Want to jump straight to the answer? The best web hosting for most people is Bluehost or Hostinger.
Sure you can use any web host for your WordPress website. But a WordPress-specific web hosting solution delivers better service, performance, and support for WordPress sites.
I’ve gone through dozens of available hosts and ranked the 10 best options on the market today, including providers WordPress itself recommends. The solutions below provide the best security, performance, and reliability for websites built on WordPress.
The Top 10 WordPress Web Hosts for 2022
- Bluehost – Best for creating your first WordPress website
- Hostinger – Best for hosting hundreds of sites on a shoestring budget
- GreenGeeks – Best for eco-friendly website owners
- WP Engine – Best for hosting multiple WordPress sites with tons of traffic
- Nexcess – Best for effortless website staging
- Siteground – Best for ecommerce websites with easy site migration
- Flywheel – Best if you want experts to migrate your site for you
- Kinsta – Best for managing unexpected surges in traffic
- Scala Hosting – Most freebies in every WordPress hosting plans
- Cloudways – Best for flexibility and extensive options
Depending on your goals, one of my recommended hosting providers may work better than another for your specific needs.
Below you’ll find in-depth reviews that explain my recommendations, followed by a brief tactical section to help you assess your options.
Bluehost — Best for Creating Your First WordPress Website
- Normally $8.99/month
- Free domain and SSL certificate
- Recommended by WordPress
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Bluehost is one of the three web hosts that WordPress officially recommends for people to use. That’s about as good of an endorsement as you can get for WordPress hosting.
People like Bluehost because it’s super simple to get started. With millions of users, all the kinks have been worked out.
Once you sign up, you’ll be able to install WordPress immediately. You’ll have your bare bones site live within 15 minutes. Then you can follow our full guide to creating a website to get your site exactly how you want it.
You can reach out 24/7 to their award-winning customer support team if any issues arise.
Bluehost also has some of the lowest pricing around, with plans as low as $2.75/month. That’s incredibly cheap, especially for something that’s so reliable and easy to use.
As such, they’re the perfect host to choose if you’re just starting out.
Yes, you will be on shared hosting. So, if you or someone else on your server gets a huge spike of traffic, your site could go down.
But, honestly, this almost never happens. I’ve had websites on shared hosting for over a decade and never had a site go down.
If and when you want to upgrade, Bluehost also offer managed WordPress hosting that starts at $9.95/month. Not the lowest price point I’ve seen, but it’s still one of the lowest-cost options out there for managed hosting.
The value you get from Bluehost can’t be beat. It’s powerful enough for most websites, and the service is widely recommended throughout the industry.
Bottom line: Bluehost is a great option for the vast majority of people reading this—but especially those who are just getting started.
Hostinger — Best for Hosting Hundreds of Sites on a Shoestring Budget
- Normally $7.99/month
- Month-to-month pricing
- Free domain and SSL certificate
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Hostinger stands out for its stellar loading times along with its low prices.
How low? Normally Hostinger is $7.99/month. But there’s a deal right now that gives you a huge discount, so you could pay just $1.99/month for single shared hosting—which is unbeatable compared to other web hosts out there.
But here’s the kicker: for just two dollars more per month, you can build 100 websites along with 100 GB of SSD storage, free email, and unlimited bandwidth.
That’s right, for the price of a single cup of coffee each month, you’ll be able to host up to 100 websites. That’s an amazing deal.
With their great prices, does that mean you’ll be sacrificing quality? Nope. In fact, you’re going to get solid uptime reliability with Hostinger.
In our research, we found that sites on Hostinger had some months in the 99.8% range and dipped to as low as 99.04%. But some months also delivered 100% uptime. Overall, you’re not going to worry too much about their uptime, especially if you have a smaller personal website.
Loading times are speedy too. According to their website, their server response time clocks in at around 43 milliseconds, which is very fast. To give you a comparison, that’s just 13 milliseconds “slower” than a lightning strike.
Overall, this is a great web host if you want good prices with quality hosting. If you want to maximize the number of sites you can host at a low cost, get signed up with Hostinger today.
GreenGeeks — Best For Eco-Friendly Website Owners
- Starts at $2.49 per month
- 300% green energy match
- Free WordPress install, migration, & updates
- 30-day money-back guarantee
If you want a shared hosting plan optimized for WordPress, GreenGeeks has you covered. With affordable rates, quick setup, and 24/7 live chat support, you will have everything you need to launch a professional WordPress website.
GreenGeeks has hundreds of WordPress-specific tutorials and information in their knowledge base. They also don’t charge extra fees for WordPress security, fast performance, or their 300% renewable energy match that makes them a carbon-reducing company.
GreenGeeks really ups the security for WordPress sites. They monitor your site for malware and other threats and help clean your site if any issues occur. They also provide a free SSL certificate and automatically renew it for you every 90 days. And if you already have a WordPress site, you can move it over to GreenGeeks or let them migrate it for you for free.
As part of their managed WordPress hosting, every plan comes with free WordPress installation, migration, and automatic updates. You’ll also get a free SSL certificate, free CDN, free backups, a free domain for one year, built-in caching, and WP-CLI and SSH access. If you have any issues or questions, users say the 24/7 live chat service is staffed with knowledgeable, friendly people who respond quickly.
The Lite plan starts at $2.95 per month, Pro is $5.95 per month, and Premium is $10.95 per month. All of these prices are based on a three-year commitment and every plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Lite is for one website. Both Pro and Premium cover unlimited websites.
You can learn more about GreenGeeks managed WordPress hosting and get started here.
WP Engine — Best for Hosting Multiple WordPress Sites with Tons of Traffic
- Starts at $22.50/month
- Biggest name in WP hosting
- A premium product with a premium price
- Easily the all-around best
For pros, I recommend WP Engine. It’s great for managed WordPress hosting.
In fact, WP Engine is what we use here at QuickSprout—and for very good reason. If you’re trying to get serious and build a high-traffic blog or business, it’s by far the best managed WordPress host out there.
But I don’t recommend it for anyone who’s just starting out, since it’s much more expensive. We’re talking between $30 to more than $100 each month versus a range of $4 to $15 with other products on my list.
Most WordPress sites would do much better with Bluehost or Siteground. You’ll save a lot of money and won’t be paying for WP Engine’s advanced features you don’t need.
For $23/month, paid annually, with their Startup plan, you can host one 10GB site with a limit of 25,000 monthly visitors. Their Professional tier of service is $56/month for three sites and 75,000 monthly visitors. If you get a spike in traffic and go over these traffic limits, you’ll get hit with overage fees.
That might seem like a lot of money for fewer resources (especially when compared to services like Hostinger and Bluehost) but, remember, this is managed WordPress hosting.
As a managed host, WP Engine professionally maintains speed and security at the server level—meaning you don’t have to do anything to maximize performance on your end.
You don’t have to research and rely on plug-ins to shave seconds off your load time or become an expert on the best practices for building a lean site.
Nor do you have to carve out time to install and update your plugins, run backups, or implement security features to ward off brute force attacks. WP Engine takes care of it all behind the scenes.
The customer service is also excellent, with 24/7 support that includes trackable service tickets and a comprehensive knowledge base.
WP Engine’s support staff are WordPress experts, providing detailed answers to your questions and issues.
Every time I’ve had to reach out to their customer support, I’ve always been impressed. Their speed, thoroughness, and expertise are world-class.
Bottom line: WP Engine is an excellent solution if you want to get serious about growing your WordPress sites.
Nexcess — Best for Effortless Website Staging
- Price starts at $12.67/month
- Designed for advanced users
- Extremely customizable
- Server-level access
Nexcess, by Liquid Web, is a powerhouse designed to service other powerhouses, like if you’re an enterprise customer or are charged with manning multiple WordPress sites.
What I really love about Nexcess, though, is how easy they make it to stage a website. Their one-click staging tool allows you to easily create a facsimile of your website that you can edit and test to your heart’s content—without worrying that you’re screwing up the actual website.
They also offer a ton of great plans that make it easy to scale. Prices start at just $12.67/month for one website. After that, it jumps quite a bit—to $52.67 per month—but you get up to five sites and 40 GB storage with that plan.
In all, they offer seven plans. If you’re an agency or freelancer who plans to host websites for clients, this is a great solution for you.
If you need more control but doing everything yourself through AWS isn’t appealing, then Nexcess is for you, too. You won’t have to do nearly as much setup and upkeep as AWS while still having a lot more control than other hosts give you.
It also automatically updates WordPress and your plugins. That’s fewer headaches for you and your team.
You’ll get all-level access to MySQL, SFTP, and SSH. You also get Git version control. Security, speed, and customer support are virtually unparalleled.
Nexcess is obviously not right for everyone. Small businesses should choose one of the other options, as Nexcess plans would be overkill.
For power users, though, Nexcess is the WordPress hosting that you’ve been looking for. Use coupon code QUICKSPROUT to get 40% off 2 months of any Nexcess hosting plan.
SiteGround — Best for Ecommerce Websites with Easy Site Migration
- Starts at $3.99/month
- Free SSL, email, CDN, & backups
- Recommended by WordPress
- 30-day money-back guarantee
SiteGround is another of WordPress’ recommended web hosts. They offer incredibly affordable managed hosting solutions that are powerful as well.
Where they really shine is how easy they make it to:
- Migrate to their host. Their free migrator tool lets you easily port your old website over to their website in just a few days time. No development or coding knowledge required.
- Set up an online store. With the powerful combination of WordPress and WooCommerce, you’ll be able to set up an ecommerce site to start making money in a snap. Seriously, it just takes a few clicks.
I also like their advanced features for WordPress, like automatic updates and enhanced security on all the SiteGround plans. You’ll also get free daily backups. That’s an amazing deal for the lowest tier pricing.
This covers most of the problems you could run into, freeing up more of your time to focus on your business or project. You can read even more about their offered services in my complete SiteGround hosting review.
I recommend the StartUp plan. It gives you 10GB of space and up to 10,000 visitors for one site. This intro-level plan is $3.99/month for your first year (paid up front).
You can boost your WordPress or WooCommerce site even further by going one step up to GrowBig. That lets you tap into SiteGround’s own Ultrafast PHP to speed up the visitor experience even more. Plus, you get the safety of on-demand copies of your site backups, all for $6.69 per month. The biggest plan is GoGeek for $10.69 per month with 40 GB web space, priority support, staging + Git, and ability to white-label clients.
All told, this is a great host for web stores on WordPress, ecommerce sites who want to switch to a better host, and anyone who wants solid security and easy site backups for their pages.
Get started with SiteGround today.
Flywheel — Best If You Want Experts to Migrate Your Site for You
- Price starts at $14/month
- Geared toward freelancers and agencies
- Easily build and transfer sites to clients
- User-friendly interface
Flywheel is a managed WordPress host that really puts the “support” in customer support.
They offer a great migration service that takes care of the often stressful process of site migration for you. They have a dedicated team that handles the entire process of moving your site to their web host so you don’t have to.
The best part: It’s absolutely free.
That’s right. They’ll take care of everything at no extra cost.
They’re also fantastic because of great features like “blueprints” that allow you to save customized themes and plugins you use over and over again.
You’ll also have 14 days on a free, password-protected demo site to show your work before having to pay. You can also easily transfer billing on any of your sites to a client.
That makes FlyWheel an excellent option if you’re an agency or freelancer working on client websites. If you build sites for clients, we highly recommend you start using Flywheel.
Flywheel offers a single-site plan with 5,000 monthly visitors and 5GB of disk space for $13/month. From there, you can scale up to a souped-up single-site plan for $25/month, or accomodate more sites in the two highest packages.
Bottom line: I’d use Flywheel if I were looking for a hassle-free migration experience and/or developing websites for clients.
If that sounds like you, go with Flywheel as your web hosting provider.
Kinsta — Best for Managing Unexpected Surges in Traffic
- Price starts at $30/month
- Premium managed WordPress hosting
- All features included across all plans
- Built for scalability
Kinsta is a a great alternative to WP Engine if something about WP Engine doesn’t gel with you.
What truly separates them from WP Engine, though, is their auto-scaling feature. In the event of an unexpected surge in traffic, their servers will automatically allocate more CPU and RAM to your website.
That’s great for websites that frequently see infrequent spikes in traffic like when an article goes viral or if you have sporadic product launches.
That means you won’t have to worry about your website slowing down or crashing when you get an influx of readers. Instead, Kinsta takes care of it for you.
This can be very good for websites that experience inconsistent traffic performance (e.g. viral articles and videos, big product launches).
They also offer a ton of pricing plans for excellent scalability. In fact, they offer 10 plans as well as a customizable enterprise solution.
Pricing starts at $30/month for 25,000 monthly visitors and scales up from there.
Bottom line: Kinsta can handle any volume of traffic that you need. You won’t have to worry about switching from outgrowing them.
One especially nice thing about Kinsta is that you get access to the same features across every plan, as opposed to upgrading to a higher-priced plan to unlock something.
It also makes Kinsta’s pricing super simple. Pick the plan based on your traffic and you’re good to go.
Scala Hosting — Most Freebies in Every WordPress Hosting Plan
- Affordable plans across the board
- Free migration of as many sites as you need
- Seven daily backups
- Robust security features
WordPress hosting can be deceiving. While a lot of providers will boast about WordPress optimization on their servers, what more are you getting from them specifically?
Scala Hosting not only makes sure their servers help your WordPress site perform better, they also throw in a ton of useful features on almost every plan.
It starts with a free website migration, which not every provider offers. And it’s not just one website—Scala’s specialists will carry over as many WordPress sites as you need to their service, free of charge.
They’ll handle the migration and verify everything’s working before you point the site to your new servers. That way, there’s no downtime for your sites whatsoever in the process.
Security features are also prevalent in all Scala WordPress hosting plans. You get a dedicated firewall installed on your behalf, plus a brute force attack blocker, custom security rules that Scala’s team implements without you having to lift a finger, malware scans and removal, and automated updates to prevent vulnerabilities from arising.
All their plans also include:
- Seven daily backups with restore points kept for a week
- Free content delivery network
- Free SEO analysis and tools
You can also unlock additional useful features by going with plans above Scala’s entry-level WP Mini (one website, 20 GB storage) package. Those are:
- WP Start: unlimited websites, 50 GB storage, double the CPU power of WP Mini
- WP Advanced: unlimited websites, 100 GB storage, quadruple the CPU power of WP Mini
On those plans, you get managed service, meaning Scala’s support team of WordPress experts will help you with everything from plugin issues to overall troubleshooting.
You also get a free domain if you opt for WP Advanced. And not just one year, either, like most providers. Each year that you prepay for, you get a free year of your domain. That’s a very nice bonus.
Scala’s pricing is also very competitive with other providers on this list and in the WordPress hosting space at large:
- WP Mini: $3.95/month for a three-year commitment, $4.95 for two years
- WP Start: $5.95/month for a three-year commitment, $7.95 for two years
- WP Advanced: $9.95/month for a three-year commitment, $10.95 for two years
Give Scala Hosting a try or get connected with their representative to learn what more they can do for you. If you want worry-free WordPress hosting at a competitive price, Scala Hosting should be near the top of your list.
Cloudways – Best for Flexibility and Extensive Options
- Five IaaS provider options
- Fast and reliable managed hosting
- Only pay for what you use
- Starts at just $10 per month
Cloudways has been providing managed WordPress hosting for over 11 years and has hosted 600,000+ WordPress websites. Another impressive statistic is that Cloudway has access to more than 120,000 active servers!
Cloudways strives to provide flexibility to all of its clients. Some examples of this flexibility are offering unlimited WordPress websites, pay-as-you-go pricing with hourly plans (so you only pay for what you actually use), one click to add more server space, unlimited staging URLs, and more.
And with an extensive knowledge base and 24/7 expert support, you don’t have to be a technical expert yourself to jump in with Cloudways.
Cloudways currently has 62 data centers in 15 countries and 33 cities, so no matter where you are in the world, you will get speedy, reliable performance.
For plans and pricing, the rates depend on several factors, including selecting from five Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, plus the level of RAM, processor cores, storage, and bandwidth you need. The IaaS provider options are:
- Linode
- DigitalOcean
- Vultr
- AWS
- Google Cloud
The managed WordPress plans run the gamut of pricing. The least expensive is $12 per month including DigitalOcean Standard hosting charges, with 1 GB of RAM, 1 core processor, 25 GB of storage, and 1 TB bandwidth. The most expensive is $3569.98 per month including the AWS hosting charges. That plan includes 384 GB of RAM, 96 vCPU, 20 GB of storage, and 2 GB of bandwidth.
All plans come with 24/7/365 support, free SSL, CDN add-on, free migration, unlimited application installation, 24/7 real-time monitoring, automated backups, advanced caches, auto-healing, and more.
You can try Cloudways for free with a three-day free trial to test their managed WordPress hosting and how it will work for your needs.
How to Choose the Best Web Hosting for WordPress
Now you know about some of the best choices for hosting your WordPress site. But what’s the best one for you and your business?
Different factors are important to different people. But there are some common priorities among all WordPress website owners. We zeroed in on the following considerations when choosing the top 10 to include on this list.
Note: We intentionally didn’t include speed and uptime on our list. Those two things should be self-evident when looking for a good web hosting provider of all stripes.
Evaluate the following to guide your decision when choosing a WordPress web hosting provider.
Multi-Site vs. Single-Site Hosting
Each provider on our list offers different solutions if you plan to host multiple sites. That’s why it’s important to make sure the provider you choose can support all the sites you’ll be hosting in the future. You’ll also want to factor in price and the features you get for each package.
For example, WPEngine offers a few great packages if you’re managing multiple websites. Their multi-site hosting packages start at $44.25 per month with three sites included. You’ll also get 125 GB of bandwidth each month along with 15 GB of storage.
It scales up from there to their Growth package that’s $86.25 per month—quite the jump. But you end up getting 10 sites included in that package with more bandwidth and storage.
Kinsta is also another great option if you’re looking for multi-site solutions. Their packages scale well, too. So, if you end up getting more clients who need websites, you can just upgrade your package as needed.
With providers like Bluehost, you can get unlimited websites at just $5.45 per month—but that comes with a catch–it is completely unmanaged.
That means it doesn’t come with the level of customer support and automatic maintenance you’d get with managed hosting (but we’ll get into that more later).
Customer Support That’s Actually Supportive
You want your website to work as smoothly as possible, especially if you’re making money from it. So when something goes wrong—like your website goes down or you encounter a security breach or cyber attack—you want someone in your corner to get you out of this jam.
Good customer support is an important consideration when deciding on a WordPress host.
One of the best-reviewed WordPress hosting customer support teams is found at WPEngine. Their team is on hand 24/7/365 to help you with any matters if your website experiences issues.
Of course, the trade-off is that they’re a managed WordPress host. That means they come at a steeper cost. With that price tag comes a great hosting service, though, along with a support team that’ll be at your disposal to help you optimize your website and guide it through any down times.
The help desk and support staff of a managed WordPress site are WordPress experts. They understand your site and the plugins you’re using. They are essentially optimized to help you—unlike a general host with customers running all sorts of applications.
On top of that, managed hosts have built their business model on providing service. Contrast this to cheaper hosts that don’t put much of an emphasis–if any–on helping customers in their time of need.
That’s not to say that all unmanaged options offer inferior customer support. In fact, hosts like Bluehost offer award-winning 24/7 customer support for all of your needs. They might not know your site as well as a managed WordPress host, though.
Managed vs. Unmanaged Hosting
This is probably one of the most important decisions when it comes to choosing a WordPress web host from this list. It determines everything from your level of customer support to security to price.
First, let’s talk about the WordPress hosting most people are familiar with. You get a regular web host and that host usually gives you an easy way to install WordPress. You have a host, WordPress is installed, and that’s it.
This is known as unmanaged WordPress hosting—and most WordPress hosting works like this. After a one-click install, you get the basic version of WordPress, the same version that you’d get if you installed WordPress on a server that you owned.
Managed WordPress hosting steps things up a notch, and offers a bunch of extra features.
Instead of a basic host with WordPress installed, everything is built from the ground up with WordPress in mind. The hosting infrastructure is tailored to WordPress and the hosting company usually customizes WordPress itself to make it better.
Your site will be a lot faster and more secure. You’ll also have much better support since the hosting team specializes in WordPress.
The downside is that managed WordPress hosting is more expensive, but this makes sense. You’re getting more value for the higher price tag.
Headache-Free Site Migration
WordPress hosting is typically an upgrade from old shared hosting solutions. As such, you’re likely migrating your website to a new web host altogether.
A good web host will help you migrate your website between web hosts easily and seamlessly. This might mean they’ll have a dedicated technician work through the process for you, or they’ll have a customer support team to guide you through the process yourself. Some might even charge you a little more in order to migrate your site—and it’s usually worth the price in my opinion.
As you research, see what each hosting provider gives you in terms of site migration. SiteGround, for example, has a free migrator tool you can use to get your website on their host.
WPEngine is another host that offers a migration plugin. Once downloaded, the plugin takes care of all the complicated work for you.
Flywheel has experts on hand to help you migrate your website. Their migration team will take care of the whole process, so you don’t have to.
If you want to transfer your website to a new host, be sure to check what the WordPress hosting provider offers to help transfer your website. You’ll want as much assistance as you can get to make the transition smooth.
The Top Web Hosting For WordPress in Summary
WordPress web hosting puts your site on a server that’s only used for WordPress. This improves the security, performance, and enhances the overall experience for your website visitors.
Factors like site traffic, technical experience, and scalability are all important factors to consider here. Beginners launching a new WordPress website likely won’t use the same solution as a high-traffic site that wants to switch hosts.
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