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We proudly host our website on Rocket.net.
US$20.83 /month on annual contract
- $24.99/month No Contract
- ✅ 5 Websites
- ❌ 1 GB RAM per website
- ✅ 3 PHP Workers per website
- ❌ 15GB SSD Storage
- ❌ 1 CPU Core
- ✅ 200 GB Bandwith
- ✅ 99.95% Uptime Guarantee
US$41.58 /month on annual contract
- $49.99/month No Contract
- ✅ 15 Websites
- ❌ 1 GB RAM per website
- ✅ 3 PHP Workers per website
- ✅ 30GB SSD Storage
- ✅ 2 CPU Cores
- ✅ 400 GB Bandwith
- ✅ 99.95% Uptime Guarantee
Table of Contents
WPX was started in 2013 by Terry Kyle and Georgi Petrov. WPX is very proud that Terri and Georgi still own the company and that WPX doesn’t need to go “begging for approval from 3rd party VC investors.” We note that overall, WPX likes to differentiate itself from other WordPress hosting providers and provide a different type of customer experience. However, the bottom line is what WPX can offer you, and how does your website perform on WPX?
WPX targets bloggers and businesses seeking a mid to upper-tier hosting solution. In this review post, we will detail WPX’s WordPress services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services.
WPX WordPress General Features
| WPX Features | Is this good? | |
|---|---|---|
| Support Hours | Yes, 24/7 via live chat. | ✅ 24/7 support is pretty standard and a must-have in our opinion. |
| Server Locations | United States, United Kingdom, and Australia | ✅ Plus WPX CDN with 35 locations in the world. |
| Uptime Guarantee | Yes, 99.95%. | ✅ Most hosts offer at least a 99.9% uptime guarantee. |
| SSL Included | Yes, Let's Encrypt. | ✅ Free SSL is standard and a must-have for website. |
| Money-Back Guarantee | Yes, 30 days. | ✅ 30 days is standard across web hosts. |
| Email Hosting | Yes, unlimited email addresses. | ✅ Included email hosting means you don't have to pay for a separate email plan. |
| Plan Lengths | Monthly or annually. | ✅ Annual plans come with two free months. |
| Backups Available | Yes, for 28 days. | ✅ 28 day backup storage is quite good. |
| Site Migrations | Yes, within 24 hours. | ✅ Having the host transfer the website is best to prevent any problems and stress. |
| Firewall | Yes, Web Application Firewall (WAF). | ✅ Firewall is crucial and standard among web hosts. |
| Malware Detection | Yes, plus free malware removal. | ✅ Malware detection is very important and also standard. But very few hosts offer malware removal, so this is a big plus for WPX. |
As you can see above, WPX gets all green checkmarks from us as they provide all of the standard features we want to see in a WordPress hosting provider. This is excellent! We also want to highlight that WPX has some extra features that other mid and top-tier hosts do not offer. For example, while malware detection is quite standard across web hosts in this tier, free malware removal is rare. WPX offers free malware removal, which is awesome. We hope that you never get struck by malware or a virus, but it is nice that WPX has your back on this.
Backups are important, and we found WPX’s backup calendar easy to understand and easy to use to restore a previous backup. Note that WPX keeps backups for 28 days, which is about the standard 30 days across WordPress hosts.
We also like that WPX includes email hosting with unlimited email addresses. Some upper-tier providers don’t even provide email hosting, so WPX is a step above other hosts in this area.
Read More: Why is email hosting important?
Regardless of the size of your business, it is important to look professional. Having a custom email domain adds to your professionalism. Which looks more professional to you: mybusiness@gmail.com or info@mybusiness.com? If you said info@mybusiness.com, then we agree with you and that is why email hosting is important. Email hosting allows you to have your own email domain instead of relying on Gmail or another free email provider.
If you have Google Workspace, you probably have your own email domain. In this case, Google is your email host. But if you are just using an @gmail.com email address, it is time to upgrade!
Additionally, WPX offers a one-time free site speed optimization for your WordPress site. WPX’s team will configure your caching, minification, image optimization, and database optimization settings for you. WPX will also perform a plug-in audit to identify plug-ins that are slowing down your website. In the end, WPX runs GTMetrix tests – the same performance tests we run for our reviews! – to demonstrate the before and after differences. We believe this is especially cool if you are not savvy with WordPress or want a professional to optimize your website for you.
WPX WordPress Optimization Features
| WPX Features | Is this good? | |
|---|---|---|
| Image Optimization | No | ❌ You want image optimization to ensure faster page loading, but can be achieved with some plug-ins. |
| CDN Access | Yes, WPX CDN ("XDN") with 35 global locations, although locations are concentrated in the US and in Europe. | ✅ We expect CDNs to be included WordPress plans except for lowest tier. |
| CSS/Javascript Minification | No | ❌ Minification helps reduce web page size to speed up loading times. |
| Staging Website allowed? | Yes. | ✅ Staging websites allow you to test changes to a website before going live. |
| HTTP versions | HTTP/2 | ❌ HTTP/3 is the latest version. |
| Data Compression | Yes, Brotli and GZIP. | ✅ Brotli is a higher data compression standard than the usual GZIP compression. |
| Full Page Caching | Yes, server-side. | ⚠️ Full-page caching is important to speeding up web page loading, but server-side caching still requires the CDN to call the host server. |
WPX uses LiteSpeed technology, which we are happy about. We use LiteSpeed on our websites with other hosts and have had great success with LiteSpeed. Furthermore, because WPX uses LiteSpeed server software, you’ll get server-side caching and free QUIC.cloud credits if you use LiteSpeed plugin. You don’t get these credits if you have the LiteSpeed plug-in without the associated server software. LiteSpeed technology is a big plus for us.
Unlike other hosts that outsource their CDN to a third party like Cloudflare, WPX built its own CDN. “XDN” – as WPX calls its CDN – has endpoints in 35 locations worldwide, including all continents except Antarctica. We tested its performance in 13 and 16 locations worldwide, and you can see the results below. Although the WPX XDN is far smaller than Cloudflare, which has over 260 CDN endpoints, the XDN performed very well!
Read More: What is a CDN?
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, speeds up web loading by keeping copies of your website in various places worldwide, so your international visitors don’t have to wait for data to travel across continents to get to them.
WPX Managed WordPress Hosting Plans
US$20.83 /month on annual contract
- $24.99/month No Contract
- ✅ 5 Websites
- ❌ 1 GB RAM per website
- ✅ 3 PHP Workers per website
- ❌ 15GB SSD Storage
- ❌ 1 CPU Core
- ✅ 200 GB Bandwith
- ✅ 99.95% Uptime Guarantee
US$41.58 /month on annual contract
- $49.99/month No Contract
- ✅ 15 Websites
- ❌ 1 GB RAM per website
- ✅ 3 PHP Workers per website
- ✅ 30GB SSD Storage
- ✅ 2 CPU Cores
- ✅ 400 GB Bandwith
- ✅ 99.95% Uptime Guarantee
US$83.25 /month on annual contract
- $99/month No Contract
- ✅ 35 Websites
- ❌ 1 GB RAM per website
- ❌ 3 PHP Workers per website
- ✅ 60GB SSD Storage
- ✅ 3 CPU Cores
- ✅ Unlimited Bandwith
- ✅ 99.95% Uptime Guarantee
WPX is a mid to high-tier WordPress hosting website. With its lowest plan starting at around $21/month on an annual plan, beginners may want to look elsewhere for a cheaper hosting solution to start out. However, for everyone else, we found WPX’s plans to be comparable – perhaps even better – than other similar WordPress providers. This is especially true considering the standard features WPX includes, as we detailed above.
We recommend the lowest-tier plan – the “Business” plan – as it performed beautifully on our testing and is an excellent value for five websites with email hosting included. The mid-tier Professional plan is better if you need more storage space, bandwidth, or up to 15 websites. However, we find the Elite plan to be a bit expensive for what you are getting.
You may want to use the Elite plan if you are hosting 16-35 websites. Yet, you will want to compare WPX’s Elite plan to SiteGround’s WordPress plans, which include unlimited websites. While WPX’s performance is better than SiteGround’s performance, SiteGround offers better pricing, so it really depends on what matters more to you.
Read More: How much storage do I need?
10GB is plenty for websites that don’t have a ton of high-quality photos and don’t store videos locally. If you are using WebP as your image format – which you should be doing! – then you could have a thousand or two of WebP photos and not need more storage. Also, if you embed video from YouTube or Vimeo, you don’t need to worry about storage either. But if you store your videos locally, and especially if the videos are 1080p or 4K, then you may want to upgrade your storage.
WPX WordPress Performance Tests
As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested WPX using our test WordPress website to see how WPX performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the Business Managed Hosting plan, which is the cheapest WordPress hosting plan WPX offers. There are three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below, and you can see our detailed testing specifications on this page.
Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores
First Contentful Paint (FCP)
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
Total Blocking Time (TBT)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Speed Index (SI)
Total Performance Score
Read More: What do these scores mean?
Google likes fast-loading websites because they provide amazing visitor experiences. These scores show how fast and how smoothly a website loads. The better your score is, the greater chance that Google will increase the search ranking of your page, especially if your competitors score poorly. Google prefers everyone to score 90-100, while 50-89 is ok. A score below 50 is poor.
While part of these scores will depend on how efficient your website is, part of these scores also depend on how fast your web host provider is. Additionally, if your web host provider offers optimization features such as minification, then that will improve your score. You can learn more about these metrics on this Google web page.
WPX has some of the best scores on the Google Core Web Vitals, especially the LCP score. 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. Below is the chart showing the actual Lighthouse values for those of you who are more technically minded.
| Lighthouse Metric | Raw Value | Lighthouse Score |
|---|---|---|
| First Contentful Paint (FCP) | 1.4 seconds | 97 |
| Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | 3.1 seconds | 76 |
| Total Blocking Time (TBT) | 0 ms (miliseconds) | 100 |
| Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) | 0 | 100 |
| Speed Index (SI) | 1.5 seconds | 100 |
GTMetrix Performance
Read More: What do these scores mean?
As mentioned above, Google likes fast-loading websites because they provide amazing visitor experiences. GTMetrix analyzes and scores web pages using mostly the same criteria as Google Lighthouse. However, GTMetrix allows you to customize the scoring based on location and type of mobile device. GTMetrix also weighs criteria differently than Google itself, providing another opinion on how the user experiences your website loading.
We used three scores from GTMetrix that match Lighthouse for comparison: FCP, SI, and LCP. We then added the Time to First Byte (TTFB) because many people are interested in this score. Finally, we also added the total fully loaded time to measure a complete loading.Based on GTMetrix’s documentation, there are how the scores measure:
- TTFB: Good is less than 800ms and bad is above 1800ms.
- FCP: Good is less than 0.9 seconds and bad is above 1.6 seconds.
- SI: Good is less than 1.3 seconds and bad is above 2.3 seconds.
- LCP: Good is less than 1.2 seconds and bad is above 2.4 seconds.
- Total Load Time: GTMetrix doesn’t have a score chart for this, but based on our own testing, less than three seconds is good and over five seconds is bad.
You can learn more about these metrics on this GTMetrix web page.
Wow! WPX had blazing speeds for all test locations except Dubai. Every location fully loaded in under 1.7 seconds (except Dubai), which is incredibly impressive. WPX is providing top-tier performance on par with Rocket.net. We were extremely impressed!
| Server Location | Time to First Byte (TTFB) | First Contentful Paint (FCP) | Speed Index (SI) | Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) | Fully Loaded Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago | 588ms | 1.0s | 1.2s | 1.3s | 1.6s |
| Dubai | 2000ms | 2.5s | 2.7s | 2.7s | 3.1s |
| Frankfurt | 518ms | 1.0s | 1.2s | 1.2s | 1.5s |
| Johannesburg | 530ms | 1.1s | 1.3s | 1.3s | 1.5s |
| Hong Kong | 521ms | 1.0s | 1.2s | 1.2s | 1.5s |
| London | 524ms | 1.0s | 1.2s | 1.2s | 1.5s |
| Mumbai | 539ms | 1.4s | 1.6s | 1.6s | 1.7s |
| San Francisco | 695ms | 1.2s | 1.4s | 1.5s | 1.7s |
| São Paulo | 650ms | 1.1s | 1.4s | 1.4s | 1.6s |
| Singapore | 427ms | 1.0s | 1.2s | 1.2s | 1.5s |
| Sydney | 519ms | 1.0s | 1.3s | 1.4s | 1.5s |
| Tokyo | 524ms | 1.0s | 1.2s | 1.2s | 1.5s |
| Vancouver | 613ms | 1.1s | 1.2s | 1.3s | 1.7s |
Worldwide Load Testing
We were pleasantly surprised by the performance of WPX’s CDN – “XDN.” Even though it has far fewer CDN endpoints than Cloudflare – 35 vs. over 260 – the XDN provided amazing performance across all of our international test locations. Amazing job, WPX!
| Average Speed Test Result (ms) | Fail Rate | |
|---|---|---|
| California, USA | 60 | 0.0% |
| Cape Town, South Africa | 31 | 0.0% |
| Central Canada | 11 | 0.0% |
| Dubai, UAE | 161 | 0.0% |
| Frankfurt, Germany | 5 | 0.0% |
| Hong Kong | 7 | 0.0% |
| Ireland | 20 | 0.0% |
| Israel | 81 | 0.0% |
| London, UK | 6 | 0.0% |
| Milan, Italy | 16 | 0.0% |
| Mumbai, India | 7 | 0.0% |
| São Paulo, Brazil | 7 | 0.0% |
| Singapore | 9 | 0.0% |
| Stockholm, Sweden | 8 | 0.0% |
| Sydney, Australia | 7 | 0.0% |
| Tokyo, Japan | 7 | 0.0% |
| Virginia, USA | 31 | 0.0% |
Our WPX WordPress Review Recommendation
We definitely recommend WPX. WPX had extremely fast performance scores on both GTMetrix and Google Lighthouse, on par with other top-tier WordPress hosts such as Rocket.net. In fact, WPX had the highest Lighthouse Performance score we saw from our testing. We also love many of the standard features WPX comes with, including bundled email hosting and providing their “XDN” CDN on all plans.
WPX’s prices are in the same range as other top-tier WordPress hosts, and we feel WPX provides a great value bundle. WPX’s offer of a free one-time optimization of your website is a unique and welcomed feature. All WPX customers should take advantage of this offer to ensure your WordPress site is fine-tuned.
If you host several websites, WPX’s prices are an amazing value. And combined with WPX’s blazing-fast speeds, we highly recommend WPX for your WordPress hosting needs!