5 Fastest WordPress Hosting Providers Compared for 2023

Quality matters, especially for the fastest WordPress hosting providers. It’s not enough to blaze to the top of the page-loading leaderboards. Each host has to offer a rock-solid setup, a fantastic user experience (UX), and plenty more. It means choosing from among them is tough, yet necessary.

For this roundup, we’ll look at a number of the fastest WordPress hosting providers around. While we’ll give you the lowdown on its speed metrics, you’ll also find out what else makes each host worth your time.

If you only want to know what we discovered about our fastest WordPress hosting providers, take a look at the following summary table for the entry-level plan at each host:

Jump to the individual reviews:

• 1️⃣ Bluehost // 2️⃣ Rocket.net // 3️⃣ IONOS // 4️⃣ InMotion Hosting // 5️⃣ WP Engine

How to choose between different types of WordPress hosting

WordPress hosting comes in a few different flavors. This is excellent news, as it means you can hunt down the right type of plan for your needs. In addition, you can choose a host based on how much server and site maintenance you’d like to carry out:

• Shared hosting comes with a lower relative grade of technical specifications, offset by a cheaper cost. This will be ideal for your first site, lower-priority setups within your network, personal blogs, and similar.
• Managed hosting delegates most (or all) of the server maintenance to the host itself. This can give you greater stability, the ability to serve more visitors, a better uptime percentage, and more. However, the cost is often higher as a result. Ecommerce sites, professional services, high-traffic sites, and similar sites will all want to opt for this type of hosting.

Ultimately, the choice is yours. However, the speed of your site will matter, and a host that can’t keep up is not worth your time. In the next section, we’ll talk about why this is.

Why speed is important for your choice of WordPress host

There are two sides to every site: the front end (that the visitor sees) and the back end (where you manage your site). When it comes to site speed, it can affect both of these aspects.

For instance, a slow site will be sluggish on the front end. This will likely put visitors off browsing your site. Your UX is important for success, sales, conversions, signups, and whatever else you want your users to do. If the front end is slow, those visitors won’t want to spend time waiting for elements to load.

What’s more, a slow back end can tank your productivity. After all, if you have to wait a few seconds for each page to load, even getting to one or two pages from the WordPress dashboard will take its toll.

Speed matters even more when you factor in mobile browsing. Smart devices are in the majority now when it comes to browsing the web, which means your site has to perform well everywhere – not just on desktops.

In a nutshell, the perceptions of your visitors who use mobile devices to hit your site matter the most. The best way to cater to them is to run a superfast site. Thankfully, the fastest WordPress hosting can handle this sort of traffic with aplomb.

The fastest WordPress hosting compared for 2024

Let’s dig into the list of the fastest WordPress hosting providers. The list isn’t in any order, so we encourage you to go through each one to see how they compare. What’s more, we’ll show off some speed numbers from our tests at the end of each entry.

1. Bluehost

Bluehost is an affordable web host that’s one of the most popular out there. This is due to a few reasons. First, it’s a recommended WordPress.org host. Second, it offers a straightforward user interface (UI). However, it’s also one of the cheapest WordPress hosts around.

The Basic plan gives you the ability to host one site and access 10 GB of storage. However, higher-tier plans give you goodies such as a free domain name, security tools, WooCommerce plugins, advanced analytics, and much more.

If you sign up for a 36-month contract, Bluehost starts from $2.75 per month. However, note that its introductory pricing will nearly quadruple to $11.99 per month after that period.

2. Rocket.net

A relative newcomer to WordPress hosting, Rocket.net offers plenty of power and rock-solid security. It’s also the fastest WordPress hosting provider on this list!

It builds on top of Cloudflare Enterprise to give you superb and speedy hosting delivered through the cloud. Every plan includes a content delivery network (CDN), web application firewall (WAF), free SSL certificate, and malware protection.

Rocket.net is also able to achieve consistently fast global load times by fully caching your site’s pages to Cloudflare’s global network. These fast global load times are one of the big reasons why we use Rocket.net to host most of our own sites.

However, while Rocket.net blazes along, it carries a price tag to match. Plans range from $30–200 per month. Even so, we think the host is one of the best around and well worth the money. In addition, you can grab your first month for $1 and take advantage of a 30-day money-back guarantee if Rocket.net isn’t right for you.

3. IONOS

IONOS is an outlier on this list, as other hosts usually get more press. However, its hosting beats most of the others on this list. Once you combine this with the feature set and cost, you have a potential winner.

Each tier will only let you host one website, but you at least have all the server power available for it. You’re able to customize updates for themes, plugins, and WordPress’s core from the IONOS dashboard too, which is a handy time saver. Along with site analytics, a free domain, and even a version of the Jetpack plugin on higher-tier plans, you have a compelling blend of features and functionality.

There are three IONOS plans to choose from. The Start plan begins from $1.00 per month, Grow from $10 per month, and Boost is $15 per month. However, you can get a discount on your first six months of each plan at $3, $1, and $7 respectively.

4. InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting is another popular provider that can boast valuable specifications and fast speeds. You get a lot for your money here, especially in the higher premium tiers.

For instance, InMotion Hosting’s core offering gives you super-fast disk speeds thanks to its use of high-performance solid state drives (SSDs). You also get a suite of security and marketing tools to help protect and promote your site.

We also like how you can host Python and Ruby app, along with leveraging Git support. This will likely please any developers you work with!

InMotion Hosting uses introductory pricing, but we think the cost is reasonable regardless. For instance the WP Core plan is $2.99 per month on a two-year contract, and that price rises to $7.99 per month after. The highest value plan is $15.99 per month, which rises to $29.99 per month after the initial period.

5. WP Engine

WP Engine represents one of the largest and popular WordPress hosts around. This is due to its flexibility, as you’ll find personal blogs to enterprises using this stellar hosting provider.

We include WP Engine on our list of Bluehost alternatives, because it’s a great ‘next step’ for your site. It gives you automated updates, a clean custom site management dashboard, proprietary caching, and enhanced security. This includes distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection and a WAF. What’s more, each plan can access a class-leading CDN too.

Speaking of which, there are a broad selection of plans available, depending on whether you want to run a WooCommerce store. While we can’t break them all down here, you’ll spend within a range of $13.00–600 per month. However, we think most will see a monthly bill of around $50–100 based on one site with all of the extras.

How to choose the fastest WordPress hosting

When it comes to choosing the fastest WordPress hosting, speed should be an important consideration. However, there’s much more you have to check out in order to find the right solution for you.

• First, consider your own needs. For example, do you have large visitor numbers? What is your technical ability or aptitude for server maintenance like? This will determine what type of plan you should consider.
• Also, think about the longer-term. What will your visitor numbers be like in six months or a year? If you see them growing, you’ll want a host that can handle your site both now and in the future.
• The location of your primary server is also key, as this will (in part) determine your baseline site speed. You want to choose a location that serves your primary audience the best, and supplement this with technology such as a content delivery network (CDN).

Once you have a shortlist, you can go down it and match up the hosts to your needs. Once you whittle these down further, take a look at the plans it offers and try to find one that suits your budget.

For a quick overview of the fastest WordPress hosting providers in this roundup, take a look at our summary table again:

Conclusion 🧐

🏎️ Speed isn’t the only factor that matters, but for the fastest WordPress hosting providers, it’s a key selling point.

For companies such as Bluehost, IONOS, and InMotion Hosting, they can combine fast loading times with dirt-cheap pricing to create an attractive offering. For Rocket.net, its cloud-based setup means you have speed, reliability, and a wealth of features on hand. However, WP Engine is a long-term stalwart of WordPress hosting. It provides dependability, rich functionality, and (of course) fast site loading speeds.

Do you still have any questions about choosing the fastest WordPress hosting providers for your website(s)? Let us know in the comments section below!