Hey guys, what’s up?today I’ve got the ultimate managed WordPress hosting comparison for you guys. We’re gonna be looking at SiteGround, Flywheel, Insta, WP Engine, and Presidium to see which one of these hosting providers is the fastest. What do you guys think? Let’s find out.
Okay, guys, so before we get into the results, I want to explain how I conducted these tests. So basically, I had to first figure out where the common data center was between all of these hosting providers, and that happens to be London. So I set up a basic WordPress website in London with a single 1,500-word blog post and three images. Next, I set up a test server in Paris and ran a series of a hundred back-to-back PageSpeed tests from Paris to each one of the respective data centers back in London. So this right off the bat is 500 individual PageSpeed tests – a hundred to each one of these hosting providers. And the thing I want to make clear here is that all of these WordPress websites were identical. They were all running WordPress version 5.4, PHP version 7.3, and there were no other optimizations applied except for the server-level caching that was by default available for each one of these hosting providers.
So guys, let’s look at the results here. Right off the bat, the first metric is server response time, and you can see here that Presidium and SiteGround were the clear winners when compared to Flywheel, WP Engine, and Kinsta. The next test is the time to the first paint test, which again, we have SiteGround and Presidium beating out all of the other managed WordPress hosting providers. The final test, which I consider to be the most important, is the page load time test, where surprisingly, Presidium and Insta edged out the competition, only separated by four milliseconds. So right off the bat here, it seems like Insta and Presidium are your best bets.
But in order to make this test as comprehensive as possible, I ended up moving the test server from Paris to New York and ran the set of 100 PageSpeed tests again to each one of the respective data centers back in London. Let’s look at the second round test results here, and you’ll find out that for the server response time, we have Presidium and SiteGround again beating out the competition, with WP Engine and Kinsta not too far behind. Next up, we have the time to the first paint metric where SiteGround beat out all the competition, with Kinsta and Presidium time for 2nd place. And finally, we have the page load time test where Presidium again beat out the competition with Flywheel and Kinsta not too far behind.
So guys, don’t worry if you weren’t keeping track here, that was a lot of numbers, but don’t worry, we’re gonna go back through the results and get some key takeaways from the data.
So first up, right off the bat, Presidium seems to be one of the most mentioned hosting providers in this test, and that’s for a good reason because it was able to deliver the page quickest when we’re talking domestically within Europe and internationally from the United States back to Europe. So if you’re looking for Page Speed alone, Presidium is probably gonna be the way to go. But the caveat with that is the fact that Presidium is one of the more expensive managed WordPress hosting providers.
Now guys, I want to be honest with you, I don’t have a lot of first-hand experience with Presidium. They are new on my radar, at least I know they’ve been around since 2014, but I’ve only recently been hosting websites with them. I can say that I have been hosting websites with Kinsta, and they were not too far behind Presidium, only four milliseconds behind Presidium in the page load test from Paris to London. So domestically, they performed really, really comparably when we’re talking about Kinsta and Presidium. So I can confidently recommend to you based on my experience hosting websites with them.
So to summarize, I would say that if you’re looking for budget, go with SiteGround because they have a good mix of good prices and site speed. And if you want something ultimately very premium for the fastest website, for lots of visitors per month, and all that good stuff, then I would recommend either Presidium for its site speed alone or Kinsta based on my experience hosting websites with them.
So guys, if you have any questions about the content, the site speed tests that I ran, or anything else, let me know in the comments below.