SiteGround has been one of my favorites and is one of the companies I started hosting WordPress with. Almost 10 years later, how good will SiteGround be? In this elaborate SiteGround review, I’ll test SiteGround in every detail. Is SiteGround the provider you should host your WordPress site with? Is it any good? Let’s discover!
TL;DR; (Is Siteground Good?)
In short, yes, SiteGround is a good provider and if you’re just starting, host with them. Even bigger sites can run well on SiteGround.
- SiteGround is fast, has good and fast support, provides good tools for managing WordPress, and offers a lot of value.
- SiteGround is one of the more expensive shared providers, but is also one of the best, matching more premium hosts in value.
- If you’re an agency, SiteGround provides some helpful tools for managing collaboration.
At the moment of writing, SiteGround is the best shared hosting provider (for starting sites) we have tested so far.
In short: SiteGround is great! Sign up here and save up to 80%.
SiteGround WordPress Hosting FAQs
For whom is SiteGround?
SiteGround caters to the lower-mid level end of the market and is mainly for starters, small businesses, WordPress businesses, and smaller agencies. Some larger businesses may find their cloud offering also attractive.
Is SiteGround free?
SiteGround is not free, as their employees also need to eat. However, you can always try SiteGround as there is a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Does SiteGround include email?
Yes, every subscription includes email support, as long as you’ve a domain registered or connected to SiteGround.
Is SiteGround good for WordPress?
Yes, SiteGround is very good for WordPress. It’s very easy to install WordPress with their installer. They also provide specific performance and security optimizations (and plugins) catered to WordPress.
Is hosting WordPress on SiteGround secure?
Hosting WordPress on SiteGround is secure with many security precautions, firewalls, and even a dedicated WordPress security plugin from SiteGround.
Is SiteGround the best WordPress hosting provider?
This is a difficult question. SiteGround is among the best (shared) hosting providers for starters and comes even close to premium providers such as Kinsta and Rocket.net.
Is SiteGround better than Bluehost?
I haven’t tested Bluehost yet, so I can’t see a lot about it. I’ll update this question once I’ve tested Bluehost. But at the first looks, it may be better.
Is SiteGround a domain registrar?
SiteGround is not an official top-level registrar, but you can register many of the most common domains at SiteGround for okay prices.
SiteGround Review Procedure
The whole reason I started my blog is that I was looking for the best hosting, and I couldn’t find many in-depth hosting reviews (just dozens of blogs promoting providers with the best affiliate programs). That’s why every provider, including SiteGround, is reviewed using the same criteria and tests:
- Features: what features are offered by SiteGround?
- Performance: is SiteGround fast?
- Usability: is it easy to install and manage WordPress on SiteGround?
- Support: is it easy to get good help?
- Pricing: is a good value offered?
You can find an overview of the best WordPress hosting providers here, or compare all hosting reviews.
SiteGround’s Features: Excellent
In one word, SiteGround offers everything you need to manage WordPress well. The only thing I’d miss is an easy option to copy or clone a site, and possibly an API integration.
I won’t be listing all the features in detail, but let’s cover a couple of the more important features.
Hosting & Server Features
The hosting and server features are dependent upon the description, but all include support for WordPress, some disk space, and unlimited traffic. You can view more details on SiteGround’s page.
SiteGround offers 3 starter plans, which respectively cover 1 website with 10GB of space, unlimited websites and 20GB, and finally unlimited websites with 40GB of space.
SiteGround also offers bigger plans in their cloud hosting offering.
After login, you are greeted with the central dashboard where you can manage your websites and buy additional services, or contact support.
The neat thing is that SiteGround not only offers hosting but also domain registration (yes, these are 2 separate things!) and email accounts.
Besides the standard functionalities, there are a lot of other features included such as:
- An easy installer for WordPress (I’ll talk about this later)
- A migration tool for WordPress and email
- A free SSL certificate (which is a must nowadays)
- An interface to manage WordPress updates, and make them update automatically.
- Specified features that make your website faster, such as caching and optimized PHP.
- And all powered by renewable energy!
Security Features
Besides being able to run a WordPress site, running it securely is important. What does SiteGround offer in terms of security?
The first feature that helps are the daily backups that are done for 30 days. Very important if things go south (or if you mess up something yourself!).
Also, SiteGround offers a helpful option to enforce your website being forced over HTTPS, making your website more secure. But what else do they offer?
- Isolation of hosting accounts
- Custom made firewalls on several levels
- Specific security plugin developed for WordPress
- Anti-bot system, blocking illegitimate traffic to your site
One thing worth mentioning is that the SiteGround Security Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that adds some common security measures, such as blocking brute-force logins and vulnerable parts of WordPress.
Developer Features
SiteGround is well-known for it’s SuperCacher, their own solution for implementing performance improvements. Something that developers (and non-developers) generally need to greatly improve a WordPress site’s performance!
Supercacher comes with a dedicated WordPress plugin as well, which offers all required optimizations such as caching, minification and even image optimization.
Next to that, there are a couple of useful other features that SiteGround offers for developers:
- Integration of your website to a Git Repository
- The ability to set-up cron-jobs on the server
- A manager to manage PHP (and your database), including extensions and versions
- The ability to add your SSH-keys to login to the server
- A staging environment for any site
- The ability to add collaborators on any site
SiteGrounds SiteCare
There is one other thing I want to mention specifically in this SiteGround review, and that is the add-on service of Site Care. Any issue with your site? Wanting to customize or optimize anything in WordPress? For an additional fee, you can hire the experts from SiteGround. This trully makes SiteGround a more premium, managed provider.
SiteGround’s Performance: Great
SiteGround’s WordPress performance is great, and can even match the performance of some premium WordPress hosts. The amount of cached users it can handle is very good, but especially the amount of uncached users is also impressive (more about what that means later).
Besides having their performance stack tuned well, their server hardware itself is also good.
About Performance Testing
For every hosting provider, I do almost the same performance testing. Three major aspects are tested in this SiteGround review:
- Load-testing: how many visitors can a demo setup handle, and how well did they implement performance optimizations? In any case, we want to keep the average response time under 2 seconds, which is our error threshold.
- Server benchmarks: how fast is the server (and in practice, how fast will your back-end be)?
- Network latency: how fast does one initial load take, and how quickly does the server respond?
Now SiteGround hosts all their clients on Google Cloud infrastructure and implements some custom optimizations such as a fine-tuned version of PHP, their caching plugin for WordPress, and some server-side caching techniques (What is caching?). We’ll see if that makes a difference :).
Load Testing Siteground: Cached & Uncached Performance
During load testing, I’m testing how many visitors the provider can handle before errors start popping up. In this case, an error is either a load time higher than 2 seconds or any other error. For this, I used loader.io and h2load.
| Requests / Second (Cached) | Requests / Second (Uncached) | |
|---|---|---|
| Loader.io loadtest | 1900 | 72 |
| h2load loadtest | 960 | 17 |
Maximum Visitors / Second with Caching: 1900
In the below figures, we’re slowly raising the amount of connected clients (visitors) to our test website. In the blue line, you can see the average response time.
SiteGround (with our test setup) can handle up to 1900 requests a second, before errors start to appear. That is an excellent score.
Maximum Visitors / Second without Caching: 72
When we turn off caching, the server can handle up to 72 requests per second before erros start to appear. That’s a very good score, even outperforming some managed hosts!
H2Load: x (cached), x (uncached)
SiteGround Server Benchmarks
One primary aspect that influences the speed of your site, and especially the speed of your back-end, is how well your server is performing and how it is optimized.
In short: SiteGround is doing well here, but some other (more expensive) providers have faster servers and thus faster backends. The average shared provider is doing worse though.
WordPress Server Benchmark
SiteGround scores a solid 8.0 in the WordPress Server Benchmark, which is good, but some faster parties score even above 9.
WordPress Performance Tester
SiteGround has a server score of 9.541 and can run 1477 queries per second, which is excellent.
WordPress Post Benchmark
In the Post benchmark, 10.000 posts are inserted, queried, and deleted.
| Insert 10.000 posts | Query 10.000 posts | Delete 10.000 posts |
|---|---|---|
| 22.472 seconds | 0.198 seconds | 29.597 seconds |
SiteGround is doing good to average here, taking 22.472 seconds to insert, 0.198 seconds to query, and 29.597 seconds to delete 10.000 posts.
SiteGround’s Latency
With latency, we’re testing how fast the servers are responding to initial requests, and how fast pages are loading. Again, the figures are good here.
Time to First Byte: 135ms, 536ms average worldwide
Other SiteGround Performance Results
Pingdom Loading Times: 0.34 (cached), 1.26 (uncached)
Pingdom is an optimization tool that tests the overall loadtime of your site. SiteGrounds scores excellent here for the cached version, but the uncached version is a bit slow.
WebPageTest.org Loading Times: 3.05 seconds
WebPageTest is another optimization tools. SiteGround scores well here with 3.05 seconds.
Is SiteGround Fast? Comparing SiteGround to Others
Loving SiteGrounds performance? Sign up here and save up to 80%.
In the charts below, you can compare SiteGround to other providers in the same category.
In general, SiteGround is doing very well compared to the other shared providers.
If you want to compare SiteGround to any provider, please check our reviews page for WordPress Hosting Reviews.
SiteGround’s Usability: Excellent
Another important factor for this SiteGround review is how easy it is to use their control panel. In other words: usability. Let’s look at a couple of factors that make SiteGround’s usability excellent.
Custom-Made Control Panel
A control panel is the interface that you use to manage your sites and everything related. Way back, SiteGround used to have integrated cPanel, which is an off-shelf control panel that many shared hosting providers use. Once you’re used to it, it’s okay. But its user experience is not breathtaking.
Luckily, they developed a control themselves and it is great! It has a beautiful UI and is very easy to use. Their interface has 2 parts: the overall account screen, where you can see all your services, sites, and additional items such as support. And the Site Tools screen, where you can manage a site in detail.
Managing Sites
The SiteGround SiteTools
Woah, I love this dashboard so much that I can’s stop spamming screenshots for it. Let’s look into a coupe of tools and features. For every site, there is a specific section called site tools where you can manage everything related to one site.
In the overview, you can see some useful actions and usage statistics.
Installing WordPress
SiteGround has a one-click installer (well, almost one-click) for setting-up WordPress, which makes it very easy to install WordPress.
Creating a Staging Environment
A staging environment is a test environment and usually a copy of your site. Very useful if you are developing or testing things. SiteGround has a beautiful interface for adding and creating a staging site.
Migrating WordPress
The WordPress migrator is a very useful feature where you can generate a token. After this token is generated, you can go to your original site, install the migration plugin, paste the token and start the migration. The site is then migrated to SiteGround.
Updating WordPress
SiteGround offers the possibility to have the plugins, themes and WordPress itself on your site automatically updated, and thus keeping it more secure and up to date.
Before updating, a backup is being made, so you can always revert to an earlier point if something goes wrong.
Search and Replace Terms
Another tool offered is the Search and Replace tool, which is helpful to replace anything found in your database. This is especially useful for so-called mixed-content errors.
SiteGround’s Support: Good
So what else is left in this SiteGround review? Let’s look into support. SiteGround support is helpful, friendly, and quick to react (within 1 minute after opening the first question).
When testing support, I have a standard set of questions and I create an error in a WordPress site that support needs to solve.
Human Support
I went to the live chat, and had an initial response of 1 minute on my question. Most questions were answered to satisfaction, although the support assistant I got was not able to spot the error I programmed in the theme very quickly.
In general, I experienced the knowledge level of support to be good.
AI-Powered Chat Support
The initial support you get is done by an AI-assistant, which can answer all kind of questions.
The only downside is that chat support is a few clicks away, and the initial support is done by a machine. It’s a well performing machine though, probably trainined on a recent large language model, so it is also a plus. And I understand from the perspective of SiteGround that they want to aveliate the real support.
Other Support Resources
SiteGround has an elaborate database with tutorials and knowledge base articles for many WordPress related options. Excellent!
SiteGround’s Pricing: Good
Compared to other shared hosting providers, SiteGround is just a little bit more expensive. However, their usability, (uncached) performance, and support is in my experience also better than most shared providers I tested, making up for the somewhat higher price.
SiteGround Pricing Plans
If you opt for a prepaid 12 month hosting plan, you’ll get a big discount opposed to the monthly fees. And this only counts for the first year. After this period, you’ll be paying the regular price. I also listed their bigger cloud plans in this table
| Regular Price | Discounted Price | |
|---|---|---|
| StartUp (1 site, 10GB) | $15.99 | $2.99 |
| GrowBig (∞ sites, 20GB) | $27.99 | $5.49 |
| GoGeek (∞ site, 40GB) | $39.99 | $8.49 |
| Jump Start (4 cores, 8GB ram, 40GB disk) | $80 | |
| Business (8 cores, 12GB ram, 80GB disk) | $160 | |
| Business Plus (12 cores, 16GB ram, 120GB disk) | $240 | |
| Business Plus (16 cores, 20GB ram, 160GB disk) | $320 |
All the above plans are also available as reseller plans, allowing you to start your own hosting business using SiteGround’s services.
Additional Services
There are a lot of additional services, which in my opinion are not strictly needed because the base level of features is already very good.
- One service worth mentioning is the Site Care, which I already discussed before.
- SiteGround offers a free and premium CDN, which can speed-up your website load times worldwide.
- The SiteScanner is an additional safety measure that scans your sites for vulnerabilities. If you stick to well-known WordPress plugins and use a trusted party to create your WordPress site, this feature may be not needed.
Value for Money
You can host your website for less money at other providers, but in my opinion SiteGround is offering excellent value for money. Especially if you lock yourself in for a longer period of time, and get a bigger discount.
SiteGround Review Conclusion: Excellent!
SiteGround provides a good set of features, good performance, excellent usability, good support and good pricing. Wether you are a WordPress professional or just starting out, I can really recommended SiteGround. It just thicks every box.
In short: SiteGround is great! Sign up here and save up to 80%.
And SiteGround, congratulations with your 20 years of existence (at the time of writing)! Hoping for many years to come.