1. Best overall: Hostinger
2. Best value: WP Engine
3. Best budget: ScalaHosting
4. Best for performance: Bluehost
5. Best for plan choice: InMotion Hosting
6. Best eco-friendly hosting: GreenGeeks
7. Best for budget performance: HostGator
8. Best cloud host: tsoHost
9. Best for new users: IONOS
The top WordPress hosting services offer the perfect blend of speed, features, and affordability. When we look at the best options out there, we focus on hosts that deliver industry-leading security and a toolbox of features specifically designed to make managing your WordPress site easy.
Performance and reliability are key, too, so we scrutinize uptime guarantees and real-world performance to make sure your website loads quickly and stays up and running.
Our favorite WordPress host is Hostinger, thanks to its budget-friendly plans that don't sacrifice speed and its 24/7 support available in over 20 languages. Read on to see which providers we've ranked among the best WordPress hosting available now.
The quick list
Looking for the best WordPress hosting? Here’s a snapshot of our top picks, with direct links to dive deeper into each review. Find the perfect host that suits your needs.
The best WordPress hosting overall
Hostinger is a favorite among over 29 million users, renowned for its WordPress-specific plans. It boasts transparency, consistent uptimes, and a variety of plans suitable for different website types.
The best value WordPress hosting
WP Engine offers a managed WordPress experience, enhancing user experience with its caching system, CDN, page performance tool, and hosting on the fast Google Cloud Platform.
The best budget WordPress hosting service
ScalaHosting provides a wide range of hosting solutions, from shared hosting to robust VPS options for business projects. Its servers are optimized for WordPress, ensuring enhanced performance and security.
The best WordPress hosting for performance
Bluehost has optimized its setup for WordPress, using a unique VPS-based architecture and a custom PHP-FPM setup. Its transparent pricing and performance features make it a top choice.
The best WordPress hosting for choice of plans
InMotion Hosting stands out with its variety of WordPress plans, catering to everything from blogs to corporations. Its plans are feature-rich, even at the lower end, ensuring value for money.
The best WordPress hosting for eco-friendly hosting
GreenGeeks offers an eco-friendly hosting solution, matching 300% green energy with every plan. Its commitment to the environment doesn't compromise on performance or speed. Its WordPress packages are comprehensive.
The best WordPress hosting for budget performance
Known for its powerful hosting at competitive prices, HostGator's WordPress hosting packages are no exception. Its plans come with features like site migration, unlimited email addresses, and malware detection.
The best cloud-based WordPress hosting
tsoHost provides WordPress basics at an affordable price. Its plans are straightforward, offering features like daily backups and 24/7 ticket support. Its cloud-based service offers great value for the price.
The best WordPress hosting for new users
IONOS is tailored for new users, offering a comprehensive WordPress experience at an affordable price. The platform is built on NGINX and PHP 7.4, ensuring enhanced performance for blogs.
The top 3 WordPress hosting services right now
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The best WordPress hosting of 2024 in full
Best overall
Hostinger is a popular web hosting choice for over 29 million users, partly due to its WordPress-specific plans. The hosting provider is known for its transparency, publicly displaying its server status and maintaining solid uptimes.
Hostinger offers a range of plans including web, cloud, VPS, and dedicated plans, with the option to opt for WordPress-specific plans that come with additional support and one-click installation. These plans are budget-friendly and ideal for various types of websites. The business plan is particularly recommended for WooCommerce users.
One of the standout features of Hostinger is its 24/7 support available in over 20 languages. We found that support was available within three minutes on average and the support team was friendly and helpful, providing actionable information.
Hostinger's use of LiteSpeed means your new WordPress site is pre-optimized for speed right out of the gate, with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin enhancing performance through efficient content delivery.
If you're targeting a global audience, though, you might find site loading times less impressive without a Content Delivery Network (CDN) as Hostinger does not enable Cloudflare's CDN by default. While you can configure it yourself, those seeking a more seamless international performance out-of-the-box might consider alternatives like SiteGround, which includes CDN integration.
When it comes to performance, Hostinger doesn't disappoint. It offers features like Solid State Drive (SSD) hardware, a custom-built cache manager, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. The server speeds are impressive, especially in the US and the UK, ensuring a positive user experience.
Finally, in terms of pricing, Hostinger offers great value for money, with plans starting at just $2.99 per month. Higher-tier plans come with additional benefits like priority support and a dedicated IP address.
Read our Hostinger review.
Best value
WP Engine stands out in the crowded WordPress hosting market by offering a truly managed WordPress experience. Unlike many hosts that simply offer WordPress installation, WP Engine enhances the user experience with its own caching system, content delivery system (CDN), and a choice of data centers across North America, Europe, or Asia. All these features, combined with hosting on the fast Google Cloud Platform, ensure that WordPress websites load swiftly, enhancing the user experience.
The starter plan, priced at $20 a month, provides users with 10GB of local storage, 50GB of bandwidth, and supports up to 25,000 visits per month. While this might seem restrictive, WP Engine compensates by packing in a lot of features. From automatic PHP and WordPress updates to malware detection and automated backups, WP Engine ensures that managing a WordPress site is hassle-free.
One unique aspect of WP Engine is its Page Performance tool, which helps users optimize their WordPress site's speed. It provides valuable metrics on performance, historical data on site performance over the past six months, and actionable recommendations to improve page load times.
Another noteworthy feature is the staging environment. This feature lets you clone your live site, enabling you to test changes and updates before they go live. This capability is particularly valuable for WordPress users who regularly tweak their sites, as it minimizes the risk of introducing errors into the live environment.
However, the lack of included email hosting and domain registration can be seen as a drawback. If these services are crucial for you, consider hosts like Bluehost or HostGator, which provide comprehensive hosting packages, including domain and email services.
However, WP Engine does restrict certain WordPress plugins, especially those known to cause performance or security issues.
Read our WP Engine review.
Best budget
ScalaHosting, a Dallas-based hosting provider with over 15 years of experience, offers a diverse range of hosting solutions. From shared hosting suitable for simple sites to powerful VPS options for demanding business projects, ScalaHosting has something for everyone.
The starter shared hosting plan might seem basic with its 10GB storage and support for just one site. However, it offers a lot of features like a free domain, free SSL, unlimited bandwidth, and a one-click WordPress installer. Plus, you get the added benefit of remote backups for your sites from the past week. All of this comes at a competitive initial price of $2.95 a month when billed triennially, and $6.95 upon renewal.
Using ScalaHosting for your WordPress site offers a standout experience, particularly with its inclusion of a CloudFlare CDN integration at no extra charge. This content delivery network ensures your WordPress site benefits from increased speed and performance, as your content is cached and served from various global locations closest to site visitors.
With ScalaHosting, your website can achieve an average load time of just around 0.7 seconds and an average response time of 25ms, which are remarkable figures that contribute to a smooth user experience and can potentially boost SEO rankings.
The support team is equipped to assist with WordPress-specific issues, including plugin troubleshooting. Moreover, daily backups and malware scans ensure your WordPress site remains secure and operational.
Best for performance
Bluehost has spent time and resources optimizing its low-level setup for WordPress, instead of simply going with a standard configuration. It uses its own VPS-based architecture to access intelligently allocated resources via KVM hypervisor, and achieves maximum WordPress performance through a custom PHP-FPM setup called NGINX.
With Bluehost, you know exactly what you’re going to get with your package. For example, there are no ambiguous references to unlimited storage or bandwidth. You get what you pay for. The Basic plan starts at $1.99 a month in year one, rising to $7.99 a month after renewal. For this, you’ll get one website with 10GB SSD storage and a free domain valid for 12 months.
All plans include a site analytics dashboard, free SSL certificate, as many subdomains as you need, limitless MySQL DB, and access to the Bluehost Marketplace - where you can purchase premium plugins and themes at a discounted rate. All new account holders can also benefit from a free-to-use advisory service called Blue Sky, designed to give new WordPress users a crash course.
Bluehost’s Choice Plus plan starts at $3.99 a month in year one, rising to $13.99 a month after renewal. This package enables you to host any number of websites. It also includes domain privacy and malware scanning.
The Bluehost Online Store plan starts at $7.45 a month for the first term but rises to $18.99 on renewal. This plan has all the features of the Basic and Choice Plus plans and adds a long list of ecommerce features. All plans come with a 30-day guaranteed refund in case you are unhappy with the service.
WordPress Pro is Bluehost’s powerful managed WordPress hosting solution. Prices for this service start at $9.99 a month (renewing at $20.99 a month), with the main additions being a dedicated IP and additional resources so your websites load quickly for visitors.
When you choose Bluehost for your WordPress hosting, the process is streamlined for efficiency and ease of use. Once you sign up, you can install WordPress with a single click from your Bluehost dashboard, eliminating the need for manual setup. The hosting environment is optimized for WordPress, ensuring compatibility and smooth performance. Plus, you benefit from features like automatic updates and a free SSL certificate to keep your site secure.
As you manage your WordPress site, Bluehost's integration facilitates a hassle-free experience. Should you encounter any issues, its 24/7 support is accessible via live chat or phone, providing expert assistance when you need it.
Read our Bluehost review.
Best for plan choice
InMotion Hosting offers four WordPress plans, providing users with more choices. The plans on offer cover all types of sites, from start-up blogs to resellers and corporations. Deciding which of these plans works best for you might be a little more time-consuming, but it’s a lot easier to upgrade, or even downgrade, as the traffic to your site grows or diminishes.
What’s more, InMotion’s low-end plans aren’t devoid of key features—a common tactic used by many other web hosting providers to encourage users to opt for a more expensive plan.
Its basic WP Core plan costs just $3.49 for the first year, rising to $11.49 on renewal, but even this option includes unlimited bandwidth, 10 email addresses, 100GB SSD storage, WordPress pre-installed, SSL, auto-updates, regular backups, SiteLock security, and cPanel site management. You’ll also get extras like BoldGrid and WP-CLI.
Upgraded plans include extras like premium themes and plugins, support for multiple hosted sites, and a dedicated IP address. But really, the reason to opt for a premium plan is the increase in resources that can make your website perform better.
When you choose InMotion for WordPress hosting, you're opting for an environment tailored to optimize your WordPress site's performance. Preinstalled with the CMS, InMotion's WordPress-optimized servers ensure that server settings like cache and PHP workers are finely tuned as per WordPress's own guidelines.
Automatic updates for both the WordPress core and third-party plugins come standard, reducing maintenance overhead. Plus, with a custom-configured NGINX stack and proprietary caching, you can expect improved loading times – a key factor for user experience and SEO.
The convenience of automatic plugin updates, website staging, and advanced caching with higher-tier plans can make managing your WordPress sites a breeze. Even though InMotion isn't the sole leader in WordPress hosting, its dedicated WordPress ecosystem and the range of tailored solutions it offers provide a reliable and effective platform for your web presence, ending your search on a note of solid confidence.
It is possible to find a cheaper option, but we found InMotion Hosting to be trustworthy, reliable, and straightforward, so it's worth paying a little extra. Try it for yourself. There's a 90-day money-back guarantee on all plans, so there's really nothing to lose.
Read our InMotion Hosting review.
Best eco-friendly hosting
With hosting accounting for a large proportion of greenhouse gas emissions, GreenGeeks offers a rare alternative in its eco-friendly hosting. It achieves this by offering a 300% green energy match with every one of its hosting plans.
This environmental approach doesn't come at the expense of performance or speed, with SSDs used and plans coming with a free Cloudflare CDN integration. You can choose from one of five different data centers in Europe and North America to have your site hosted at, including Chicago, Phoenix, Montreal, Toronto, or Amsterdam.
On the WordPress side of things, GreenGeeks offers three unmanaged plans, ranging in cost from $2.95 a month at the entry level up to $8.95 a month on the Premium plan. All three offer free installation and migration, free backups, free SSL certificates, and free CDNs, alongside automatic WordPress updates, and a free domain name for the first year.
Beyond those features, its WordPress packages offer unlimited databases and bandwidth, with only the cheapest plan having a storage restriction (50GB). Via cPanel management, hosting is made simpler, while phone, email, and 24/7 live chat support are available alongside an online help center.
With automatic installation of WordPress, daily backups, and automatic updates for WordPress and its plugins, getting started is easy. The LiteSpeed server and LS Cache plugin work together to optimize your site's speed, which is a boon for maintaining swift page loads.
Despite this, the WordPress plans are quite basic and may not offer advanced features that more demanding users seek. However, if you're running a personal blog or a small web store,
With each hosting account, GreenGeeks plants a tree, adding a layer of satisfaction in knowing that your web presence is aligned with eco-friendly initiatives.
Security-wise, real-time scanning offers continued protection against malware, while automatic nightly backups provide peace of mind. If there's a downside, it's the lack of 24/7 phone support, but the three WordPress plans offer value for money.
Read our full GreenGeeks review.
Best for budget performance
HostGator has a reputation for offering powerful hosting at a very competitive price, and this includes its range of WordPress hosting packages. Its Starter plan costs $4.50 a month for the first three years of hosting and rises to $9.95 after that. With this plan, you’ll receive a site migration, unlimited email addresses, storage, and bandwidth, an SSL certificate, malware detection and removal, and a monthly visitor allocation of 100,000.
HostGator’s Business plan includes extra CPU power and support for up to three separate sites.
You’ll also get smart caching and a CDN to boost your website's performance, plus 24/7 support in case you run into any unexpected issues along the way. On top of this, you get free domain privacy protection to help secure your site from identity theft and, in the process, reduce the amount of spam you receive. Even with all of this, the cost is only $6.25 a month for the first three years and $22.95 a month after that. Certain security features such as malware detection require an additional purchase.
The hosting plan includes unlimited bandwidth and a free SSL certificate, ensuring your WordPress site is secure and can handle growth without worrying about hitting data limits. While some users have found the control panel and site design somewhat dated, the functionality remains user-friendly. Plus, HostGator's 24/7 customer support and extensive knowledge base can guide you through any challenges you might face.
We found HostGator's service to be reliable and more than adequate for our needs, but the company does offer a 45-day money-back guarantee in case your experience isn’t so good. This doesn’t cover domain registration fees, but it’s a far better deal than you can expect to find from many other providers.
Read our HostGator review.
Best cloud host
tsoHost, a UK-based hosting provider, offers WordPress basics at an affordable price, rather than advertise inflated claims and make hard-to-prove assurances.
Its Economy plan includes a free domain name, and you can transfer your current site. There is no bandwidth limit and a 50% discount on standard SSL. Backups take place on a daily basis and, with a single click, you can restore your site from as far back as 30 days.
We were also pleasantly surprised to find that the Economy plan included 24/7 ticket and email support, while phone and live chat services operate from 7am to midnight GMT. All this comes at the equivalent of around $9.00 a month paid annually.
With tsoHost, you won’t find a long list of attractive extras like SiteLock malware protection, optimized add-ons, or a customizable CDN. Despite these support issues, tsoHost offers a dependable platform for your WordPress site with good server response times and a strong record of uptime. These performance metrics are crucial for maintaining a professional image and ensuring your visitors have a seamless browsing experience.
But for the price, you get a lot of bang for your buck. The most important thing is that despite a lack of bells and whistles, tsoHost is still a very capable provider and smaller websites could do a lot worse than opting for this service.
Best for new users
IONOS is a major player in the web hosting industry and has a dedicated product for almost any platform you can imagine, including WordPress. New users can opt for its most basic managed plan at a cost of only $1 a month, but even this relatively simple offering outperforms most of 1&1 IONOS’s competitors.
The plan includes unlimited bandwidth, monthly visitors, and one email account, plus 25GB storage. This is a lot for just a $1 a month package (which rises to $6 a month after your first term). As well as all the essential WordPress management functions, IONOS offers pre-installed plugins, a free personal consultant, guided setup, auto-updates, and 24/7 support, which includes a phone service.
There's also a Grow plan available for $1 a month at present, which offers 50GB storage and five email accounts. However, on renewal after the first year, it rises to $10 a month.
The basic plan even includes SSL and a free domain. We were very impressed by the sheer wealth of features provided by IONOS at such an affordable price.
When managing a WordPress site through IONOS, you'll encounter a custom control panel rather than the industry-standard cPanel. This can be a challenge, particularly if you're accustomed to the cPanel layout. While IONOS boasts excellent site speed and stability, which is crucial for maintaining user engagement, the backend can feel unintuitive and might require a learning curve.
Our advice to novices would be to sign up for the cheapest plan for a year, taking advantage of the free domain included, and use that time to learn more about WordPress and how to get the most out of the blogging platform. The user interface takes a little getting used to. Afterward, you could continue with this very affordable option or upgrade to something a little more powerful.
IONOS doesn’t just cater to new users, though, and has plans for all user levels. We were particularly impressed by its Boost plan, which includes 75GB of SSD storage and 20GB of RAM for $15 a month. This plan, again, is available for $1 a month for the first term.
The best WordPress hosting, compared
| Web hosting service | Entry level price | Unlimited bandwidth? | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger | $2.99 a month | ✔ | 100GB |
| WP Engine | $20 a month | ✖ | 10GB |
| ScalaHosting | $2.95 a month | ✔ | 10GB |
| Bluehost | $1.99 a month | ✔ | 10GB |
| InMotion Hosting | $3.49 a month | ✔ | 100GB |
| GreenGeeks | $2.95 a month | ✔ | 50GB |
| HostGator | $4.50 a month | ✔ | Unlimited |
| tsoHost | $9.00 a month | ✔ | 25GB |
| IONOS | $1.00 a month | ✔ | 25GB |
WordPress hosting FAQs
What is WordPress hosting?
WordPress hosting is web hosting specifically aimed at WordPress sites, utilizing the content management system's website-building elements and optimized for hosting sites created with WordPress.
What's the difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting?
WordPress hosting is designed specifically to offer web hosting for WordPress sites, while other web hosting plans and types are available for use with any type of website.
Another difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting is apparent when comparing managed vs unmanaged hosting. With WordPress hosting, most packages provide users with managed hosting, meaning that they are in control of updates, security, advanced functionality, and the overall administration of your site's hosting.
This then enables you to focus on what's important: many other hosting types meanwhile are unmanaged, meaning you're responsible for these factors instead.
How to choose the best WordPress hosting for you
Although cheap WordPress hosting is an attractive option, in most cases it won’t give you the advanced features, high performance, or consistency you need for a popular site with lots of traffic. If you can live without this functionality, no problem. If not, you need to find a premium hosting plan.
There are also lots of expensive managed WordPress packages out there, with many providers charging a premium for advanced features like malware protection or server optimization, which can be difficult to verify. In most cases, web hosts tend to offer a limited number of WordPress plans, and many providers will market their plans in such a way as to guide a user’s decisions.
For example, it’s common to find in any list of plans one that lacks power, one that is clearly overpriced, and one in the middle marketed as a special deal. This last one is the plan the providers want you to purchase. Opting for a mid-range plan does make the decision process easier, but could limit your options for upgrades.
With so many low-level details to consider, it might seem a little complicated to find and decide on the best WordPress hosting package for your blog. But it needn’t be. As long as you don’t require any specific functionality, choosing a well-known, reliable provider and taking its mid-range plan will be more than sufficient for your needs.
How to choose a managed WordPress hosting plan
If you’re a novice and don’t have the time, resources, or technical experience to manage your hosting plan personally, it might be a more suitable option to choose a managed WordPress hosting plan. With a managed plan, your WordPress hosting provider will deal with all the technical elements for you, so you can concentrate on other aspects of your business.
In many cases, the host will migrate your existing WordPress blog—that is, of course, if you already have one—and provide you with some pre-installed themes and plugins to make it easier to customize.
There will likely be an auto-update facility in place, and a security service like SiteLock will be responsible for keeping your site free of malware. We would also expect to see 24/7 support from a qualified technical support team.
Some of the best managed plan providers go further still, with optimized servers to boost the performance of the WordPress sites in their care, and other extras like a CDN for greater worldwide speeds.
How we review the best WordPress hosting services
In reviewing the best WordPress hosting services, we approach the process in the same way that we would any other web hosting provider. First of all, we test response times and uptimes over two weeks via a WordPress test site we've built. If a builder is included with the host's plan, we'll use it; if not, we'll build one with another provider, import it, and test a separate feature or tool.
Next, we test web security and how easy it is to set up an SSL certificate. As mentioned earlier, deciding on managed or unmanaged hosting is important for WordPress hosting: whichever you choose, you'll want to know how responsive and knowledgeable customer support and service staff are.
WordPress hosting costs can vary quite dramatically depending on the type of site you have. As such, we examine pricing plans available in-depth and in detail. Web hosting is a market known for confusing pricing, and exponential increases after a discounted first term.
We also compare hosts we're testing and reviewing to main competitors, to assist you in finding the right provider for your WordPress hosting requirements.
See our testing methodology page for more information.
Next steps with WordPress and web hosting
Moving forward with WordPress? The content management system is one of the most powerful you can choose. Learn how to make a website with WordPress with our comprehensive guide.
Make sure you take a look at our other buying guides for web hosting, too, including the best VPS hosting, the best cloud hosting, and the best unlimited hosting.
