SiteGround 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.

SiteGround is a Bulgarian web-hosting company with offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, and Cyprus. SiteGround started in 2004 and has grown exponentially. SiteGround claims they have a 98% customer satisfaction rating and host over 2.8 million domains. Plus, we were quite impressed to see that they have a positive testimonial from Joost de Valk, the founder of Yoast.com. Wow!

In this review post, we will detail SiteGround’s WordPress services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services. SiteGround also offers non-WordPress hosting as well, which we will not cover in this review.

SiteGround General Features

SiteGround’s WordPress Managed Hosting plans offer a well-rounded selection of features. It is a big plus that SiteGround has multiple server locations in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We especially liked that SiteGround keeps backups of your website for 30 days, unlike other web hosts offering only 14 days. We also loved that SiteGround offers 10GB email accounts for all plans.

When things go wrong – which they will – it is important to consider the website host’s support policy. SiteGround offers 24/7 support via live chat and by phone. Few web hosting companies offer 24/7 support via phone – most only offer online chat – and we appreciate that sometimes it is nice to call another human and resolve a problem. Rocket.net is another web host provider that offers 24/7 phone support, but their starter plans are much more expensive.

However, SiteGround also has a couple of odd drawbacks. First, SiteGround does not offer an explicit uptime guarantee. Most web hosts say they guarantee at least 99.9% uptime. SiteGround says a lot about how their servers have the latest technology and are monitored 24/7, which is fantastic. But it makes us curious as to why they do not offer an uptime guarantee, which is very common in the industry.

Additionally, SiteGround helps you transfer your WordPress site from your current hosting provider to SiteGround, but only via a WordPress plug-in. While the plug-in is helpful, most other companies will have a human transfer your website for you. Having a human do it means it can be fixed in case something goes wrong, and you don’t have to spend time on the phone with support because something failed. SiteGround charges $30 per website if you want a human to perform the process for you.

Finally, SiteGround includes free SSL certificates for all of its plans. However, you can upgrade to a Premium SSL certificate through SiteGround that covers all of your subdomains and includes $10,000 in insurance. The upgrade is around $7.50/month and is worth it if you run an e-commerce site or handle sensitive data.

SiteGround WordPress Optimization Features

SiteGround’s optimization features are pretty standard fare and perform well. The only missing feature is that the lowest-tier Managed Hosting plan does not offer a free staging website. We believe staging websites are important so you can make changes and test your website without screwing up your live site. Fortunately, this only applies to the lowest-tier plan, which is not our recommended plan anyway, so we can’t complain much about this.

We really liked SiteGround’s “SG Optimizer” plugin that controls caching and optimizations. It was very easy to use, had a lot of fine-tuning adjustments, and we love that it includes dynamic full-page caching for speed. The plug-in also includes minification settings for CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, which is awesome. SiteGround also includes their “SG Security” plugin, which has some useful features, such as hiding the WordPress version (to prevent seeing vulnerable WordPress versions), disabling RSS feeds, and requiring two-factor authentication (2FA).

SiteGround has been building its CDN over the past few years, and finally, it seems like a real CDN that can go up against larger providers like Cloudflare. We like that SiteGround has multiple CDN locations on all continents, including South America and Africa (but not Antarctica), where SiteGround does not maintain servers.

Even with bundling the CDN in all plans now, SiteGround still offers two versions of its CDN: Basic and Premium. SiteGround charges $15/month for its Premium CDN, although you can get the first year at a discount. We used the free Basic CDN version for our initial performance tests below, and the performance wasn’t that great. But then we upgraded the CDN and re-ran our tests. Performance is much, much better with the Premium CDN!

The main differences between the Basic and Premium CDNs include that the Basic CDN gets 10GB of bandwidth per month while the Premium CDN has unlimited bandwidth, plus the Basic CDN has static caching while the Premium CDN has dynamic caching. Also, the Basic CDN is limited to the primary domain, while the Premium CDN serves all of your SiteGround domains.

SiteGround also encourages you to use their Ultrafast PHP setup, which they claim is “30% faster than standard PHP.” We enabled Ultrafast PHP, which is free, for our SiteGround testing.

SiteGround WordPress Managed Hosting Plans

SiteGround has beginner-friendly WordPress Managed Hosting plans. Our recommendation of the three managed hosting plans is the middle plan, also known as GrowBig. Even if you have one website, we recommend GrowBig because you get increased server and PHP resources, which are critical for performance and SEO rankings. Furthermore, if you want to grow, you’ll want the increased performance to be there as you get more visitors. And the price is not that much different between the two plans.

We love that all three WordPress Managed Hosting plans come with SiteGround’s CDN and unlimited visitors. We prefer the middle and top tier plans – GrowBig and GoGeek – because of the enhanced performance features and unlimited number of websites. Furthermore, we do not like that the bottom plan – StartUp – does not include a free staging website, meaning there is no way for you to test changes to your WordPress site without touching the live site.

Please remember the price difference between the first year – “introductory pricing” – and the renewal pricing. Prices jump up a lot upon renewal. You may want to negotiate a lower price before it comes time to renew your SiteGround plan. Otherwise, at full price, you may want to consider another similar provider, such as GoDaddy or Pressable.

SiteGround Cloud Hosting Plans

SiteGround’s Cloud Hosting Plans are built for top-tier websites and Agencies. We found it very interesting – and quite useful! – that SiteGround allows you to customize the hardware specifications of your Cloud Hosting Plan. For example, while the four plans above are their “off-the-shelf” plans, upon checkout, you can specify the number of CPU cores, memory, and SSD space you want. The website will give you pricing in real-time for the specifications you ask, so you immediately know how much it costs.

As such, Cloud Hosting Plans range from 4 cores to 33 cores; from 8GB of RAM to 130GB; and from 40GB of SSD space to 1TB. This is especially useful for website owners who need much hard drive space but don’t necessarily need additional performance, such as photographers and other portfolio-heavy businesses, as well as Agencies managing many websites.

SiteGround WordPress Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested SiteGround using our test WordPress website to see how SiteGround performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the GrowBig WordPress Managed Hosting plan, which is our recommended plan. We also ran the tests with the free standard CDN and after upgrading to the Premium CDN.

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 – Free CDN

SiteGround scored okay on the Google Core Web Vitals, with an overall performance score of 86. Our top-tier hosts scored between 92-94 on the overall performance score. As with many of our performance tests, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score is what dragged down overall performance.

Please note that 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.

Lighthouse Scores with Premium CDN

SiteGround’s performance on Lighthouse didn’t change between the premium and free CDNs. This makes sense because our SiteGround host server was already located in the United States, so long communication times weren’t a factor. However, if your host server is located outside of the United States and you have US customers, then the premium CDN will most likely improve Lighthouse scores.

GTMetrix Performance – Free CDN

We first ran GTMetrix using SiteGround’s standard CDN. The standard CDN worldwide performance is not great, especially for a mid-tier WordPress hosting provider. As we hosted our site with SiteGround’s server in the United States, North American and European locations did okay, but not great. While fully loaded times were quite good, the Google Core Web Vitals, especially FCP, were not good. We expected better for a host like SiteGround, but continue reading for SiteGround’s dramatic improvement after we upgraded the CDN.

SiteGround GTMetrix with Upgraded CDN

As noted above, SiteGround includes their basic CDN with all plans, but you must upgrade to get their Premium CDN. We performed this second GTMetrix test using SiteGround’s Premium CDN. We expected SiteGround’s Premium CDN to perform better because of the Premium CDN’s dynamic caching. Dynamic caching allows the HTML page to live on the CDN server instead of being called from the host server whenever the page is loaded. GTMetrix states that slow initial server time was problematic for many of our testing locations with the standard CDN.

Well, we were right. Scores improved dramatically across the board, including FCP, SI, and LCP. TTFB was cut in half, which is amazing. Although these scores aren’t quite as good as our top performers, Rocket.net and WPX, these scores are definitely in the upper tier of hosts.

We strongly recommend upgrading to SiteGround’s Premium CDN if you have worldwide customers. However, if your customers are local to your country or nearby countries, you’ll be fine with SiteGround’s free CDN, assuming you don’t exceed the bandwidth cap. Just make sure to sign up for SiteGround’s servers in your local area.

Worldwide Load Testing

As mentioned above, we hosted our test site in the United States and initially *without* the Premium CDN. Thus, it is unsurprising that SiteGround did very well in Canada and the eastern United States. We expected performance to be better in the Western United States and Europe, but it is still ok. However, SiteGround’s performance was not good at all elsewhere, especially throughout Asia.

Note that if you locate your website in another part of the world – SiteGround has servers in Europe and Asia, too – then these scores will change. If you remain on the free CDN, you’ll see faster results closer to your website location and slower results elsewhere. However, you need to upgrade to the Premium CDN if you have global customers. As you see below, the Premium CDN performs far better than the free CDN across all global locations.

Our SiteGround WordPress Review Recommendation

If your customers are local – within the same country or the same region – we really like SiteGround’s performance with the standard CDN included. SiteGround has servers in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, so you can choose a server location near your customers. And if you host multiple websites, we believe both the GrowBig and GoGeek plans deliver tremendous value with unlimited websites, unlimited bandwidth, and 10GB of email. The value is present even after the first year when the deep discount for new customers disappears.

However, we did not appreciate that while SiteGround advertises a free CDN included with their WordPress hosting plans, SiteGround holds some features back on this free CDN to get you to upgrade to their Premium CDN. The two main missing features are unlimited bandwidth for the CDN (it is unlimited for the server bandwidth only) and dynamic caching.

As our performance tests above noted, the premium CDN performs far better globally! You’ll want to upgrade your CDN plan if you have customers outside of your local region. If you manage multiple global websites, SiteGround can still provide excellent value even with the extra monthly CDN charge. However, if you only manage one or two websites, you’ll want to look at other top-tier WordPress hosting providers – such as Rocket.net or WPX – that bundle an amazing CDN into their plans.