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2018 WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks is now live.

This is the fourth round of managed WordPress web hosting performance testing. You can see the original, 2014 version , and 2015 version.

Companies Tested

A2 Hosting [Reviews]

BlueHost [Reviews]

CloudWays [Reviews]

Conetix

DreamHost [Reviews]

FlyWheel [Reviews]

GoDaddy [Reviews]

Incendia Web Works

Kinsta

LightningBase

LiquidWeb [Reviews]

MediaTemple [Reviews]

Pagely [Reviews]

Pantheon [Reviews]

Pressable (Formerly ZippyKid)

Pressed.net

Pressidium

Pressjitsu

PressLabs

Hosting Agency (German)

SiteGround [Reviews]

Traffic Planet Hosting

WordPress.com VIP

WPEngine [Reviews]

WP.land

WPOven.com

Companies that didn't participate this round but did on previous rounds: WebHostingBuzz, WPPronto, Nexcess, A Small Orange [Reviews] and WebSynthesis [Reviews].

Every plan was donated by the company for testing purposes with the strict stipulation that it would be the same as if any normal user signed up. There is a notes section at the bottom that details the minutiae of changes made to plans at the end of this post. Nearly every single company had security issues that I had to get around, so they worked to make sure my testing went through properly. Load testing often looks like an attack and it's the only way I can do these tests.

The Products

This year is a bit different than years past where every company and plan competed against one another. When I started the price gap was from $5/month to $29/month. Last year the gap was $5.95 to $299. I was only testing entry level plans but the market has dramatically changed since I first got started. Today, there is demand at many different price points and lots of companies have gone upscale with WordPress.com VIP at the top of the price bracket starting at $5,000/month. The only logical way to break things up was by price brackets. So below you will see the brackets and which companies participated. Specific details will be included on each bracket's write up.

<$25/m $25-50/m $51-100/m $101-200/m $201-500/m $500+/m A2 Hosting A2 Hosting LiquidWeb A2 Hosting Kinsta Kinsta Bluehost Conetix Bluehost Bluehost Media Temple Pagely DreamHost LLC Lightning Base Cloudways (AWS ) Conetix Pagley Pantheon Flywheel Pantheon Cloudways (Google) Kinsta Pantheon Pressable GoDaddy Pressable Kinsta Liquid Web Pressable Pressidium Incendia Web Works Pressjitsu Lightning Base Pressable Pressidium WordPress.com VIP Lightning Base SiteGround Media Temple Pressidium Presslabs WP Engine Media Temple WP Engine Pagely Pressjitsu SiteGround Pressed WP.land Pantheon Hosting Agency.de Cloudways (DigitalOcean) Pressable SiteGround Cloudways (Vultr) Pressidium Traffic Planet Hosting WPOven SiteGround WP.land

Methodology

The question I tried to answer is how well do these WordPress hosting services perform? I tested each company on two distinct measures of performance: peak performance and consistency. I've also included a compute and database benchmark based on a WordPress plugin.

All tests were performed on an identical WordPress dummy website with the same plugins except in cases where hosts added extra plugins. Each site was monitored for approximately two months for consistency.

1. LoadStorm

LoadStorm was kind enough to give me resources to perform load testing on their platform and multiple staff members were involved in designing and testing these WordPress hosts. I created identical scripts for each host to load a site, login to the site and browse the site. Logged in users were designed to break some of the caching and better simulate real user load. The amount of users varies by cost.

2. Blitz.io

I used Blitz again to compare against previous results. This tests the static caching of the homepage. I increased the number of users based on monthly cost this time.

3. Uptime (UptimeRobot and StatusCake)

Consistency matters. I wanted to see how well these companies performed over a longer period of time. I used two separate uptime monitoring services over the course of a month to test consistency.

4. WebPageTest.org

WebPageTest with 9 runs, first view only, native connection. I tested from Dulles, Denver, Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, South Africa, Singapore, Shanghai, Japan, Sydney, Brazil.

5. WPPerformanceTester (free plugin on WordPress.org)

I created a WordPress plugin to benchmark CPU, MySql and WordPress DB performance. The CPU/MySql benchmarks are testing the compute power. The WordPress component tests actually calling $wpdb and executing insert, select, update and delete queries.

Notes - Changes made to Hosting Plans

A2 - VPS Servers can't install WordPress out of the box without extra payment for Softaculous. Disabled recaptcha.

Conetix - disabled WordFence and Stream plugins.

SiteGround - fully enable SuperCacher plugin

GoDaddy - 24 database connection limit increased if you notify them of heavy load

CloudWays - disabled WordFence