EasyWP WordPress Hosting Review

Disclaimer: Our reviews are not sponsored, as we used our own money to purchase hosting subscriptions. Our reviews are 100% based on our sole opinions. Reviews contain affiliate marketing links where we get a commission when you purchase or subscribe to that service. Read our Affiliate Marketing Policy here. Also, please verify all product and pricing information directly with the linked brands, as product offerings change often. FastestWP.Website is not responsible for errors or product discrepancies.

We proudly host our website on Rocket.net.

EasyWP’s services are based on their name: make it easy to set up a WordPress website. Owned by NameCheap, EasyWP is geared toward beginner WordPress websites that want an inexpensive WordPress hosting solution without needing the bells and whistles. If you want to get your simple WordPress website up and running without any fuss, then EasyWP is a good contender.

In this review post, we will detail EasyWP’s WordPress hosting services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services. Note that EasyWP does not offer plans for more than one WordPress website. If you need a plan for multiple WordPress sites, check out some of our other recommendations, such as SiteGround or WPX. And if you are more advanced, check out our top-tier recommendation, Rocket.net.

EasyWP General Features

EasyWP doesn’t offer many standard features across all of its plans. While we don’t expect the world for lower-tier, cheaper plans, some things are becoming less “nice-to-have” and more required.

For example, SSL is a must-have for today’s Internet, especially since Google will penalize your website if you don’t offer SSL. Thus, we are confused about why EasyWP doesn’t offer SSL on its lowest-tier plan. Furthermore, you may not get SSL even on the Turbo and Supersonic plans that include SSL. If you read the fine print, SSL is only offered on these plans to domains that are with Namecheap, EasyWP’s parent company. If you have your domain with another provider, you must transfer to Namecheap for free SSL, or you’ll still have to get your own SSL certificate elsewhere.

Additionally, EasyWP does not offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. 30-day money-back guarantees are quite standard throughout the industry. Instead, EasyWP offers a 30-day free trial. On its face, we consider the two offers to be the same – a 30-day free trial is essentially a 30-day money-back guarantee. However, the problem is that if you opt for the free trial, you forgo any special pricing you get as a first-time customer, which can be 30-40% off your first year. This more than wipes out your savings from the 30-day free trial. But if you opt for the 30-40% discount on your first year, you forgo the 30-day free trial and don’t get a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Finally, EasyWP does not include email hosting, although you can upgrade for a monthly charge. If you have a separate email plan through Google as part of Google Workspace, you don’t need to worry about email hosting – Google is your email host. But if you host your own email server, you need to consider who that will be and whether there will be an extra charge. Regardless, we strongly recommend having your own email domain instead of just yourbusiness@gmail.com.

EasyWP WordPress Optimization Features

In contrast to some standard features lacking from EasyWP, we are pleased that EasyWP includes its “Supersonic” CDN on all plans. However, much like the “included” SSL certificates that we mentioned above, the CDN is only available if your domain is with Namecheap or if your domain is with a provider that uses FreeDNS. We haven’t seen this limitation with other CDNs, which is something to keep in mind if you transfer your site to EasyWP. But having said that, we are still pleased that EasyWP includes its CDN with all plans.

After transferring our test domain to Namecheap to activate the Supersonic CDN, we realized that only the base plan was free. You’ll need to upgrade if you need more than 50GB of CDN bandwidth, advanced DDoS protection, custom SSL certificates, and an advanced firewall (WAF). Below are what the CDN plans offer as of September 2023.

We also had trouble setting up our test website on EasyWP because of EasyWP’s caching policies. The main problem is that EasyWP does not allow most other caching plugins besides its own EasyWP Caching plugin. This includes banning popular caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache, WP Cache, and WP Rocket – you can see the full list of banned plugins on EasyWP’s site here. But the EasyWP caching plugin doesn’t have any settings, so you won’t be able to fine-tune or customize caching behavior on your website.

Furthermore, if you are a more advanced WordPress user, migrating your WordPress site to EasyWP is not easy. There is no SSH support nor a web-based file manager. Everything must be done using EasyWP’s basic interfaces. While this is ok for a beginner to migrate their website, if you are looking for advanced features during the migration process, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

EasyWP Managed Shared Hosting Plans

EasyWP only offers three managed WordPress hosting plans, all of which come with only one website. Of these three plans, we believe the lowest plan – the “Starter”- is not even worthy of consideration.

As mentioned previously, SSL is an absolute must-have for any website today. Unfortunately, the “Starter” lowest-tier plan does not include free SSL, so you must factor the price of an SSL certificate into the Starter price compared to the other two tiers. If you add in that price, the Turbo plan isn’t much more expensive – if at all – and you get increased performance and storage compared to the Starter plan. This is why we don’t consider the Starter plan a contender.

Between the Turbo and Supersonic plans, we believe the Supersonic plan is a better value for serious business websites and bloggers. Supersonic performs better than the Turbo plan and includes an uptime guarantee. While there is a relatively significant price difference between the two plans on a monthly plan, this difference isn’t that much on a yearly plan, especially compared to the performance value. However, if you are starting out or don’t need the performance resources yet, then Turbo is ok to start.

Finally, note that all plans come with unlimited bandwidth. However, the free CDN has a bandwidth limit of 50GB per month. Thus, while it is true you get unlimited bandwidth, your non-local traffic will be slow once you exceed your CDN limit of 50GB.

EasyWP WordPress Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested EasyWP using a test WordPress website to see how EasyWP performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the Supersonic WordPress Hosting plan, which is our recommended plan. We also ensured our test domain used Namecheap’s FreeDNS so SSL and CDN services would be activated.

There are three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below, and you can read more about our test specifications on this page.

Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores

Even though we believe EasyWP caters more towards beginning WordPress websites, EasyWP performs well on the Google Core Web Vitals. We are pleasantly surprised! The scores above are not the actual Lighthouse values but the scores Lighthouse assigns to each metric. We chose to display these scores instead of the actual values to make comparing scores across web host providers easier.

GTMetrix Performance

EasyWP performed so-so on GTMetrix. Four locations – Frankfurt, London, São Paulo, and Vancouver – fully loaded in less than two seconds, which is excellent. Most locations fully loaded in under four seconds, which is not great but not bad for a lower-tier WordPress provider. The same for LCP scores, in which most locations scored under three seconds. We aren’t that happy with EasyWP’s performance, but we also didn’t expect much from EasyWP either.

Having said that, Bluehost and Hostinger – which are in the same lower-tier category as EasyWP – had much better GTMetrix scores. If you are a beginner or looking for cheap WordPress hosting, you’ll want to consider Bluehost or Hostinger alongside EasyWP.

Worldwide Load Testing

EasyWP did not handle the load testing well at all. All locations performed horribly, meaning EasyWP could not handle much load at all. Although it is good that EasyWP did not fail, waiting times will be quite long if there is a spike in traffic to your website.

Our EasyWP WordPress Review Recommendation

If you are starting a WordPress blog or business website, and you are in North America or Europe, then you may want to consider the “Solid” EasyWP plan. On the other hand, if you are running a single website that gets a lot of traffic and needs a good amount of storage space and performance, then the Supersonic plan is better and our recommended plan for EasyWP.

However, while we really like EasyWP’s pricing for the first year, the pricing for the Supersonic plan after the first year isn’t a deal. At $20/month for the Supersonic plan, you could easily compare to top-tier performers like WPX, Rocket.net, and Kinsta for just a few dollars more per month. The Turbo plan for $13/month is more reasonable for what you are getting, but it doesn’t include the top-tier performance features like Supersonic nor the uptime guarantee.

EasyWP is definitely a contender in the beginner WordPress hosting market. However, while the Turbo plan provides good value, the Supersonic plan is where the performance is. But there are some top-tier competitors in the Supersonic price range after the first year, so you’ll want to keep that in mind before committing to EasyWP. And if you are a beginner, you’ll want to compare EasyWP to Bluehost and Hostinger, which also offers low prices but superior performance.