Kinsta 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.

Started in 2013, Kinsta is one of the highest-rated WordPress web hosts in the world. Kinsta claims they have a 97% customer satisfaction rating with over 25,000 active customers. It is no wonder they are so highly rated: they have some of the most comprehensive WordPress site features we’ve seen in WordPress site hosts.

In this review post, we will detail Kinsta’s services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services. However, Kinsta’s plans are expensive and geared towards high-end, high-performance websites. If you are starting out or need a simple WordPress hosting plan, we recommend checking out our Guide to the Top WordPress Hosts for under $10/month.

Kinsta General Features

As you see above, Kinsta checks all of the boxes. Its top competitor in this space is Rocket.net, which we recommend you also check out. Both companies offer similar pricing, plans, and features, so you’ll want to read our Rocket.net review as well for a comparison.

When things go wrong – which they will – it is important to consider the website host’s support policy. We love that Kinsta offers 24/7 chat support in English and business-hours support in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. This is amazing for European and Latin American customers. However, some top-tier providers also provide phone support, which Kinsta does not.

We also love that Kinsta offers 35 servers worldwide to host your website, including one on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. Plus, with Cloudflare’s CDN incorporated into every plan, you’ll get a CDN server in over 260 locations worldwide, including Africa. In fact, much like Rocket.net, Kinsta offers Cloudflare Enterprise, which is Cloudflare’s top-of-the-line CDN plan. This is amazing! However, as shown in our performance testing section below, Rocket.net performed slightly better with our test website than Kinsta.

One item to note is that Kinsta offers an incredible amount of plans. While this is good in that you can find a plan that best matches your needs, it also makes it very confusing to figure out which plan you do need. We narrowed Kinsta’s options in this post to Kinsta’s Individual WordPress Hosting and Kinsta’s Business WordPress Hosting Plans. However, Kinsta also offers Agency Hosting, WooCommerce Hosting, and Mission Critical Single-Site Plans. Whew!

Finally, please note that Kinsta offers two types of staging websites: free and Premium. Staging websites are important to allow you to test changes to your website without modifying or damaging the current live site. However, Kinsta’s free staging website comes with limited resources. This means if you are testing performance-related items, the free staging website will not give you an accurate performance indication. You’ll have to upgrade to the Premium Staging Environment for $20/month.

Kinsta WordPress Optimization Features

We wouldn’t expect anything less than a full assortment of optimization features from a top-tier hosting provider, and Kinsta does not disappoint. All of the checkboxes are checked, plus many more that Kinsta details on their website. Additionally, we reviewed Kinsta’s uptime performance, which is excellent. When we reviewed the performance on September 16, 2023, they had 100% uptime over the past 90 days. That is excellent!

We also liked Kinsta’s control interface, called MyKinsta. It was very easy to follow and had robust features without being overwhelming. The MyKinsta interface allows you to manage the Cloudflare CDN, domain, and overall site settings. For those of you who prefer a simpler interface, Kinsta also supports SSH access on all WordPress plans.

We also noticed that Kinsta has the option to turn off or on Early Hints. Early Hints is a newer browser feature that allows static assets to be loaded while the browser waits for the server to return the main page HTML. This is faster than preloading or prefetching, as that only occurs after the main HTML has been returned to the browser. This Cloudflare page has an in-depth explanation of Early Hints, and we thought it was very cool that Kinsta supports it.

However, we didn’t experience our test website using Early Hints in our testing. We contacted Kinsta support about this, and they said that if Edge Caching is turned on, then Cloudflare often believes it is faster to send the cached HTML page than to send Early Hints. If so, then Early Hints may be best for pages that don’t use Edge Caching and are continually being updated. Static pages like blog posts may not benefit from Early Hints since Edge Caching already boosts the cached speed.

Finally, Kinsta offers an upgrade to allow object caching using Redis as well for advanced, intensive websites. It is $100/month per website. This is only required if you have a really intensive website, such as a blog with many hundreds or thousands of posts or a busy e-commerce website. Read more about the different types of WordPress cache options in our Guide to WordPress Caching.

Kinsta Pricing of Managed WordPress Hosting Plans

There is no other way to put it: Kinsta is on the upper end of pricing of Managed WordPress hosting. If you are starting out, you may want to start with a cheaper host first, such as Hostinger or Bluehost, and then upgrade to Kinsta as your site grows. You don’t need all of the bells and whistles right now. But if you are looking for a top-tier web hosting plan, Kinsta is one of the providers to look at, along with Rocket.net. And if you purchase a year plan instead of a month-to-month plan, Kinsta discounts your plan by giving you two free months.

One issue we have with Kinsta’s plans is the relatively small amount of storage space. Although we aren’t expecting unlimited storage space – which some providers offer – we also believe you’ll run out of 10GB of storage if you run a top-tier website. Kinsta offers additional storage space for $2/GB per month, or you can buy an extra 20GB for $20/month (or $1/GB per month). We recommend you factor this cost into your monthly budget.

You’ll also want to note that Kinsta WordPress plans offer other upgrade options. For example, an additional 1,000 monthly visitors is $1, which is a minimal cost. If you need more CDN bandwidth, it is 10 cents per additional CDN GB. They also have upcharges for a premium staging environment (higher-performance staging compared to the free staging server), extra intraday site backups, and external backups to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud. Depending on your needs, you may want to consider these upgrades – remember to include them in your monthly web hosting budget.

Kinsta Business WordPress Hosting Plans

Much like Kinsta’s Individual hosting plans, we find Kinsta’s Business hosting plans priced on the higher end of WordPress hosts. By all means, you get what you pay for, and Kinsta is a top-tier web host provider. But you’ll want to include additional upcharges for extra storage space and CDN bandwidth, as we detailed in the previous section. You’ll also want to compare to Rocket.net’s Agency Plans.

Of Kinsta’s four Business Plans, Kinsta states that its Business Tier 1 plan is its most popular plan. We can see why, as the cost increases as the tiers increase. You don’t need to increase tiers unless you manage more than five websites. You are much better off getting Tier 1 and adding extra storage space or CDN bandwidth. This is the way to go if you manage five or fewer websites.

Kinsta WordPress Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested Kinsta using our test WordPress website to see how Kinsta performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the Starter Individual Hosting plan, which is the cheapest Managed WordPress hosting plan Kinsta offers. There are three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below, and you can read our fully-disclosed testing parameters here.

Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores

You would sign up with Kinsta because you want top-tier performance. Kinsta lives up to its promise and performs well on the Google Core Web Vitals mobile version, although not as good as top-tier performers Rocket.net, GoDaddy, and WPX. The scores above are not the actual Lighthouse values but the ones 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. You can see the raw Lighthouse values in the table below.

GTMetrix Performance

Kinsta performed very well using GTMetrix. All locations received an A grade in GTMetrix, except for Sydney, Dubai, and Johannesburg, resulting in an average ranking of A. Average performance and structure scores are also around the A-/B+ grade category, which is solid. Fully loaded times are on par with the fastest web hosts, with most Kinsta locations fully loading in under three seconds. The top web hosts with our test website have fully loaded times under two seconds, although we considered the fastest web hosts having fully loaded times under three seconds as acceptable.

For the price, Kinsta’s direct competitor is Rocket.net, which scored even better than Kinsta in our GTMetrix testing. Most locations had fully loaded times of less than two seconds with Rocket.net. If you desire top-tier performance, make sure to read our review of Rocket.net as well to compare it to Kinsta.

Having said that, we noticed that Kinsta’s LCP times in GTMetrix were near Rocket.net’s LCP times, but Kinsta’s fully loaded times were higher. Upon reviewing the GTMetrix detailed reports, we observed Kinsta loading many more resources than Rocket.net – 27 vs. 9, respectively. Kinsta loading three times as many resources as Rocket.net is what caused Kinsta’s fully loaded times to be much higher than Rocket.net, even though LCP scores were similar.

We installed the LiteSpeed WordPress plugin on Rocket.net that combines CSS and JavaScript files and then delays – not defer – loading until the first user input, while Kinsta does not have such an option. We had wanted to test Kinsta using the LiteSpeed WordPress plug-in, which we love and what we used when testing Rocket.net. Unfortunately, Kinsta bans the LiteSpeed plug-in, as described on this Kinsta page. Thus, we were unable to re-test Kinsta using our favorite WordPress plugin.

We point this out because Google Page Speed does not consider fully loaded times, but it does account for LCP. Rocket.net still slightly had a faster LCP time than Kinsta – 1.1s vs 1.4s on average, respectively. Thus, Kinsta may perform just as well as Rocket.net on Google Page Speed metrics, depending on your website, even if it takes longer to load. However, for our test website, Kinsta’s Lighthouse performance score was 87 compared to Rocket.net’s score of 94. You can see all of the GTMetrix scores by WordPress host on our Fastest WordPress Hosts page.

Worldwide Load Testing

With Kinsta’s 35 worldwide servers plus 260 global servers via Cloudflare’s CDN, it is no surprise that Kinsta delivers very fast results across all international test sites except Dubai. This is vital for companies with a global audience! We’re unsure why Dubai scores poorly on the Global Load Test or GTMetrix’s testing. However, this is something to consider if you have an audience in the Middle East.

Our Kinsta WordPress Review Recommendation

Our overall recommendation on Kinsta is to only look at it if you need top-tier performance. If you are a beginner or mid-tier website, you should consider lower-priced providers, such as Hostinger or Bluehost. However, if you need or want top-tier performance, Kinsta is a solid choice.

We really liked Kinsta’s plethora of optimization and performance features, which are really catered to delivering strong WordPress performance. Kinsta performed beautifully in our benchmark tests! We appreciated that Kinsta has 35 servers worldwide (although none in Africa!), plus it includes Cloudflare’s 260 CDN servers in all plans, including Africa. Plus, 24/7 support in English and business-hours support in French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian ensures that global businesses keep their website active.

On the other hand, Kinsta’s WordPress plans are expensive, and with Kinsta’s low storage space options, you’ll most likely need to add on storage space for additional monthly costs. You’ll want to compare Kinsta to other top-tier plans like Rocket.net.

Overall, Kinsta is a solid top-tier WordPress host, and it can be ideal for many top-tier, high-growth websites. But do your homework, compare to our review of Rocket.net, and read the other top-tier hosting reviews before committing to Kinsta (although, like other providers, Kinsta offers a 30-day money-back guarantee).