The Fastest WordPress Hosting: I Signed Up For 16 Plans And Measured TTFB/Load Times In Various Tools (Reports Included)

Looking for the fastest WordPress hosting?

I signed up for 16 hosting accounts and measured speeds/TTFB in Pingdom, GTmetrix, KeyCDN, and other tools. On each hosting account, I installed the same Astra Starter Site with the same 6 plugins, no cache plugin, no CDN, with SSL. I also posted screenshots of the reports.

If someone is doing a hosting speed test, check who they’re using and run their site through GTmetrix to make sure the person walks the talk. I use the winner of the test (Cloudways) and depending on the test, can get <1s load times on posts with 50+ images and 500+ comments.

 

1. Pingdom Load Times

In the Pingdom test, each host was added to Pingdom tools which performed 30 minute check intervals to measure load times. Pingdom only shows the average of the last 7 days. But even with 7 days at 30 minute check intervals, that means each individual site was tested 336 times.

Conclusion

The winner was not WPX and definitely not SiteGround. It was Cloudways Vultr HF.

If you haven’t heard of them, join the WordPress Hosting Facebook Group and you’ll quickly see they’re who most people recommend. This is a top place to get unbiased hosting opinions.

Which begs the question:

Why do other tests not show Cloudways in the top results, but they are one of the most recommended hosts in Facebook Groups and clearly one of the fastest WordPress hosts?

Here’s my theory:

Affiliates think Cloudways is too “technical” for the average user (even though they’re not) which might discourage them from recommending Cloudways. That’s why most affiliates promote the most “user-friendly hosts” such as WPX, SiteGround, Kinsta, and even Bluehost.

But they’re not the fastest.

This blog is dedicated to WordPress speed optimization and I only recommend the fastest WordPress host, regardless of whether you click my links. Many people (including myself) do these speed tests in hopes you will use our affiliate links, but it should not influence the data.

Isn’t WPX the fastest?

No. In Matthew Woodward’s test, WPX was the winner but had caching and WPX Cloud CDN installed while other hosts did not. In his other tests, hosts with built-in caching and CDNs were at the top (WPX, Kinsta, GoDaddy). Of course a host will get better results if they have a clear advantage. Does that also mean I can login to Cloudways and use PHP 7.4, Maria DB 10.3, Varnish, activate their CDN, and configure the Cloudways Breeze caching plugin? No, we need to give each host level playing ground since we’re strictly measuring the speed of their servers.

 

2. TTFB

This test took the average of 5 TTFBs: GTmetrix (1), WebPageTest (1), and KeyCDN (3).

GTmetrix only has 1 testing location in the US (Dallas, Texas) while WebPageTest has multiple US testing locations, in which case I chose the closest testing location to each host’s data center. KeyCDN has 10 global testing locations total, but only the 3 US locations were used in the test.

It is somewhat pointless to test TTFB in other countries since you would probably select a data center that’s in your same country. That’s why only US locations were used in the tests.

These tests are never going to be 100% perfect because there will always be a variable (the physical distance between a host’s data center vs. the testing locations). But I did my best to make it as accurate as possible by reducing the variable. I still wanted to be transparent about it.

Conclusion

Cloudways Linode had a slightly faster TTFB, but their data center was also located in Texas (close to the GTmetrix and 1 KeyCDN testing location).

This was followed by Cloudways DigitalOcean whose data center was in San Francisco, CA. Even though the DigitalOcean data center was further away from the GTmetrix location (Dallas, Texas) they still outperformed every other WordPress host besides Cloudways Linode.

 

3. Server Response Times

Server response times were measured using the WP Hosting Performance Check Plugin for a one month period. This was the same plugin used in Darrel Wilson’s original “best WordPress hosting” YouTube video when he told viewers that NameHero was the fastest. I do not agree.

Conclusion

Most results aligned with other tests, however WP Engine (1753ms) had very slow server response times.

Why does Darrel Wilson recommend SiteGround?

Darrel has been creating YouTube videos on “the best hosting” which recommends NameHero, SiteGround, GreenGeeks, and a few others (mostly shared hosts). He also recommends WP Engine and Liquid Web over Cloudways. While he creates very helpful videos, his results aren’t accurate. Especially if you view Backlinko’s PageSpeed Test where SiteGround’s TTFB was slow.

 

4. GTmetrix Load Times

I ran 10 GTmetrix tests on each host and took the average.

While TTFB in GTmetrix’s Timing tab is usually stable, load times can vary on each test. Pingdom is best for measuring load times which is the recommended method by WP Rocket. While GTmetrix can be used as an indicator, refer to the Pingdom test (#1) for accurate results.

Conclusion

GTmetrix only has 1 testing location in the US (Dallas Texas), which may have contributed to why Vultr and Linode were at the top since both of their data centers were located in Texas. Again, Cloudways DigitalOcean outperformed all the other hosts even when their data center was located far away in San Francisco, CA. Otherwise, results were pretty much as expected.

 

5. The Results

Host	Server Type	Caching	CDN	PHP	Hotlink
A2 Hosting	LiteSpeed + AMD EPYC	Server-side (Database, Memcached)	Cloudflare	7.4	Yes
Bluehost	In-house	None	Cloudflare	7.4	Yes
Closte	Google Cloud + LiteSpeed	LiteSpeed	Google Cloud CDN	7.4	No
Cloudways DigitalOcean	DigitalOcean	Server-side (Varnish, Redis, Memcached)	StackPath ($1 Per 25GB)	7.4	No
Cloudways Linode	Linode	Server-side (Varnish, Redis, Memcached)	StackPath ($1 Per 25GB)	7.4	No
Cloudways Vultr	Vultr	Server-side (Varnish, Redis, Memcached)	StackPath ($1 Per 25GB)	7.4	No
Cloudways Vultr HF	Vultr High Frequency	Server-side (Varnish, Redis, Memcached)	StackPath ($1 Per 25GB)	7.4	No
Flywheel	Google Cloud	Server-side	Fastly ($10/mo)	7.4	No
HostGator	In-house	Server-side	Cloudflare	7.3	Yes
Hostinger	LiteSpeed	Server-side	Cloudflare (on cloud plans)	7.4	Yes
Kinsta	Google Cloud C2	Server-side	KeyCDN (200GB free)	7.4	No
Liquid Web	Nexcess Cloud	Server-side (Varnish, Memcached)	Nexcess Edge CDN + Cloudflare	7.4	No
NameHero	LiteSpeed	Server-side	Cloudflare	7.4	Yes
SiteGround	Google Cloud	Server-side via SG Optimizer	Cloudflare	7.4	Yes
WP Engine	Google Cloud + AWS	Server-side	StackPath	7.4	Yes
WPX	In-house	W3 Total Cache	WPX Cloud	7.4	Yes

 

6. Screenshots Of Reports + Hosting Information

Below are screenshots of the reports used in tests, which data center was chosen, and links to the live test sites (I cancelled a few since it was getting expensive). I also included details about each WordPress host like their speed features, cons, and the pricing of the plan used in the test.

*Price is the yearly rate of the plan I used unless otherwise noted.

If you need help choosing a host, drop me a comment and I’ll be glad to help.

Cheers,
Tom