Searching for a genuine SiteGround review based on real-world testing and tailored toward WordPress users? You’ve come to the right place.
In this review, we will delve deep into SiteGround’s WordPress plans, scrutinize their customer support, assess the performance and reliability of their services, and also evaluate the ease of launching a new website with them. We’ll start with an overview of what they have to offer, followed by a heavier analysis of the aforementioned factors.
SiteGround
SiteGround specializes in providing web hosting services for businesses and individuals, offering a wide range of hosting options, including shared hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers. Their plans include advanced website optimization tools, excellent customer support, and strong security features to protect websites from cyber threats.
Pros
WordPress-specific features
Modern tech: SSDs, CDN, latest PHP
Great customer support
Cons
Control panel is rather basic
An overview of SiteGround
Load times | 1.26s (US avg.), 0.34s (EU), 1.3s (Asia) |
Uptime | 100% (avg. over 3 months) |
Support | 24/7 support system, including live chat, ticketing, and phone |
Key features | SSD storage, WordPress site transfers, one-click staging, daily backups, free SSL, enhanced security features |
Apps | NGINX server, SuperCacher, CDN integrated |
Price | From $2.99 / month, host 1-unlimited websites, free email hosting, free domain name for the first term |
Best for | Site owners new to WordPress who don’t want to have to worry about the technical aspects of web hosting. Small to mid-sized WooCommerce stores. |
SiteGround vs main competitors
SiteGround | Bluehost | WP Engine | |
---|---|---|---|
Rating | 4.7 / 5 | 4.4 / 5 | 4.7 / 5 |
Load time avg. | 0.96s | 0.41s | 1.29s |
Uptime avg. | 100% | 100% | 99.99% |
Price from | $2.99 | $2.99 | $20.00 |
Free domain | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
Free email hosting | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
Free SSL | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Hosting panel | SiteGround’s own Site Tools | cPanel and custom panel | WP Engine’s custom panel |
Visit | SiteGround | Bluehost | WP Engine |
SiteGround | market avg. | |
---|---|---|
Load times US | 1.26s | 0.98s |
Load times EU | 0.34s | 0.94s |
Load times Asia | 1.3s | 1.77s |
Uptime | 100% | 99.74% |
SiteGround review for WordPress 🔎
Table of contents 📚
Plans and pricing 💰
SiteGround has three managed WordPress hosting plans. All three have extremely competitive promotional rates and an impressive stack of features that are drool-worthy. Let’s quickly review how much each one will cost you, and then we’ll take a deep dive into what you’ll get for your money.
- StartUp is $2.99 per month.
- GrowBig is $4.99 per month.
- GoGeek is $7.99 per month.
All of the prices above reflect annual billing and renew at their regular, non-promotional rates. In case you’re wondering what that looks like, we got you! The renewal rates are as follows:
- StartUp renews at $17.99 per month.
- GrowBig renews at $29.99 per month.
- GoGeek renews at $44.99 per month.
Don’t let the wide discrepancy between the promo rates and the renewal rates discourage you. Once you see everything that these plans come with, you’ll quickly understand that the regular rates are more than fair. In fact, you can think of the promo rates as SiteGround’s way of giving you a friendly head start on your website, while they absorb your startup costs.
The idea is that after a year, you’ll ideally be earning enough from your site that you’ll be able to pay the true cost of everything you’re getting from them – or at least be on the verge of that milestone.
In a worst case scenario, if that’s not the case, then you can always transfer your site to a cheaper managed WordPress hosting provider. With all of the extras and goodies that SiteGround sets you up with though, you’ll be well poised for success. Let’s explore those features next.
Key features bundled into all WordPress plans
SiteGround has a number of features that are included in all three of their WordPress plans. To begin with, here are all of the things you get for free:
- Domain name: Free for the first year and then renews at the regular rate, which varies depending on the domain extension (e.g., .com, .net, .org, etc) you choose.
- WordPress installation: Get WordPress automatically installed with select plugins of your choice, courtesy of SiteGround’s WordPress Starter tool.
- WordPress migration: If you have a WordPress.org website hosted elsewhere, SiteGround will facilitate the transfer process on your behalf.
- Email: Get unlimited email accounts with an easy to use webmail interface, and more advanced features such as autoresponders, mail forwarding, and spam protection.
- Email migration: If you have existing email accounts with another host, you can bring over all of your emails with SiteGround’s migrator tool.
- SSL certificate: Let’s Encrypt Standard SSL and Wildcard SSL are both available, with the former being pre-installed on your site for convenience.
- Content delivery network (CDN): SiteGround has an in-house CDN that loads your content from 17 different data centers across the globe, thus speeding up your page load time for visitors.
There are other WordPress hosts that also bundle some of these features into their plans, but in many instances they convert them into paid add-ons after the initial promo period ends. That’s not the case with SiteGround (excluding the domain name, but first-year only is the industry standard for free domain promotions).
Beyond the freebies, all three plans also come with:
- WordPress auto-updates: If you struggle to keep on top of WordPress updates, you can stop stressing because SiteGround takes care of it for you.
- Daily backups: Another done-for-you feature, with easy website restoration if anything ever breaks.
- Enhanced security: SiteGround uses a custom web application firewall (WAF), along with an AI-powered anti-bot system to help protect your site.
- Developer tools: Advanced users will appreciate access to WP-CLI and SSH.
- Out-of-the-box caching: SiteGround caches your WordPress site on three different levels, resulting in faster load times.
Now that we’ve covered all of the features available to every user, let’s look at each plan individually.
StartUp plan analysis
SiteGround’s entry-level managed WordPress hosting plan is aptly titled StartUp. As the name suggests, it’s ideal for startups and small businesses who wish to host a single website with up to 10,000 visitors per month.
The plan also comes with 10 GB of storage space, which isn’t enormous, but it’s ample enough for plenty of text and images. If you wish to feature videos on your website, we suggest uploading them to a third-party website, and then embedding them from there. Otherwise you’ll run out of storage space quickly if you try to upload the videos directly to your media library.
GrowBig plan analysis
The GrowBig plan, despite being only one level up from the StartUp plan, is actually quite a few levels up in terms of its offerings. For starters, there’s a giant leap from being able to host only one website on the StartUp plan to now being able to host unlimited websites on the GrowBig plan.
It doesn’t stop there.
The storage space is doubled to 20 GB, and the number of monthly visitors is increased tenfold to 100,000! They’re not kidding when they call it the GrowBig plan.
In addition, you also get the following:
- One-click WordPress staging: This feature allows you to create a staged copy of your website with a single click, enabling you to make edits before moving all changes to your original (and live) website.
- On-demand backups: While all of the plans have automatic daily backups (as we shared earlier), on the GrowBig plan, you can also create up to five additional backups at a time – whenever you want.
- Faster PHP: SiteGround cuts down your time to first byte (TTFB), which lets your pages load up to 30% faster.
GoGeek plan analysis
As the third and highest tier plan, you already know that this one is going to really bring it with the features. The websites were already bumped to unlimited in the previous tier so there’s no increase there, but there is quite a jump in both storage space and the monthly visitor cap.
To be exact, the GoGeek plan gives you 40 GB of storage space and sets your monthly visitor limit to 400,000.
You also get the other extras from the GrowBig plan (e.g., one-click staging, on-demand backups, faster PHP), but then get even more stacked on top of those:
- Git integration: If you enjoy getting your hands dirty with code, the GoGeek plan unlocks the Git for WordPress tool.
- White-label clients: Set up a private hosting service for your clients, which will run on your GoGeek plan, but will appear with your branding to your clients when they log into their accounts.
- Free private DNS: This feature lets you set a custom domain name for your nameservers and lets you brand your nameserver as if you were the owner.
- Highest tier of resources: The GoGeek plan gives you a higher allocation of server resources, which includes support for more simultaneous connections, higher process execution time, etc.
- Priority support: All GoGeek plan members who reach out to their support team are automatically routed to their most experienced staff.
Support options 🤝
When vetting a website hosting solution, checking out the available support options is a must. If your website isn’t functioning as it should be, you’ll want help on deck as soon as possible – no matter what time of the day or night it is.
In terms of help and support, SiteGround offers:
- A 24/7 support system, including live chat, ticketing, and phone support.
- A detailed and comprehensive knowledge base.
- Pre-recorded webinars to help customers understand the different features available.
- Tutorials to help customers use SiteGround more effectively.
When working on this SiteGround review for WordPress, we tested out their live chat system for ourselves. Overall, we found their team very quick to respond and highly knowledgeable about their hosting service and WordPress itself.
We posed a number of questions to them, including details on the hosting technology used by SiteGround, and how its WordPress specific features work. The answers we received were prompt and well detailed:
This level of support is also confirmed by other users as part of a WordPress hosting survey we conducted on our sister site. We also trawled through their webinars, tutorials, and knowledge base – finding them all to be brilliantly insightful.
Performance 🔋
Website hosting companies typically make use of a number of collaborating technologies to optimize their performance levels, along with various server locations scattered throughout the world. So let’s get into the technical part of this SiteGround review for WordPress and check out the technologies available with their hosting packages:
- SSD. Otherwise known as a “Solid State Drive,” this storage medium is faster than a Hard Disk Drive (HDD). SiteGround offers this hardware on all its servers, to every customer.
- NGINX. An alternative to the Apache web server, offering potential speed benefits due to a leaner architecture.
- SuperCacher. A SiteGround-specific feature, which speeds up WordPress via three different levels of caching.
- CDN. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of servers that deliver webpages to users based on their geographic locations, increasing website speed. SiteGround has a custom in-house CDN that delivers your content from 17 different locations around the world.
- HTTP/2. This is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol, which further improves website performance.
- Latest PHP. SiteGround offers managed PHP by default, which means they will always update your site to the latest, stable version, but you can also choose to manually update to whatever the newest version is.
Finally, SiteGround’s servers can be found all over the world. You can see the current map of servers in the image below. This is quite impressive – there are data centers in all the major markets around the world, including the US, Europe and Asia.
Now that we have discussed SiteGround’s performance in theory, it’s time to put it to the test in practice. For the next part of this SiteGround review for WordPress, we will rely on a speed testing tool called Pingdom to judge how well our host holds up.
Page speed tests and uptime
🤔 Did you know? We conduct our own tests and annual surveys to gather firsthand user feedback, ensuring our recommendations are rooted in actual user experiences.
The following test is conducted on a monthly basis and we update the results below using a shortcode mechanism. The way we do it, is that we run a sandbox website through load time testing five times for each server location. We then take the aggregate for each of those locations and share the results:
East Coast USA: 1.23s | West Coast USA: 1.31s |
Central USA: 1.25s | London, UK: 0.35s ⭐ |
Paris, France: 0.33s ⭐ | Mumbai, India: 1.30s |
Since this is continuously updated, we can’t write a definitive conclusion on the specific numbers that you might be looking at right now, but what we can say is this:
From our experience of doing these tests for several years now, SiteGround typically has respectable numbers that range from under one second (ideal) to up to two-ish seconds. Generally speaking, to be considered “good,” you want to stay under the two second mark.
Now let’s have a look at our uptime data, which is a composite of the three most recent months:
September 2024 | October 2024 | November 2024 |
---|---|---|
99.99% | 100.00% ⭐ | 100.00% ⭐ |
See the live status page and historical data for SiteGround.
Again, because this data is updated on an ongoing basis, it varies from month to month, but overall, SiteGround usually has a reliable uptime percentage. The bottom line is that regardless of your location, site speed shouldn’t be an issue with SiteGround.
Green web hosting features ♻️
These days many companies are making the pledge to “go green,” and this trend has not eluded the web hosting industry. In fact, an entire sub-genre of green web hosting has gained in popularity the last few years and SiteGround has been one of the industry leaders in this movement.
If you’re an environmentally conscious individual who takes into account how your buying decisions impact the world, then you’ll be pleased to know that by choosing SiteGround for your WordPress hosting needs, you’ll be picking a company that has committed itself to reducing their carbon footprint.
Here’s how they’re doing it:
- Partnering with eco-conscious data centers: SiteGround uses Google Cloud Platform as their infrastructure partner. This is due to Google’s commitment to sustainability. They match 100% of the energy consumed by their resources with renewable energy, thus maintaining carbon neutrality.
- Optimized resource usage for efficiency: SiteGround constantly optimizes server software to reduce the resource usage of client websites, resulting in less energy consumption. Innovations like Ultrafast PHP and optimized RAM usage for cloud MySQL setups contribute to making websites hosted by SiteGround more energy-efficient.
- Green building design for headquarters: SiteGround’s main headquarters was built in accordance with Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) requirements, emphasizing their commitment to reducing the environmental impact of their workplace.
- Promotion of conscious lifestyle among employees: SiteGround encourages a more eco-friendly lifestyle among employees by providing company e-cars, e-bikes, and free e-charging stations, eliminating plastic water bottles in offices, and using eco-friendly packaging for company gifts.
While most of the above will not have any direct effect on your own WordPress site, it’s nice to know that the company you’re doing business with doesn’t only care about the bottom line.
Overall pros and cons 👍 👎
After poring over the various elements of the company’s services in this SiteGround review, let’s sum up our findings.
Pros
Excellent set of WordPress-specific features.
The technology used – including SSDs, CDNs and the latest PHP – is modern and highly reputable.
Support options are plentiful, with knowledgeable staff on hand.
Page loading is typically fast, and uptime is reliable.
For a good WordPress hosting solution, the pricing is competitive.
Cons
We found the SiteGround control panel rather basic looking – a redesign is certainly in order.
Final thoughts on SiteGround hosting 💭
Overall, SiteGround is a stellar example of a good WordPress hosting solution
It is brimming with WordPress-specific features, helpful support options, and competitive pricing.
Who should use SiteGround
SiteGround is an ideal choice for site owners who are new to WordPress and prefer not to get bogged down with the technical nuances of web hosting. By allowing users to focus on building and managing their websites without the hassle of technical complexities, it streamlines the hosting experience.
The platform can also shine for small to mid-sized WooCommerce stores. This is due to SiteGround’s optimized setups that enhance the performance and security of WooCommerce and also the tools it has that make WooCommerce integration easier.
Additionally, SiteGround is also a very interesting alternative to platforms like WP Engine and Kinsta. It comes at a fraction of the price and can deliver similar results in terms of performance and optimization. That’s not a bad deal if you ask me.
Do you have any prior experiences with SiteGround? Let us know in the comments section below! Perhaps share your own SiteGround review for WordPress…
Muito bom, estou usando e gostando muito.
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