Is SiteGround good for WordPress sites?
I don’t know about you, but as I get older I find that time is the most important asset that I need to manage and optimize. At the end of the day, being productive is crucial to the success of any business.
I don’t even want to think about the hours I’ve wasted trying to contact hosting providers support, updating my plugins or fixing bugs for WordPress sites, too many.
A good WordPress hosting provider can help you here, as smart hosts will make your life so much easier.
Siteground is one of the most recommended WordPress hosting companies. They are known for their top-notch customer support, fast and reliable hosting plans. Your WordPress optimized hosting includes everything you need to create and grow a successful website or blog.
SiteGround is a solid provider for WordPress for 3 main reasons: excellent performance, friendly and helpful support (with knowledge of WordPress), and smart WordPress features like migration and speed optimization plugins, auto-update scripts, easy-to-use staging areas. configure and install WordPress with 1 click.
We think SiteGround is one of the best hosting providers out there, especially for hosting WordPress sites.
However, we are not the only ones; Popular WordPress-related organizations like Yoast, WooCommerce, and WordPress itself recommend SiteGround’s hosting services.
But of course you shouldn’t use SiteGround as your host just because a bunch of big companies (or us) are backing it.
So let me tell you what to expect from SiteGround when you host a WordPress site with them and when to use it.
SiteGround Review : Pros and Cons of for WordPress
Let’s summarize the main pros and cons of SiteGround:
| Pros | Contras |
| Performance – SiteGround is one of the highest performing hosts. Its uptime and speed can be compared to much more expensive hosting services like WP Engine.
Support: Offers support by chat, email and phone. I usually use the chat and have always had a good experience. Ease of use : It has its own system (not cPanel). It’s modern looking and intuitive, with no UX bugs either. User management : With the GrowBig and GoGeek plans you can add individual users (eg clients or collaborators) for each website you host with them. This is very powerful for developer teams and digital agencies. Unlimited Traffic – Unlike some competitors, SiteGround does not limit the traffic your site can get. Backups : They keep 30 daily backups of your websites that you can restore. With the top 2 plans it is also possible to create on-demand copies of your sites. WordPress Features – There are a ton of WordPress tools out there out of the box. Among others, you will be able to create staging areas, easily migrate your WordPress site or hyper-optimize the speed of your website. |
Renewal Pricing – Even if SiteGround (IMO) is good value for money, you’ll need to set aside some of your budget for when it comes to renewing (starts at $14.99 a month).
Limitations : Like any other hosting provider, it has some service limitations. For example, storage, email account space, hosted sites, CPU usage, or database size. However, these are generous enough for most WordPress projects. Contract duration : You can buy SiteGround for 1, 2 or 3 years. Shorter periods (for example, monthly or bi-monthly offers) are not available. |
Who is SiteGround for?
Before I delve into SiteGround ‘s pricing, features, support, and performance , let me quickly tell you what scenarios I’d suggest considering it as your host:
- If you are looking to host an online store (eg using WordPress + WooCommerce)
- Professional bloggers with medium to large sites
- Companies that use WordPress for their website
- Developers and users who need cutting-edge features (Git or staging areas) for WordPress
- Organizations that need to give access to various users (for example, collaborators and clients).
- In general, anyone who needs a good performing host
However, there are a couple of cases where you probably shouldn’t use SiteGround:
- Your budget is very limited – check out DreamHost.
- You need large amounts of storage (for example, more than 50 GB)
- Those looking for a Windows based hosting provider (check out A2 Hosting or InMotion)
SiteGround Plans and Pricing
But before you jump on board with SiteGround, you’ll need to make sure their prices match your allotted budget. I will also check all available plans and check their rates.
Shared Siteground Hosting for WordPress
SiteGround has 3 shared hosting plans, all of which will allow you to host your WordPress site. But let’s take a look at the prices and what each level offers.
| StartUp | GrowBig | GoGeek | |
| sites | 1 site | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Support | Email, chat and phone | Email, chat and phone | Faster email, chat and phone support |
| Storage | 10 GB | 20 GB | 40 GB |
| Bandwidth | no meter | no meter | no meter |
| database | Unlimited Maximum size of 500 MB | Unlimited Maximum size of 750 MB | Unlimited Maximum size of 1000 MB |
| Email and FTP accounts and subdomains | no meter | no meter | no meter |
| Backups | 30 days | 30 days and manual backups | 30 days and manual backups |
| Hidden | Static and dynamic caching | Static and dynamic caching | Static and dynamic caching |
| blazing fast php | Not available | Available | Available |
| staging | Not available | Available | Available |
| Email and FTP accounts and subdomains | no meter | no meter | no meter |
| professional migration | $30 extra | $30 extra | $30 extra |
| First installment price | $4.99mesmo | $7.99/mes | $14.99/mes |
| renewal price | $14.99/mes | $24.99/mes | $39.99/mes |
The StartUp plan is ideal if you have a single (small) WordPress site and don’t need advanced features like staging areas or Git repositories. Additionally, your storage, email accounts, and databases will be limited to 10 GB, 2 GB, and 500 MB respectively.
These plans come with static and dynamic content caching.
By purchasing the GrowBig package, you will have more storage and space for your email accounts and databases (20 GB, 4 GB and 750 MB respectively). With this plan it is possible to host unlimited WordPress websites.
On top of that, you’ll get access to a blazing-fast PHP and WordPress staging system enabled (for faster websites).
The GoGeek tier is ideal for larger WordPress users who need even more storage (40 GB), larger databases (1 GB maximum size), and more space for their email accounts (6 GB).
It is possible to host unlimited websites. Plus, it provides cool perks like pre-installed Git repositories and a white-label backend (for example, you want to give access to your customers).
SiteGround Cloud Hosting para WordPress
From what I know, your website may be performing extremely well, which means you need an even more powerful solution (for example, you get more than 100,000 visitors per month).
If that’s the case, SiteGround Cloud Hosting could be exactly what you’re looking for.
You can think of cloud hosting as a series of interconnected servers that host your website. This type of hosting is ideal for larger websites, as you can add resources (eg more storage, processing power, etc.) as you need them.
SiteGround offers 4 pre-made plans for cloud hosting services (storage and processing power differ). However, you can configure your server to meet your exact needs. Their cloud hosting plans start at $80.00 a month and go all the way up to $2,100.
Features of SiteGround for WordPress
But let me mention some cool WordPress (hosting) features that SiteGround has to offer WordPress site owners.
Migration
They have an amazing plugin that will help you migrate your WordPress website in a matter of minutes. It is a very easy to use solution that will only require you to add a plugin to the migrated website.
Unfortunately, the migration plugin will not work if your WordPress site (database) is really big. I have migrated 3 websites using your plugin without any problem, one of them is quite big and gets around 50,000 visitors.
However, I had a problem with a fourth site: support helped me with the migration, however this may have additional costs.
SiteGround 1-Click Installations
Like almost all other hosting providers, SiteGround offers an easy way to install WordPress. You can see the whole process in the following video:
One advantage of their WordPress installer script is that you can actually host your website on a free temporary URL provided by SiteGround. This means that you can create a WordPress installation without having a proper domain for it, ideal if you just want to test things out.
Please note that with every installation, SiteGround will suggest you get a security plugin that you probably won’t need. Be sure to skip this option unless you want to pay more for it
WP Starter Plugin
I have to confess that I have not used the starter plugin on a live website, although it sounds like a useful guide for beginners. For the purposes of this article, I have researched it extensively so that I can explain to you what to expect from it.
If you end up using this starter plugin, you will follow the following workflow:
- Choose one of SiteGround’s WordPress theme suggestions. Most of them are free.
- Decide if any of the free suggested plugins (for example, WooCommerce, JetPack, or WPForms) are relevant to your WordPress project. Don’t worry, you’ll be able to add or remove them later if needed.
- SiteGround offers 3 more plugins that will help you optimize and measure your traffic. Not all of these are free.
- Click complete to add all of this to your WordPress website.
And of course none of these are required. So if instead of using SiteGround’s suggested plugins or themes you want to use different ones, you will be allowed to.
SG Optimizer Add-on
I think this is the most useful WordPress feature that SiteGround offers. Once the plugin is installed, you can easily enable a dozen optimizations for your website. It’s also seriously a good reason to consider using SiteGround as your WordPress host.
Let me give you a tour of it:
- In the first tab ‘SuperCacher Settings’, you will be able to configure how caching should work on your WordPress site. For example, exclude pages from the cache (for example, the shopping cart), decide when to purge your cache, or what levels of caching to enable.
- From the ‘Environment optimization’ section, you can manage the PHP version, ssl activation, browser caching, and GZIP compression.
- ‘ Frontend Optimization ‘ will allow you to speed up your website by minifying its HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and optimizing where the scripts are loaded (eg the footer).
- An added bonus is the available media optimizations . This plugin will compress and optimize your images and allow you to lazy load images and videos.
Ever since SiteGround released this plugin, I have been using it. I was able to get rid of several other plugins that I used to achieve the same thing.
Automatic update of WordPress and SiteGround plugins
Sometime in 2013, WordPress released a feature that meant you could set your installation to update automatically. This can save you a bit of time every time there is a new version of the WordPress system (update).
SiteGround has gone a step further and gives you a couple of options to handle updates. It’s great that they let you choose between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ updates and give you so much flexibility: do the updates as soon as they’re available, wait 24 hours, 48 hours or 72 hours.
On top of that, SiteGround will also manage plugin updates automatically, if that’s what you want. But keep in mind that if there is a plugin conflict, your site might break, that’s why we manage plugin updates manually.
WordPress staging areas
Finally, another one of my favorite WordPress features is the 1-click staging areas to test code before going live. You can think of this as an exact replica of your site so you can see how the new code (or plugin update) will affect your WordPress site without breaking the live site.
Simply name your staging area and click the ‘Create’ button. Your staging will be available in a couple of seconds.
Another useful feature is that you will be able to replace your live website with the staging copy you created (make sure your site is properly backed up beforehand). Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be an option to password protect the frontend of your staging, that would be desirable as you probably don’t want people (or search engines) to find it.
Tip: When creating a new staging area you have to remember to install the SSL certificate as well (1 click from backend) or your staging won’t be accessible via https, I keep forgetting this and wondering ‘Why my new staging doesn’t work? ? ‘
SiteGround y WooCommerce
This is nothing extraordinary, but you can purchase a WooCommerce SiteGround plan that comes with WordPress + WooCommerce pre-installed. It is also possible to migrate (import) your WooCommerce site hosted elsewhere.
SiteGround WordPress Performance
Of course, you want your website to load lightning fast and with as few interruptions as possible, regardless of the CMS you use (WordPress or any other).
Uptime
Believe it or not, your hosting provider cannot guarantee that your site will be available (online) 100% of the time. For example, sometimes there are maintenance tasks that will cause downtime.
But of course you want your downtime to be as little as possible. This is where good hosting providers can shine compared to mediocre or bad hosts.
As you can see below, SiteGround provides extraordinarily good uptime, being well above the standard 99.95% mark.
| Supplier | Uptime (percentage of time checked) |
| DreamHost | 100 |
| SiteGround | 99.98 |
| Bluehost | 99.98 |
| GoDaddy | 99.97 |
| InMotion | 99.97 |
| HostGator | 99.94 |
| Accommodation A2 | 99.93 |
| iPage | 99.66 |
In fact, I’ve used SiteGround for several years, and I’ve never seen them drop below 99.98%, so I’m very happy with their uptime.
Velocity
I have to say that SiteGround does things right when it comes to speed. We tested it together with 7 other vendors and it came out 2nd after more than 150 tests from different countries (eg USA, Europe, Asia, etc.).
| Supplier | Speed (in seconds) |
| Accommodation A2 | 2.31 |
| SiteGround | 2.35 |
| DreamHost | 2.47 |
| HostGator | 2.77 |
| GoDaddy | 2.85 |
| InMotion | 3.07 |
| Bluehost | 3.32 |
| iPage | 4.61 |
Cargando Seed & SiteGround
In addition to the super-useful SG Optimizer wordpress plugin that I’ve talked about in detail above, there are a couple of general things that SiteGround implements to improve speed:
- Like some of its competitors, SiteGround uses SSD drives for all its servers: SSDs can be 4 times faster than normal hard drives.
- All SiteGround customers can use the latest version of PHP for their hosting account. In addition to being safer, it also performs better.
- Another good option is to be able to host your website in multiple locations, choose a server in the USA. USA, Europe or Asia. Hosting your website close to your audience (for example, not in the US if you’re targeting Europe), should give you a speed boost.
- SiteGround integrates with Cloudflare’s CDN which will help you distribute your site more efficiently around the world. Cloudflare even has a free plan.
Other useful features, exclusive to SiteGround
SiteGround has many features that other hosting providers also offer. However, there are a couple of unique options that make SiteGround a little more special. Let me tell you about them:
- On-Demand Backups : With SiteGround’s system, you’ll be able to create your own backups (eg before submitting new code) and restore if things went wrong. Many hosts will sell you an expensive plugin to have this advanced backup functionality. SiteGround offers this on its GrowBig tier.
- Git – The highest SiteGround plan comes with this version control technology pre-installed. Developers use it to record changes and avoid code conflicts when more than one programmer is working on a project.
- User management : If you opt for the GrowBig plan (or higher), you will be able to create users for your hosting account and assign them roles and projects, quite useful if you have a team managing a website. With the GoGeek plan, you can also add clients and the SiteGround branding will be gone.
Successful WordPress sites hosted with SiteGround
I wanted to share a couple of examples of (really great) WordPress websites hosted with SiteGround.
This company creates SEO plugins for WordPress, and is quite successful with over 5 million active WordPress installs. Not only does it endorse SiteGround as a WordPress host, but it also uses it to host your website.
Their website is huge and built on WordPress. Ahrefs estimates that they have around 400,000 visitors a month.
This chain of healthy supermarkets in the United States has more than 340 stores in 22 different states (USA) and employs more than 30,000 people. According to Ahrefs, their website (based on WordPress) receives more than 500 thousand visitors per month.
SiteGround Support
One thing I really don’t like is waiting; I don’t like it when the bus is late or when I have to wait too long for a meal. Similarly, having to wait for a free (hosting) support agent when I have a problem really frustrates me.
Generally speaking, SiteGround’s support is fast, although sometimes I had to wait a bit longer. I have contacted them over 100 times and I have to say that the quality of the support has been (almost always) good and my problems were solved.
Please note that they can be contacted by their ticketing system (similar to email), live chat, or phone. Personally, I prefer chat support as I can speak live with an agent without having to stop everything I’m doing.
SiteGround WordPress Review: Conclusion
You should now have a pretty good idea of what to expect from SiteGround when hosting a WordPress site.
You won’t find many shared WordPress hosting providers that beat SiteGround, especially at this cost (starts at $14.99 after renewal). But as I mentioned, you’ll need to set aside some of your budget as it’s not the most affordable solution – check out DreamHost if you need a cheaper option.
Generally speaking, it’s safe to go with them, especially if you have a large project and need some advanced features to help you with daily maintenance (for example, updating plugins).
It’s also good when working with multiple team members or clients; Being able to create users and assign individual roles and projects to users will greatly streamline your workflow process.
