 per month.

  • Speed: 689 ms
  • Uptime: 99.99%
  • Customer Support: 4/5

SiteGround

You can also choose SiteGround, which is another wildly popular WordPress web hosting provider that’s got sky-high ratings from users. Plus, it’s also recommended officially by WordPress.org, which is a big deal. And they provide unique in-house WordPress speed and security solutions to make your site as fast and secure as possible.

Also, SiteGround offers location-specific hosting with 3 different data centers in the USA, Europe, and Asia so you can choose the one closest to you and make sure your site is lightning-fast. Additionally, they offer WordPress daily backups, daily caching, plus unlimited databases and email accounts.

And, their pricing starts at just $3.95 a month.

  • Speed: 649 ms
  • Uptime: 99.98%
  • Customer Support: 5/5

DreamHost

Another officially recommended hosting provider from WordPress.org is DreamHost. This is one of the best WordPress hosting options to choose from. This independently owned and operated company is a smart choice because they offer a 97-day money-back guarantee. Plus, they’ve been powering millions of sites since 1997. Their standard shared hosting package is a popular choice.

And if you choose DreamHost, you’ll get a custom dashboard, one-click WordPress installation, automatic updates, unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, and free SSL certificates. So if you’re looking for an excellent WordPress host that offers easy site creation with high-speed SSD storage, then DreamHost could be the right one for you.

  • Speed: 445 ms
  • Uptime: 99.90%
  • Customer Support: 4/5

WPEngine

WPEngine is a managed hosting company used for WordPress. And you know they’re reliable since they have some popular clients including companies like Yelp, MyFitnessPal, Asana, National Geographic, and PBS. That’s because they’re one of the most optimally managed WordPress hosting plans in the world.

So if you’ve got a high-traffic site and need a top-notch host, you’ll appreciate that WPEngine has cloud hosting through Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. These partnerships give your WordPress website the highest possible availability, speed, scalability, and security. And it all comes with 24/7 customer service.

In addition, WPEngine plans include the Genesis Framework + multiple StudioPress themes completely free (an amazing value). And if you want, they can help you get WordPress pre-installed if you’re starting from scratch.

If you choose WP Engine as your WordPress hosting provider, the pricing plan starts from $20 per month. You can use our exclusive WP Engine coupon codes and get 3 months free on an annual payment & 10% OFF.

  • Speed: 582 ms
  • Uptime: 99.99%
  • Customer Support: 4/5

HostGator

HostGator supports millions of websites and is a leader in the shared hosting space. They have affordable plans with a 45-day money-back guarantee.

In addition, all plans include a website builder with templates, unlimited bandwidth, and $100 in AdWords credits to help you with WordPress SEO optimization. On top of that, HostGator offers amazing 24/7 support.

Additionally, prices start at just $2.75 a month.

  • Speed: 691 ms
  • Uptime: 99.96%
  • Customer Support: 5/5

Hostinger

Hostinger is a fast-growing and popular hosting company. Hostinger’s many great features include unlimited bandwidth, a free domain, free SSL, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Plus, they also have automatic 1-click WordPress install with managed updates and WordPress-optimized speed acceleration.

Also, we love that they have 24/7 live chat support, and offer a choice of 7 data centers in Europe, Asia, and South America.

And prices for Hostinger start at only $2.19 per month!

  • Speed: 146 ms
  • Uptime: 99.9%
  • Customer Support: 5/5

GreenGeeks

The most eco-friendly hosting company on this list is GreenGeeks. Not only do you get a free SSL certificate and free domain name, but they give back 3x the power they consume into the grid in the form of renewable energy, for instance. Also, their SSD storage makes them one of the fastest WordPress hosting providers that also deliver on security and reliability.

Plus, they’ve got a 30-day money-back guarantee and 24/7 support. Check out our GreenGeeks review for more information.

And their prices start at just $2.95 a month.

  • Speed: 697 ms
  • Uptime: 99.92%
  • Customer Support: 4/5

WPX Hosting

WPX Hosting is a leading managed WordPress hosting provider, renowned for its speed, security, and support. With features like free SSL, automatic backups, and malware scanning, they ensure a seamless experience for website owners. Their custom dashboard simplifies management, while dedicated WordPress-optimized servers deliver lightning-fast performance. Trusted by businesses and bloggers alike, WPX Hosting excels in providing top-tier hosting solutions tailored specifically for WordPress users.

All of its hosting plans come with premium SSD storage, a custom control panel, and free unlimited site migrations to WPX. Along with WordPress hosting, you can also purchase WooCommerce-tailored hosting from WPX. They are running a 10th Anniversary contest, Participate & Win 10-Year Hosting Plan for your website!

  • Speed:
  • Uptime:
  • Customer Support:

The Best WordPress Hosting (Winner)

So now that you’ve seen how to choose best web hosting services for WordPress and what they have to offer, it’s time to decide which one is right for you.

Ideally, you want to pick a service that’s fast, in your budget, and promises over 99% uptime. All of the hosting providers on this list are excellent, but our overall recommendation goes to Bluehost. That’s because they’re officially recommended by WordPress.org. Plus, Bluehost is super affordable for blogs and small business websites, but can also work for eCommerce sites as well. And you’ll get amazing 24/7 support from a WordPress expert at any time. You can check out our latest article on top 13 best WordPress hosting providers in detail.

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