Ionos 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.

Ionos is a German company and is the largest hosting company in Europe. Founded in Europe in 1988 as 1&1, the company opened up its United States operations in 2003. The company rebranded as Ionos in 2018 after merging with ProfitBricks’ cloud infrastructure. So, if you have previously heard of 1&1 web hosting, know it is the same company as Ionos.

Ionos Managed WordPress Hosting plans are geared towards beginner WordPress websites, in our opinion. In this review post, we will detail Ionos’s WordPress services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services. Note that Ionos also offers VPS, cloud, dedicated servers, and Agency web hosting plans, but that is outside the scope of this review.

Ionos WordPress General Features

For a web host geared towards beginner, we are pleasantly surprised at the standard features Ionos includes in its managed WordPress hosting plans. Ionos includes free SSL certificates, 24/7 support via chat and phone, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. We also like that Ionos includes malware detection on all its plans, but we especially appreciate that Ionos also includes malware repair on its top “Boost” plan. Plus, Ionos commits to environmental sustainability and “climate-neutral hosting.”

We also like that Ionos includes email accounts on all of its plans, although the number of accounts depends on your plan. Each account comes with 2GB of storage, although you can upgrade to 50GB plans as well. 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 must buy a separate email hosting plan from another provider, so we appreciate that Ionos takes care of this for you (up to the number of accounts included with your plan).

The only real drawback we see with Ionos is that they do not include website backups in their plans. Ionos includes 12 months of Jetpack Backup for free on the Grow and Boost plans, which is nice. But after the first year, you’ll have to pay for Jetpack Backup, which is $5-20 per month, depending on the plan.

Ionos Optimization Features

Ionos includes a lot of proprietary plug-ins with a standard WordPress installation – nine to be exact! Seven of them are deemed to be optional by Ionos, and we believe you could disable four to five of these plugins. Unless you are very advanced, you’ll probably want to keep the Ionos Performance and Security plugins. However, the rest could be disabled, in our opinion, if you wanted or needed to.

The Ionos Performance plugin provides caching services, although it is not robust (see screenshots below). The plugin allows basic tools such as defining a cache expiration, purging the cache, excluding items from caching, and GZIP data compression. You can also turn off Ionos caching if you want to use another caching plugin, such as LiteSpeed or W3 Total Cache. The Ionos Security plugin offers basic security options such as turning off remote management (XML-RPC), disabling email log in, and whether your password has been compromised. While it is basic, you might as well keep it unless you are advanced.

Ionos Managed Hosting Plans

Ionos only offers these three Managed WordPress hosting plans. Of the three plans, we recommend only considering the Grow plan – our recommended plan – or the higher Boost plan. We don’t like the Start plan because it does not include caching and daily backups and has the least performance available. While that may be okay for beginner plans, we believe other WordPress hosts offer better beginner plans for the price, such as Bluehost.

As for comparing the Grow and Boost plans, we feel it really depends on your personal needs. With 50GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, and five email accounts included, we recommend the Grow plan as it is value-packed and probably suitable for most beginner websites. However, if you need top-tier performance or five additional email addresses, then Boost is your plan.

Note that all Ionos WordPress Managed Hosting plans come with only one website. You’ll have to buy more than one hosting plan if you need more than one website. However, Ionos also offers Agency Web Hosting plans, including a portal to help you manage all of your client’s projects. You can read more about these plans on this Ionos page.

Ionos WordPress Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested Ionos using our test WordPress website to see how Ionos performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the “Grow” Managed Hosting plan, which is our recommended Ionos plan. There are three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below, and you can read our detailed testing specifications on this page.

Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores

Ionos scored quite well on the Google Core Web Vitals, with an 89 overall performance score. The scores above are not the actual Lighthouse values but rather 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

Ionos did relatively well in North America and Europe, with all locations having a fully loaded time of less than three seconds. For our test website, the fastest WordPress hosts had fully loaded times of less than two seconds, but we accepted less than three seconds. However, Ionos’ performance suffered outside North America and Europe, with most fully loaded times between four and five seconds. This isn’t the worst performance, but it isn’t great either.

Please note that while Ionos is Europe’s largest hosting company, we hosted our website in Ionos’ United States data center. These performance metrics will change if you host your website in Europe using Ionos. However, if you are in Europe, you should consider HostXNow, which has amazing European performance, or WPX, which has blazing-fast performance worldwide.

Worldwide Load Testing

As Ionos does not use a CDN, all load requests go straight to the original server. Because our load test simulated 50 users at a time from various places worldwide, Ionos’s servers thought we were attacking the server and thus blocked our load test. All of our load test locations experienced 80-90% block rates, making the load test data unusable. Thus, we are unable to analyze how Ionos’s servers would perform under a high simultaneous load.

Our Ionos WordPress Review Recommendation

If you are looking for a beginner WordPress hosting solution, and you are based and have customers in North America *or* Europe, then Ionos could be a perfect solution for you. Their prices are very reasonable for one website. Ionos provides a lot of storage space, plus unlimited bandwidth and traffic. They also include many standard features that sometimes beginner-focused websites – such as Bluehost or Hostinger – do not include, such as free email accounts and SSL certificates.

We recommend the mid-tier “Grow” plan, which provides the best value. If you need top-tier performance, then the price of the higher “Boost” plan is still reasonable. The lowest-tier “Start” plan doesn’t include some key features and has the lowest performance rating of the three plans. While it is cheap, other cheap WordPress hosts offer similar or better plans for better value. Thus, we do not recommend the “Start” plan.

If you are a beginner, you’ll want to compare Ionos to Bluehost. However, if you are mid-tier or advanced, or you manage multiple websites, you’ll want to look at a higher-tier WordPress hosting company. Our top picks include Rocket.net and WPX. Or if you are in Europe, HostXNow has superior performance to Ionos.