When it concerns webhosting, rate is just one of one of the most (otherwise one of the most) essential consider selecting an organizing firm. There are numerous aspects that affect the rate of your web site, yet among one of the most critical (and one that you can not manage) is just how well your host handles the web servers where your website is organized.
Excellent hosts normally do a whole lot to minimize transmission capacity misuse, maximize memory use, and take advantage of server-side caching. Negative hosts typically allow consumers cut loose on the web server, hog memory for others, and do not actually take way too much time to enhance their web servers past the default setups.
When trying to find a rapid webhosting, you desire a person that’s on top of handling sources and likewise recognizes exactly how to maximize the equipment they have in order to provide one of the most efficiency.
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Why Speed Matters
There are a million reasons rate issues, however we’m mosting likely to tighten it to 3 of them in order to assist you comprehend.
1) Slow sites raise individual bounce prices
There have actually been several research studies that reveal after the moment to fill a web site or websites exceeds 3 secs, individual bounce prices raise tremendously.
Firms like Dotcom-Monitor and CrazyEgghave actually done substantial research studies one just how internet site rate effects jump prices and customer contentment, and these researches (along with others) have actually regularly revealed that customers not just jump tremendously after the 3 2nd mark, yet they frequently do not return. This can be credited to enhanced customer assumptions as a result of the spreading of broadband web, LTE smart devices, and much faster computer systems as a whole. Whatever the reason, customers have actually concerned anticipate rate.
2) Slow sites result in reduce conversion prices
When a web site lots gradually it can have a significant result on conversion prices, just since individuals lack perseverance. Quick internet sites aid to produce implied trust fund with individuals and additionally aid to make certain that they do not shed perseverance waiting on your website to tons.
If you desire individuals to sign up for your e-mail listing– rate issues. If you desire individuals to have a look at utilizing your buying cart– rate issues. Whatever your conversion metric is, rate influences whatever. The faster your web site is, the much better it will certainly transform.
3) Slow sites show up reduced in internet search engine
Several of one of the most preferred online search engine make use of rate as a ranking aspect when it concerns buy the internet search engine outcomes. Google has claimed particularlythat it takes rate right into account when placing web sites. Various other internet search engine likewise take this right into account, so it’s essential to make certain that your website is as quickly as feasible to optimize your internet search engine exposure.
Fastest Web Hosts—The Ultimate Test
In order to truly find out who’s the best of the best, we put 20 popular web hosts to the test. Some of these hosts we don’t recommend to begin with (iPage, FatCow, etc.) but it was worth testing them as well because although they’re not companies we recommend, they are still relatively popular so we thought it was worth giving them a chance (to hopefully prove our point).
The Players
Below are the hosts that we’ve put to the test for this showdown:
Although some of these hosts are at different price points/quality levels (such as WP Engine being a higher end host) it’s important that all of them be tested together to really get an idea from an objective standpoint if the more expensive hosts are that much faster.
Finding the Fastest Web Hosting Company: Server Response Time vs Page Load Speed
In order to determine who is the fastest, it’s crucial that we first understand two different metrics: server response time and page load speed.
Server response time is exactly what it sounds like—the time it takes for a server to respond to a query from a browser or device.
Page load speed is the time it takes for all of the elements on a particular page to load completely. For example, if you typed the name of a specific website into your web browser, the website may appear but some images may take longer to load than others. In this situation, a website would not be considered to be “loaded” until all of the elements on the page have finished loading.
In order to test both server response time and page load speed, we enabled monitoring on 20 test websites for 72 hours on the hosts mentioned above using Dotcom-Monitor’s BrowserView platform. As we’ve said on other places on this site, we prefer Dotcom-Monitor’s speed test and some of their other tools. BrowserView is nice because it measures both server response time and page load speed. Each of the sites monitored was a WordPress site with similar plugins, similar content, and similar page sizes. Although the sites weren’t identical (which doesn’t matter for server response time), they were very close so any difference in page load speed would be marginal. The results of the server response times (sorted by the average server response time) for each host are summarized below:
Looking at the hosts in the table, you can see that Flywheel had the lowest average server response time coming in at 0.425 seconds, followed by SiteGround in second place with an average of 0.637 seconds. These results aren’t surprising as both of them are hosts that we use and also recommend and they both do very well with WordPress.
In terms of server response time, the fastest web hosts are:
#1 Flywheel
#2 SiteGround
Something important to consider is the fact that while server response times do give an idea of server “snappiness” so-to-speak, they only paint one part of the picture. When measuring page load times, you can get a better idea of how a host manages their SQL database queries as well as how they balance other aspects of their servers that tend to be more memory and CPU-intensive. Below, you’ll see the table of page load times for the 20 hosts that were tested:
In terms of page load speed, you can see in the table above that Bluehost came in first place with an average time of 2.458 seconds, while WP Engine came in second place with an average time of 2.647 seconds. Again, this isn’t surprising as these are two of the best hosts out there for the money in our opinion, although we did think that WP engine might place above Bluehost as they’re a managed WordPress hosting company and a bit more expensive.
In terms of page load speed, the winners are:
#1 Bluehost
#2 WP Engine
So who’s the fastest web host overall? Well, determining that requires a little more analysis and math. In order to figure this out, we added both the average server response time and average page load time together (giving them equal weight) and then divided by two for a combined server response time and page load time metric for each host.
You can see the table of combined and average times below:
With a combined time average time of 1.694 seconds, the fastest web host is:
#1 WP Engine
Honestly, they deserve every bit of praise they get here as they’re one of the best WordPress hosts out there for the money, if not the best. While some people may say it’s not a fair comparison because their entry-level plan starts at $29/month ($24/month if you pay annually), they are such a popular web host for WordPress now that we thought it was important to include them in the test, and when you look at all of the results, they put up some great numbers deserving of the win.
Final Thoughts on the Fastest Web Hosting Companies
In 2021, website speed has never been more important—and in order to optimize speed, there are three main considerations that a website owner should think about: 1) on-site optimization (images, scripts, etc.), 2) off-site optimization (DNS, CDNs, etc.), and 3) your choice of hosting company.
While there are a lot of different factors that can affect website speed (even random things like visitor location, etc.)—in our opinion, these are the “big 3” and account for at least 80% of what makes up a fast website. So, if you want a fast website—these are the things to focus on.
On-Site Website Speed Optimization (span)
There have been volumes written about optimizing a website for speed and performance, so we’re not going to get into a giant post about it here—but it’s important to note that this is a big way to pick up website speed, and the first place you should start looking when trying to get your website loading time under 3 seconds.
Content management systems like WordPress are notoriously slow and full of JavaScript calls, so if you can optimize your scripts, compress your images, include some caching, and limit the overall size of your page—that will go a long way toward making your website fast.
Some of the fastest web hosting companies on this page (WP Engine, SiteGround) even have awesome caching that integrates with WordPress in order to help speed up websites and solve some of the aforementioned problems.
Off-Site Website Speed Optimization
While it’s important to first make sure that your website is as optimized as it can be in terms of scripts, page size, etc.—it’s also important to look into off-site optimization best practices as some of these things can also be quite impactful on website speed.
For example, if you look at some of the most popular websites on the Internet, they all generally have a premium DNS setup which includes some form of secure DNS that helps to mitigate DDOS attacks, spoofing, and other DNS issues.
On top of that, they almost always use some type of CDN such as Cloudflare or a custom solution that allows content to be served from anywhere in the world in a fast, efficient manner. CDNs also help reduce buffer time and deliver content uniformly across a wide range of browsers and devices. So, if you’re looking to optimize web performance, it’s important in our opinion to consider the use of a CDN.
Choosing the Fastest Hosting Provider
Selecting a fast web hosting company is something that’s often overlooked by webmasters who are looking to speed up their websites. It goes back to that old adage about a “house built on sand vs. a solid foundation.”
In other words—you can do everything right in terms of on-site and off-site optimization, but if you don’t choose a web hosting company with fast, high-performing web servers, a lot of that optimization well essentially have been done for nothing, because the slow servers will be limiting the performance of your website.
So, as we’ve described in this breakdown—there are a few web hosting companies with notable for performance, and they are WP Engine, SiteGround, Bluehost, and Flywheel.
If you’re looking for a good, reliable hosting company to build a solid foundation of speed and performance for your website, we would recommend any of those four options.
We hope this breakdown of the fastest web hosting companies has been helpful, informative, and sheds some light on the topic of speed and performance, helping you to create the fastest website possible!
Gentry