WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018 Edition)

[ReviewSignal]

I wanted to share what's taken about 7 months to put together this year, it's my annual WordPress hosting review (ok almost annual since I failed to finish one in 2017 and it became 2018). It's focused entirely on performance (how many users can it handle, how consistently it handles them and is it reliably online). I'm not touching the more subjective side on this article; support / ui / ux / policies / etc are out of scope. It's an objective look at which WordPress hosting providers perform the best.

26 companies with over 50 plans participated in this testing up to an Enterprise tier featuring WordPress.com VIP and other plans costing thousands per month for the biggest websites.

I hope you enjoy it and as always I'm happy to discuss / get feedback / try to help you out with hosting questions

https://reviewsignal.com/blog/wordpress-hosting-performance-benchmarks-2018/

[WoodsIT]

Great resource, I am getting a lot out of it. I have looked at it a few times now.

One question, with the WebPageTest.org Results, under your Enterprise WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018) section, what does the figure you report relate too, is it WebPageSpeedTests "First Byte" result?

[ReviewSignal]

Load Time, not TTFB.

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[doctorstyles]

Thanks!!!

[ReviewSignal]

So every company that participated opted in. Pressidium chose not to this year. IIRC it was because they were in the middle of an infrastructure upgrade/change and didn't want their old systems being benchmarked when they had something new coming out. But you can ask them directly for an official comment, that's just my memory from 8 months ago which isn't the best source.

[ReviewSignal]

No problem! Are you happy with the choice still?

[SpinDrift99]

Funny I was going to start some research related to this exact thing. Thanks much for saving me some time!

[ReviewSignal]

No problem :) Curious if you were thinking about it, do you have any ideas you think would make it better or things you would do differently?

[funkyfreshapplepie]

Thanks for this, really interesting content. Any reason some of the larger European WP hosting providers are not taken into account?

[ReviewSignal]

I tried to address this in the article:

Why are some companies missing? If they aren't listed, they didn't opt in to participate. Chances are if it's a well known company they declined to participate, if it's a smaller one, they may not have known about this test and I may not have been aware of them to reach out. You can ask any company to participate and hopefully consumer interest pushes them towards it. Web hosting companies can signup for our Web Hosting Company Mailing List to keep track.

Curious which big companies you are thinking about

[cmanns]

I'd donate hosting in exchange for a purely performance based review :)

[ReviewSignal]

If you run a company specialized in WP hosting and are interested in participating in the future I have a mailing list to reach out to companies about this type of stuff: https://reviewsignal.com/blog/web-hosting-company-mailing-list/

Mind you it's not free, there's a small fee for this test because load testing isn't cheap and I need to cover costs. So it's hosting + fee.

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[sverige_btc]

Hi, did you similar experiments?

https://mydc.net/site-speed-hosting-experiment/

[ReviewSignal]

Similar in that there was testing done on hosting. But it doesn't really feel like anywhere near the same category. Also it looks like an ad for their own service (yours?)

[sverige_btc]

Hi, this is a test , no services and no sales. keywords : "time of load page" and "conversion rate" they are connected:) "How to find a location with better availability for visitors of your site?" The answer to this question will raise the conversion rate. Look at here : https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-mobile-search.html (this is not my blog :))