Finding a fast host for a WordPress website?

[estwig]

How is this done, what should someone look for to find a fast hosting service?

Putting aside reliability, customer service and UK hosting, these seem easy enough to check.

Using shared hosting, not a VPS, what metrics or comparisons should someone look for to choose a fast host.

 

[james_firmsites]

Benchmarking seems to be the best method.

Get a small or trial account. Have a standard wordpress site that you know exactly how fast it is and load the same site onto the new provider then compare response times. There are numerous tools for both testing the standard response and under load response times.

 

[Dolphin-Design]

@ryedale maybe able to help
They certainly tick all the boxes for the stuff you've put aside

 

[arnydnxluk]

It's difficult to judge performance before signing up, as James mentions the only true way to know is to sign up and try the service out for yourself.

There are a few things that would put me off when looking for good shared hosting:

• A website which uses buzzwords all over the place (for example calling their web hosting "cloud hosting" because it's set up on a VM despite not having true redundancy in place).
• A website which brags about just how fast they are all over the place, claiming they're the fastest hosting etc. If they have to post about this everywhere they're probably overstating the facts.
• A provider which overloads their servers. This isn't something you would know about before signing up although I do find that the more times a provider has the word "unlimited" on their website, the more likely they are to be overloading their servers! That's especially true when it comes to disk space, domains and accounts. Of course some providers set up their shared hosting on a VM with a SAN in place for hugely expandable storage but unlimited storage does still introduce issues when there's a lot of data associated to each server, for example it becomes more difficult to offer a reliable backup solution to customers.

In general, it's the largest providers which want to squeeze out every bit of profit from their customers, so those are the ones that are usually overloading servers which kills performance.

I would do the following:

• Take advantage of trials or money back guarantees as James mentions.
• Look for genuine recommendations, e.g. on UKBF or within your network.
• Look at other's websites, if their website seems to perform well to you then you can find out who their hosting provider is and consider that provider (keeping in mind that website performance also largely depends on the developer).

 

[fisicx]

It's less about fast hosting and more about having a fast site. You could have a lightning fast server with a poorly configured site that is slower than an optimised site on a shared server.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Yes, benchmarking can work.

Better hosting will cope better with heavier, more trafficked websites, so it's only really a start.

How hosting copes with multiple active visitors, a number of plugins, and often unoptimised themes and images can vary greatly - the storage, web server, and how crowded the server is will make a big difference with that.

Pure SSD storage is much better for reliability and performance, so you can look for a host that provides only that.

LiteSpeed web server or Nginx will also perform better than standard Apache which many web hosts run.

LiteSpeed provides LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress:
https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/litespeed-cache/
https://www.litespeedtech.com/products/cache-plugins/wordpress-acceleration

This works directly with the LiteSpeed web server for the best caching performance, and can make a real difference.

Finally the number of users on the server makes a big difference, and you can test this through benchmarking and simply using the control panel and backend. This will be slow with the large commercial hosts, that cram far too many users onto ageing servers.

This is a popular tool:
https://tools.pingdom.com/

We routinely run that after migrating clients from the likes of Vidahost to see the speed improvement.

You can also check reviews and feedback from other users. If you do a search on the forum you should find plenty of recommendations, hopefully including us.

If you have any questions feel free to get in touch.

All the best,

Dan

 

[ryedale]

@ryedale maybe able to help
They certainly tick all the boxes for the stuff you've put aside

Many thanks Dan

As Fiscix has said, a lot of it can come down to how the site is set up in the first place. Generally, we do find that we can usually improve the speed even further for new hosting clients with a few tweaks.

It's an ongoing process so it's important that you find a host you can have a working relationship with - ideally with someone you can call and speak to the same people.

It's well worth asking for a trial so you can see how the performance and support shape up. Any host confident in their service should be happy to offer at least a month as well as free migration.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

It's less about fast hosting and more about having a fast site. You could have a lightning fast server with a poorly configured site that is slower than an optimised site on a shared server.

Yes, true, WordPress websites are notorious for plugin bloat and heavy page builder themes using scaled massive images. It's no good having decent web hosting and a poorly built website (a poor house on good land).

But there's also little point in having a well built, optimised website, only to stick it on an overcrowded ageing server with spinning disks and bad neighbours (a good house on poor land).

You've got to take care of both really, neither is a solution to the other.

 

[iDigLocal]

This is a lot to do with site construction as a few others have mentioned.

• A lot of off the shelf themes are very slow - keep it simple most of these off the shelf themes have lots of bells & whistles you won't need.
• Only install plugins you need.
• optimise images
• optimise delivery of assets
• cache control
• use a CDN

server response times have an effect but without looking at the above it doesn't matter were you stick your website.

You can always use a dedicated server and that way you remove competition with users for resources on VPS and shared hosting accounts

Find a hosting company that has good support and has a good set of hosting support tools in their hosting control panel.

 

[NickGrogan]

Do you need to use wordpress?

It takes a lot of resources, and a lot of people use it for what are essentially static sites.

plain html pages will load much much faster on any server V wordpress site.

Lightsail from Amazon, virtual servers from £5 per month.

 

[iDigLocal]

@NickGrogan yes you are right. We still build a lot of static websites if we cannot see a need for a CMS. Using a CMS has a lot of benefits if you are going to be adding a lot of content on a regular basis or need more complex functionality. If not, you just need a brochure website, static websites are much better. Also don't use any resource heavy frameworks on your static websites, there only benefit is tot he web designer not the client.

 

[arnydnxluk]

It takes a lot of resources, and a lot of people use it for what are essentially static sites.

plain html pages will load much much faster on any server V wordpress site.

The difference between a well developed dynamic website and plain HTML is probably about 30-50 ms per page load, so not a big deal. For WordPress maybe a bit more but still < 200ms. In any case, full page caching makes that a non-issue while retaining the content management aspect for the website owner.

Lightsail from Amazon, virtual servers from £5 per month.

Excludes the cost of management, backups, being on-call 24/7, etc. Although if the OP was looking for an unmanaged VM I can recommend DigitalOcean or Linode, in that order.

 

[iDigLocal]

The difference between a well developed dynamic website and plain HTML is probably about 30-50 ms per page load

I'd be interested to see the stats for that.

 

[arnydnxluk]

I'd be interested to see the stats for that.

Just do some comparisons.

PHP 7 with opcache is pretty fast as long as you're not doing anything crazy (which a lot of bad WordPress plugins may well be doing).

I just opened our site in Chrome - 45ms response time for the homepage. Built on Laravel, no content caching in place. So what difference does it make whether serving plain HTML in 25ms or dynamic content in 45ms for the end user? Of course at scale there are advantages for the website owner but the performance difference at low traffic is negligible.

 

[NickGrogan]

Just do some comparisons.

PHP 7 with opcache is pretty fast as long as you're not doing anything crazy (which a lot of bad WordPress plugins may well be doing).

Unfortunately most people using wordpress use every plugin and theme they can find and end up with load times running into seconds, not milliseconds

 

[iDigLocal]

Just do some comparisons.

PHP 7 with opcache is pretty fast as long as you're not doing anything crazy (which a lot of bad WordPress plugins may well be doing).

I just opened our site in Chrome - 45ms response time for the homepage. Built on Laravel, no content caching in place. So what difference does it make whether serving plain HTML in 25ms or dynamic content in 45ms for the end user? Of course at scale there are advantages for the website owner but the performance difference at low traffic is negligible.

Its not wordpress though, you have essentially a custom build so it won't come with all the bloat of wordpress.

 

[arnydnxluk]

Unfortunately most people using wordpress use every plugin and theme they can find and end up with load times running into seconds, not milliseconds

Right, I completely agree that some (maybe most!) people abuse WordPress. But WordPress itself isn't the issue, you can easily achieve excellent load times on a WordPress website if it's not packed with poorly developed plugins etc (example: ~50ms on a basic website).

I'm by no means a huge fan of WordPress but there's no need to stick to static HTML only (unless the OP wants to of course). Any issues with response times from a WordPress website are down to the developer and the developer of any plugins/themes being used.

 

[arnydnxluk]

Its not wordpress though, you have essentially a custom build so it won't come with all the bloat of wordpress.

Sorry I did forget that we were focused specifically on WordPress here (I took it as dynamic vs static) but as in my post above, WordPress can easily do similar response times. It's really not the performance hog people make it out to be as a bog standard CMS / blogging platform, it only becomes that once a bad developer gets their hands on it, or a non-dev starts picking themes or installing dozens of plugins not realising just how awful some of them are!

 

[estwig]

Thank you for the replies, some interesting points.

I have a painfully slow wp site that was built for me, at not inconsiderable expense for a brochure site, the developer used divibuilder and various plugins. The home page takes up to 12 seconds to load in chrome! My fault for not paying better attention to what I was getting for the money, I'm learning fast.

A fast host is only one part of the puzzle, I get that, but it's still an important one.

Litespeed looks interesting, I think I'll head down that route.

I asked my host about making things faster, for £250.00 + vat they can move me from cpanel to plesk, apparently that will fix all my woes. Fookers must have a gun and a mask under their desk!

 

[NickGrogan]

I would worry about the hosting, fix the website first.

12 seconds is mad, something is very badly wrong.

Good hosting will help shave off milliseconds, but you need to be set up right first. Otherwise you're spending money for nothing.

 

[fisicx]

I asked my host about making things faster, for £250.00 + vat they can move me from cpanel to plesk, apparently that will fix all my woes. Fookers must have a gun and a mask under their desk!

Idiots. The control panel you use won't make the site faster.

Getting rid of divi and all the unnecessary junk will fix the slow site.

 

[estwig]

I know I've gotta have the site fixed, I get that. I'm on a mission to have the World's fastest wp site, ever and that includes the hosting.

I nearly bought that b*llsh*t fisicx and signed on the dotted line. Looks like Phil sold us out, shame.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Plesk isn't a great control panel, so would be a downgrade.
While Plesk is available for Linux, generally people only use it if they have to - if they're using Windows hosting - as cPanel isn't available for Windows.

If that was part of moving you to Windows hosting, then because of the licensing costs that will typically perform worse for the same money. The Windows licensing cost could be spent on more RAM and resources with Linux hosting for example, or highly quality hosting with pure SSD storage and fewer users.

Also, WordPress arguably is more at home on Linux as it's a standard open source MySQL / PHP platform.

As suggested earlier, a good host that provides personal support can find what's wrong with your website, and help advise on the best steps and action you can take to improve things.

So while simply having higher performance hosting won't solve the build issues, switching to a better host that provides both better performance and better advice / service can help solve both issues.

A decent host would be happy to look at your plugins, theme and build when migrating your website.

Divi is a terrible page builder / theme platform. Unfortunately it uses shortcodes, meaning there's some work involved to remove it, but it can be done.

Given how slow your website is loading, I'd suspect the hosting is very poor as well. We've seen similar loading times for okay WordPress websites with the likes of Fasthosts and others.

Feel free to send me a message if you'd like us to take a look.

I hope you can get it sorted.

Have a good weekend,

Dan

 

[webhostuk]

I know I've gotta have the site fixed, I get that. I'm on a mission to have the World's fastest wp site, ever and that includes the hosting.

I nearly bought that b*llsh*t fisicx and signed on the dotted line. Looks like Phil sold us out, shame.

If you are looking for make things faster you need to look at server you are hosting with, make sure its SSD server, with Nginx or litespeed webserver, latest php version with opcache and phpFPM things will drastically make some good changes for your site as 12 sec is pretty bad loading time.

 

[Alan]

If you want me to have a look at your WP code, please let me know.

(p.s. not selling anything just an offer )

 

[fisicx]

If you want me to have a look at your WP code, please let me know.

Already done this. It’s the theme, plugins, content and configuration.

 

[Alan]

Already done this. It’s the theme, plugins, content and configuration.

Lol - so everything - class development

 

[iDigLocal]

Sorry I did forget that we were focused specifically on WordPress here (I took it as dynamic vs static) but as in my post above, WordPress can easily do similar response times. It's really not the performance hog people make it out to be as a bog standard CMS / blogging platform, it only becomes that once a bad developer gets their hands on it, or a non-dev starts picking themes or installing dozens of plugins not realising just how awful some of them are!

no your are right wordpress can be fast, it does just depend on how the site is built and how it is delivered. But static sites can be very fast.

12 seconds does seem to be ridiculously slow though @estwig . moving hosting is not the issue here, that's rubbish. The site is badly built.

 

[HostXNow]

9/10 the slowness is caused by CMS like WordPress, plugins or themes. You can tell if this is the case by using page loading tools to test whether the issue is with the website or server itself. If the issue is with the website then fix it or throw a better environment at it. Or fix it up and still throw a better environment at it.

To help with faster page loading speeds you need to use the following:

TRUE cloud hosting setup using SSD NVMe storage

Have a good amount of server resources e.g LVE limits from CloudLinux. Some hosts offer 1 CPU whereas others offer 2 CPU. Some offer very low 1-2MB/s Disk IO whereas some offer 10MB/s Disk IO. Disk IO is usually a big bottleneck FYI. So it's a good idea to check if your site is hitting any LVE limits.

LiteSpeed Web Server will outperform everything else, especially LSCache for WordPress.

You may put a copy of your site on a subdomain at each provider and test which is the fastest e.g

webhost1.yourdomain.com
webhost2.yourdomain.com

If you are still not 100% sure have someone who has enough experience with this to check everything for you.

Happy Testing.

 

[Alan]

I thik it has been established the speed issue has nothing to do with hosting but an incompetant developer.

 

[HostXNow]

@Alan

I wouldn't say the hosting/server has nothing to do with it. Certain setups are able to load sloppy/complex code much quicker and better than other setups all while using the same resources.

Good code and hosting/server environment are needed.

 

[Alan]

In this specific case, it has been established that the extreme slowness is due to poor coding, whilst hosting MAY make an impact, the materiality of this specific issue is code.

 

[HostXNow]

In this specific case, it has been established that the extreme slowness is due to poor coding, whilst hosting MAY make an impact, the materiality of this specific issue is code.

True, but my point is if using setup like Apache web server that is not configured and optimised properly and no decent caching then just a few requests can increase the server load bringing the website to a halt yet use something better like LiteSpeed with LSCache plus a lot of the other things I mentioned and you may find the sites then loads within just a second or two, even if the coding is crappy.

The thing is some pay for a poor setup at around £5/month and have page load of 10 plus seconds and there are others who pay around the same price and have excellent page load speed of around 0-2 seconds. Some are just luckier when it comes to choosing a web host.

So should not always blame it on the code. A lot of the time the customer is overpaying for web hosting account and is getting ripped off due to the provider overloading the server too much or not investing properly into their hosting infrastructure.

And as mentioned by some other members a lot of the big providers squeeze every penny and are usually the ones who give you as little server resources as possible. The reason why so many are leaving hosts like TSOHost, Vidahost and switching to smaller providers who offer more personal support, specs and better value for money.

Hope this helps.

 

[estwig]

This is quite surreal, everyone talking about my site, in some strange geek language.

Like if I'm talking to my Daughter about talking the Grandchildren round the park, and you spell things out so the toddlers don't understand, shall we go to the p-a-r-k and go on the s-w-i-n-g-s?

 

[jazperson]

There are a lot of hosting that offers trials or a few bucks for 1 month. Also, check your website first. If it is loaded with a lot of images that is not optimized, then your website is the problem. So check your website first then when choosing the right hosting, read some reviews and then subscribe as a trial account.

 

[GURUCLOUD]

I'd suggest contacting a host and asking for a test/trial account. You should be able to get a copy of your website loaded onto their servers for a side by side comparison - we've done this before for customers that are not sure on exactly what they want/need package wise.

If you are then happy with how things run with the new host, I'm sure they would have options to convert to a full account!

Best of luck with your search.

 

[Blacklaw]

I see some people have claimed your ISSUE is DIVI and that it sucks.
I use DIVI as do thousands of others, and it certainly doesn't suck at all. All of the sites I have built with DIVI load in under 2 seconds. It is simply a matter of knowing what you are doing and optimizing your site properly.
No themes and visual builders are perfect, they all have their bugs or quirks, and will do something that someone is not happy about or is not to their liking. You find the one you like and stick with it.
I would suggest joining the DIVI facebook group, where you will get help and advice from people who actually use DIVI every day and actually know what they are doing.

 

[estwig]

Good points about divi Blacklaw, thousands of people use it so it must be good for certain things. I have a brochure site, it's large but it's just a brochure site. Divibuilder would seem complete overkill for my needs and I just don't like it at all, I've tried and I can't get along with it, it all seems so clunky and unnecessary.

I'm going to get rid of it.

 

[Calvin Crane]

Right - from a technical perspective read how a web page actually gets served to a browser. If you are really on a mission to get a fast web experience then understanding the fundamental process is key.
I can tell you the host is largely (not 100%) irrelevant. It is a factor but you can throw ram and bad code will just chew it all up. Especially server code dealing with database.

Find a good pro and start focussing on your business. If you are interested in building websites great but do it on a hobby site instead not you business site.

I wouldn't pretend to build an physical brick extension to my business so I hire a professional why do people try to build websites? They are actually very complex creatures. Of course anyone can click a few times and actually make one appear, but here is where the issues for you start.

What is it about a man a laptop and an internet connection that makes him DIY anything themselves. I think I might actually have the topic for my next video.

 

[fisicx]

Find a good pro and start focussing on your business. If you are interested in building websites great but do it on a hobby site instead not you business site.

He had a pro build the website for him.