If you want to know our top pick right away, we recommend Nexcess for WordPress hosting. 99.998% uptime, superfast servers & excellent support. Prices start from $13/month. Visit Nexcess to see their WordPress hosting plans or read their review below.
Here’s the best wordpress hosting companies based on our expert analysis
#1: Nexcess WordPress Hosting (Powered by Liquid Web)
Liquid Web Hosting is simply the best web hosting company there is, and offer the finest hosting across all of the major hosting categories. Their WordPress hosting platform – Nexcess, is certainly no exception, earning them our top recommendation for WordPress hosting companies.
The list of the things they stand out with is a pretty long one. It all starts with the idea that more efficient should mean not just faster but considerably faster. Nexcess is obsessed about performance, and they are excited to show you just what they can do in order to really ramp up yours.
They don’t just deliver this, they show you what they are doing with daily performance reports as well as being able to immediately measure changes in your plug-ins and setups. Nexcess also provides valuable analysis to guide you toward making the changes you need in order to ensure that you are truly optimizing the performance of your sites.
Nexcess only offers a managed WordPress hosting option, where you turn everything over to them and they do everything for you with industry-leading expertise. They deliver this with amazing 24 hour support starting at under $20 a month. Their WordPress hosting packages run all the way up to $999 a month, so even the sites that can benefit from this much power are well covered, and everything in between.
Nexcess WordPress hosting delivers everything you could ever want in a WordPress host and also deliver it at an affordable price, in a way that earns them our top recommendation for WordPress hosting platforms. You can’t go wrong with the very best.
Features of Nexcess WordPress Hosting:
| Fully Managed | Free staging site | 99.998% uptime guaranteed |
| 24/7/365 Support | Daily backups | Fastest global CDN & DNS |
| FREE unlimited email | FREE SSL & SSH | Inherent SEO |
| FREE migrations | Advanced password protection | Instant caching |
| Up-to-date PHP | Premium firewalls & DDoS prevention | Autoscaling for traffic surges |
| Automatic WordPress updates | Automatic patches | No pageview limits |
#2: DreamHost WordPress Hosting
Our number two recommended WordPress hosting site is right up there with the very best, and DreamHost has earned a recommendation from the software itself, WordPress.org. One of the big reasons why they like DreamHost so much is that DreamHost offers their prime hosting and expertise to everyone, and even take great care of the smallest web sites through their WordPress Basic platform starting at just $2.59 a month.
From there, you can choose a fully managed WordPress service called “DreamPress” for as low as $16.95 per month for the more serious sites that can benefit from the optimization and other benefit that DreamHost’s managed WordPress hosting provides. For those who even need more power, DreamHost offers WordPress hosting in virtual private server plans, and VPS really turbo charges your site’s performance.
People use WordPress for its ease of management, and want the exact same thing from their WordPress hosting. DreamHost makes everything incredibly easy for you, whether you are rolling out your very first site or are a larger one with much more sophisticated needs.
DreamHost is most famous for its sheer speed, and this also carries over to its WordPress hosting as well. Everything is optimized for WordPress and even smaller sites can really benefit from this. You don’t just want your sites fast, you also want them to be reliable, and DreamHost offers an industry leading 100% guaranteed uptime. It doesn’t get any better than 100%.
There is a whole lot to like about DreamHost, and their having something to fit every site’s needs perfectly earns them a very deserved spot in our top 3 WordPress hosting companies.
What is a WordPress Hosting Server?
WordPress is a fantastically popular content management platform and is especially loved for its sheer ease of use. It takes comparatively very little time to learn to use and enables those with no training and expertise to create some very nice websites.
WordPress isn’t just used by novices, even though it is such an overwhelming choice among this group. There are some pretty big sites that use WordPress as well, and this is by no means a toy like the free stuff that gets thrown in with cheap hosting plans.
WordPress is free as well, but it’s not only free, it’s based upon an open source program that benefits from the work of a great many software developers who continually seek to improve it. WordPress is all about making the managing of your websites as easy and as effective as possible, and does both tremendously well.
One of the real benefits of so many people and sites using WordPress is that you can build a whole industry around this, including hosting providers providing services completely dedicated to getting the most out of your WordPress sites.
If you have a WordPress site, the first choice is between a hosting service that is optimized for WordPress and one that is not optimized, so in this case it’s just better to choose the optimization. This is the case whether you have a very small website or a very large one, or anything in between, and the price ranges for WordPress hosting ranges from a couple of bucks a month to a thousand a month, so everyone is properly served regardless of the extent of your needs.
Some hosting companies optimize for WordPress better than others, so it’s important to be selective here and want to start by choosing from among the very best companies out there, ones that have well proven themselves as being among the very best in WordPress hosting and are most worthy of your business.
Like all hosting plans, WordPress hosting comes with a variety of different configurations and options and even among the best providers, one or the other may offer a package that most suits your needs, so it is not enough for us to just tell you who we feel is the very best because another provider from among the very best might fit your needs a little better.
If you run WordPress sites, or are looking to do so, it just makes sense to have your hosting optimized for it, and we have the best of the best for you to check out.
Who Needs WordPress Hosting?
Other forms of hosting cater to specific sizes of websites, such as the shared services for the smaller sites, to the VPS hosting from the medium sized sites, and dedicated server hosting for the larger ones. You decide which group you fit into and then choose from among the offerings within that group.
WordPress hosting instead focuses on the full range of sizes with the exclusion of the very large ones who have the most extensive needs and need custom solutions and wouldn’t be running WordPress anyway.
For everyone else, especially if you go with the best in WordPress hosting, which is exactly what we direct you toward with our top recommendations, if you are running WordPress, you definitely should be at least looking very seriously at WordPress hosting plans, because they are designed just for you which offers some significant advantages at all price points.
What you really want to see when deciding between types of plans, WordPress versus other options, is to have the companies that you are considering WordPress hosting with also be among the very best in these other hosting types as well.
Our carefully selected and unbiased recommendations also happen to be among the best in all categories, including offering the best WordPress hosting. If you are looking for the best hosting period as well as the best WordPress optimization out there, this is where you want to look.
Once you have decided to go with a WordPress hosting company and have narrowed them down to the 3 best out there, which we rank for you based upon our independent analysis, it comes down to the finding the right fit. WordPress hosting simply fits WordPress sites better, and it’s clearly better to pick from among the best providers, and all you really have left to do is decide which top WordPress hosting plan fits your needs the best.
There’s still a little work to do, especially since among the top providers, some providers offer features that may fit your needs better than what another provider may offer, but narrowing down your choices to what the top WordPress hosting sites have to offer does make the task easier, in addition to enjoying the greater performance and better management that this better fit offers.
How to Choose a WordPress Hosting Server
Given how popular WordPress sites are, finding a hosting plan that is tailored to WordPress is a very easy task. WordPress makes building sites a lot easier, and easier is definitely always a good thing, but a lot of people take the easy route of just going with any old provider.
The thing about choosing a hosting plan is that people don’t do this very often at all, and when they make a poorer choice, they end up getting stuck with it for a long time as they don’t really know what they are missing due to not paying enough attention to the quality of their hosting.
Even if your site is really small now, where this may not matter, just about every site wants to grow, and choosing a more quality hosting service as well as matching your hosting plan with your current and future needs are central to the growth of your sites. These decisions are therefore very important to the health of your sites and the investment you make in them.
Web hosting is not something that is fairly homogenous, meaning that one hosting company is close enough to another to not have it matter much which one you choose. You want to go with a hosting company that excels in providing both high quality service at a competitive price, what we call high value.
Choosing from among the best companies is therefore central to these decisions, and also the part that requires a high level of expertise and familiarity with the industry to make properly. This is why you have come to us, and rest assured, we’ve done all the work that needs to be done here for you.
So apart from having WordPress sites, as it wouldn’t make sense for a non-WordPress site to want to have their hosting optimized for WordPress, it now becomes just a matter of finding the right fit from among the various plans that the top providers offer.
While you do need to be able to afford the price, and have it make sense within your budget, the way a plan fits and takes care of your needs is the most important thing. You cannot afford to have the wrong fit here.
How We Rank WordPress Hosting Companies
It only makes sense that the most important thing in deciding between hosting services is the quality of the companies themselves, because everything else flows from this. Top hosting companies seek to provide a higher level of service and especially a higher level of value.
We really like the ones that do everything very well, including with their WordPress hosting packages. Reliability and satisfaction with a hosting company in general also factors in heavily, especially since you want to find a company you will want to stay with, one that has been great for long enough to know that it will stick.
With this knowledge in hand, from looking at this from a company level, we also need to carefully consider their WordPress hosting options as this is at the heart of the matter given we’re recommending the best in WordPress hosting here.
While you can get both unmanaged and managed WordPress hosting, it’s only the small sites that should be considering the unmanaged option, those looking for WordPress optimization at the lowest price points. We also want to see the managed plans done the right way, providing complete oversight of your WordPress sites at minimal extra cost.
This is really about speed more than anything, where you optimize WordPress for greater speed. You also need to make sure that the speed and capacity of your hosting plan is on the high end, otherwise you just won’t end up with the high end speed you could have had.
Our top picks all excel in this area, and if they aren’t fast, this is a pretty decisive reason not to want to do business with them. While hardware always matters, the biggest difference between hosting companies is their software solutions to manage this, and you want the best.
Support is far less important with managed WordPress hosting due to the fact they take care of everything for you, we still need to see top level customer support, for the times you may need it. Reliability is always important and you especially do not want to see your sites be down for extended periods.
The sum of all this cashes out to two main things, which are top of the line services together with a price that represents great value. That’s exactly what you’ll get with all of our top 3 WordPress hosting companies.
Pros and Cons of WordPress Hosting
The pros of WordPress hosting are very simple to describe and understand. This simply comes down to the fact that WordPress hosting is designed for WordPress sites, and if you have one, it’s much better to have your hosting optimized for the type of site you have than not.
You simply will not be able to achieve the same results with a non-WordPress hosting plan as you can with WordPress optimized hosting. This does not mean that we don’t want to be looking at price differences, but pound for pound, you don’t really pay that much more if anything for this to make any difference worth noting. The benefits are always well worth any very small extra price you may encounter.
WordPress hosting simply makes WordPress sites a lot faster, and a lot faster makes a real difference, especially as your sites continue to grow. You just choose the level of power you need and with the benefit of fully managed hosting, your host does the rest, making sure things aren’t just optimized but ensuring they stay that way.
This is especially a big plus for those who have multiple sites and want to spend their time creating content and not wasting any of it on site management. When you can have real experts do it for you at virtually no cost, that’s definitely a better way.
Your choices do matter though, but among the WordPress plans within the choices of our top recommended providers, there is a wide range of choices to take care of the smallest sites all the way up to some very big ones.
There really aren’t any cons as far as whether or not someone chooses a hosting plan that is designed for the type of site they have, WordPress, so it comes down to making sure you don’t pick one of the lesser ones and ensure you only pick from among the best. We have done this all for you.
Pros:
Custom designed hosting optimized for WordPress sites
Significant upgrades in performance
Takes all the work out of managing your sites
All plans of any size enjoy a high level of expertise
Cons:
Not designed for non-WordPress sites
Summary of WordPress Hosting
WordPress is an enormously popular website platform due to users being able to create and manage some pretty nice websites with very little technical knowledge. You just need to learn a few simple things about using WordPress and you’re in business.
We’re up to 40% of all internet sites being run on WordPress, which means that the market is simply huge, and this has led to hosting companies offering web hosting optimized for WordPress. The back end of WordPress is also constantly being upgraded by open source developers, and the fact that you get all this for free makes this a great choice for a great many projects.
If you have WordPress sites, the decision to go with a host that optimizes for WordPress is made very easy when you get to choose to go with the very best hosting providers in the business and enjoy their top of the line hardware, software, engineering, reliability, expert management, and everything else that goes into a great hosting platform, at a very competitive price.
This is not even a matter of figuring out whether the extra cost is worth the extra benefits, as you get all the additional performance of site optimization at virtually the same price as comparable non-optimized solutions. The only real decision you need to make is comparing the various offerings for WordPress among the top hosting companies and choosing what serves your needs the best.
The variety of options offered cover a very wide range of needs, anything from a dirt cheap entry level plan designed for the smallest sites, to enjoying the ramped up power of a loaded virtual private server plan, all optimized for WordPress.
The biggest benefit of WordPress hosting may be having the host manage everything for you, and in the case of WordPress, that does mean everything, freeing up your time to devote to what you do best. Our top recommended WordPress hosting sites do the very best job at everything else and leave you completely assured that your sites are running at their best all the time, at very little or no additional cost. If you run WordPress, that’s too sweet a deal to pass up on.
FAQ About WordPress Hosting
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management program that is renowned for its ease of use, allowing both amateurs and professionals to create both great looking sites as well as ones that work fabulously and make managing all of this far easier than with other options.
What is WordPress Hosting?
Due to the massive popularity of WordPress, representing a full 40% of all sites on the internet, this has led hosting providers to offer a number of distinct hosting plans all tailored to optimize the hosting they provide with the website software you use.
Why should WordPress users choose WordPress Hosting?
While it just makes sense to want to have your hosting perfectly matched with the web software you use, we still are left with the task of deciding whether the extra money is worth this benefit. WordPress hosting is offered at a similar price though, which makes the decision very easy.
Does WordPress Hosting offer managed hosting plans like other types?
While those who run smaller WordPress sites can easily manage things themselves by spending a little time on the basics such as staying up to date with their software and their plug-ins, more serious and more complex sites can definitely benefit from having this professionally managed at little extra cost.
What size of websites does WordPress hosting cater to?
No matter how small your WordPress site is, you can benefit from having it optimized for WordPress, at the same super low prices that non-WordPress hosting offers. WordPress hosting plans run all the way up to hundreds of dollars per month that take care of the needs of all sizes of websites and all sizes are well served.
What are some of the benefits of going with the best WordPress hosts?
Just like everything else, there is good, better, and best with WordPress hosting as well. Choosing a top hosting company means that you get the best of everything, everything you need to ensure that your WordPress sites are the best they can be.