Overall Rankings of WP Hosts - After 3 Years of Live Testing

After 3 Years of Testing, let’s combine all the results and see who is #1 in our Overall Rankings?

Weekly Testing Method

Compare 8 WordPress Hosts
Use 8 Live Sites, each with a Different Host but with Identical Content (you can check them out here)
Each week speed & uptime tests are run using independent tools, GTmetrix & Pingdom

After 140 Weeks, a Total of 11,477,760 Tests have been performed

WordPress Hosts

Identical Live Sites

Total Tests

Overall Rankings – Apr 2016 to DEC 2018

Congratulations to SiteGround who is now crowned our Overall #1 Ranked Host!!

SiteGround has achieved the coveted #1 Overall Ranking off the back of an impressive 2018 performance. It has outperformed our previous leader, Lightning Base, in both Speed & Uptime tests, as well as proven to be the fastest of all hosts across 2018!

The 2 hosts at the bottom of our rankings have both been replaced. A2 Hosting was removed on 28 Jan 2017 due to unacceptable downtimes, while DreamHost have were replaced on 23 Apr 2017 due to poor uptime and unacceptable speed. Namecheap replaced A2 Hosting and Lightning Base replaced DreamHost.

By reviewing the performances of the 10 hosts across the last 3 years, it has become abundantly clear that SiteGround & Lightning Base have split away from the pack and are consistently dominating all other hosts.

As we enter into 2019, I have decided that a big shakeup is required. In a similar vein to the removal of DreamHost & A2 Hosting in 2017, our current bottom 6 hosts will all be removed (GoDaddy, Bluehost, InMotion Hosting, HostGator, Web Hosting Hub & Namecheap).

Our new hosts for 2019 will be:

Flywheel
Kinsta
Pressidium
WP Engine

I am very much looking forward to the step up in competition our new hosts will bring to SiteGround & Lightning Base – bring on 2019!!

Note: If your target audience is focused in 1 region, make sure you check out the Regional Rankings, where the results are split into North America, Europe & Asia Pacific.