One of the most important SEO ranking factors in 2020 is site speed. Look, Google knows exactly how fast your website is, and because Google wants the best experience for its users, it’s not going to shoot itself in the foot and send hundreds or thousands of visitors to your website if it’s slow. Knowing that your website can’t handle that, Google will only ever trickle traffic to your website here and there. The bottom line is, if you want your website to grow, the first step is to ensure that your website host can handle that type of traffic.
Knowing this, I signed up for a Kinsta and a WP Engine account. Through a series of speed tests, I was able to determine which one is the fastest. To my surprise, there was a huge difference in site speed between the two. In this video, I’ll explain how I conducted the speed test and we’ll dive into some numbers. By the end, you’ll know exactly which host is the fastest for your WordPress website.
Alright, let’s get into this. To ensure a level playing field, I created a test client server in Tokyo and two identical WordPress websites in Singapore. One is hosted on Kinsta, and the other is hosted on WP Engine. As for the hosting environment, each website utilized server cache, content delivery network, PHP version 7.4, and had no WordPress plugins installed. In addition, both websites used a domain name registered with Namecheap and did not have an SSL certificate installed. Finally, the WordPress website itself contained a single 1500-word blog post with three images.
Now, what about the actual tests? Well, the browser used to conduct the test was Google Chrome, and between each individual test run, the browser cache was cleared to simulate a user visiting the page for the first time. For each host, I ran a series of 800 back-to-back speed tests with sites video and what the results in a cross the board Kinsta outperformed WP Engine. I honestly thought this would be a much closer race, but from literally right out of the gate, when looking at the average server response time, Kinsta was already 21 milliseconds ahead of WP Engine. Even more, Kinsta had its first paint on average 26 percent faster than WP Engine. Finally, and probably most importantly, Kinsta really showed its power with an average page load time of just 852 milliseconds. Comparatively, WP Engine has a respectable page load time of 1.97 seconds, but relative to Kinsta, there is just no competition.
Now, since I really couldn’t believe that Kinsta was this much faster than WP Engine, or I guess rather, WP Engine was this slow, I ran the set of tests again. As you might expect, I saw very similar results. WP Engine did slightly better this round, but still nowhere near Kinsta when it comes to performance. Even after that, I manually ran PageSpeed audits in Chrome dev tools and studied the networking tab to prove to myself that these results were accurate. And the thing is, the timings match up to the site speed test results.
Now look, this is all very interesting because WP Engine is actually able to compress web pages better than Kinsta. You can see here that WP Engine compressed the same exact WordPress website to a size of 635 kilobytes, while Kinsta compressed down to 638 kilobytes. While the compression size difference of just half a percent isn’t substantial, every byte counts when it comes to site speed. As you know, the less data that needs to be transferred, the faster a web page will load. Unfortunately, even with this advantage, Kinsta is still able to deliver web pages faster than WP Engine. So that just goes to show that on the surface, these two hosting providers seem identical. They have a similar pricing structure and promise to be the best-managed WordPress host. However, when it comes to site speed, there is one clear winner.
Now, I’m personally genuinely interested in hosting my own WordPress websites on the fastest infrastructure, so it’s nice to be able to promote a product that I use and love. I’ve partnered with Kinsta to spread the word about their managed WordPress hosting, and in doing this, I receive a commission when you sign up for a hosting plan with Kinsta using my referral link below. With that said, if you have any questions about hosting with Kinsta, let me know in the comments below. As someone who has already been through this process and made the leap to Kinsta, I’m here to help you.