SiteGround is one of the most recommended WordPress hosting companies. They are known for their top-notch customer support, reliable and fast hosting plans, and WordPress-optimized hosting, which includes everything you’ll need to create and grow a successful website or blog. Read our complete SiteGround review to find out if it is the right host for you.
In this detailed SiteGround review, we’ll put their promises to the test. These are the areas we will look into:
- Performance: Speed is crucial for the success of any website. How fast will your website load with SiteGround?
- Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7/365 without facing any downtime?
- Customer Support: Can you count on SiteGround’s customer support?
- Features: Do they offer all the features and tools you’ll need to build your website?
- Pricing: How much will it cost you? Are there any SiteGround deals that can save you money?
This is a comprehensive SiteGround review with a detailed analysis of SiteGround’s hosting service. If you don’t want to read the full hosting review, here is the quick scorecard with our verdict right below it.
| SiteGround Review Summary | |
|---|---|
| Performance grade | A+ |
| Average load time | 397 ms |
| Average response time | 123 ms |
| Free domain | Yes |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| 1-click WordPress | Yes |
| Support | Phone / Live Chat / Knowledge base |
| Start with SiteGround | |
Bottom line: We found SiteGround to be noticeably fast and extremely reliable. Their hosting plans are flexible, and their customer support is one of the best in the industry.
That’s why we’ve chosen to recommend SiteGround as one of the best WordPress hosting companies.
Now, let’s dive into our detailed SiteGround review so that you can see how we reached that conclusion and decide for yourself.
About SiteGround
SiteGround was founded in 2004 and has grown into one of the most well-known hosting companies.
SiteGround is a holding of companies registered in the USA, UK, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Spain, with data centers on three continents. Today, the company has over 500 employees and hosts over 3,000,000+ domains.
Pros and Cons of SiteGround
Each hosting company has its pros and cons. Some advantages can overshadow the disadvantages, but some cons can be a total deal-breaker for your needs.
Before making a decision, you may want to review these SiteGround pros and cons.
Pros
Here are some advantages that make SiteGround one of the top-rated hosting companies in the world:
- Super fast servers: All SiteGround servers are highly optimized for speed. They use the Google Cloud platform, which is one of the fastest platforms on the market.
- Top Notch Customer Support: Their customer support is amazing, to say the least. They offer 24/7 phone support, live chat, and ticket-based support.
- Free CDN and SSL They offer an instant setup of Cloudflare’s free CDN and free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.
- Multiple Server Locations They have data centers on three continents. During signup, you can choose the location you prefer.
Cons
As we mentioned earlier, every hosting company has some downsides. The following are some disadvantages of choosing SiteGround as your host:
- Limited Storage: Their plans come with fixed storage. However, this storage is quite ample, and if you are starting, you will most likely never need extra storage.
- Higher fee for monthly billing: The hosting service gets expensive if you choose monthly billing. But if you sign up for a longer billing period, then you’ll get a more significant discount and a lower rate. They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee anyway, so it’s a good idea to choose a longer billing period when you sign up.
SiteGround Performance Tests
While price often plays a significant role when choosing a web host, you cannot compromise on performance.
This is why we decided to run our tests to thoroughly review SiteGround’s performance.
SiteGround Speed Test Results
Speed is one of the most important performance metrics to look for. A faster website offers a good user experience and boosts your SEO.
In fact, a single-second delay can cause a 7% decrease in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.
We created a WordPress-powered test site on SiteGround and filled it with dummy content for theme development with images.
After that, we used Pingdom’s website speed test tool to run our tests. These were the results we got:
As you can see, our test site loaded in less than a second (397 ms, to be precise) with a performance score of 95.
This is incredible, but this website had almost no traffic, so the Pingdom test alone is insufficient.
SiteGround Stress Test Results
We used K6, a stress testing tool by Grafana Labs, to test how SiteGround servers would respond to increased traffic.
This tool gradually sends up to 50 users to see how the server would respond to increased traffic from multiple connections.
You can see the results in the chart below:
The gray line is the number of active virtual users on the site, and the green line is the server response time. SiteGround performed consistently throughout the test without any hiccups.
This test shows that SiteGround is a perfect choice if you are looking for a really fast website.
One of the reasons why SiteGround performed exceptionally well in these performance tests is because of the recent innovations they’ve added.
SiteGround servers are hosted on the Google Cloud Platform. They’ve also added UltraFast PHP and created a custom WordPress plugin for optimization (SG Optimizer), which really puts them in a premium web hosting category.
SiteGround Uptime Test Results
Typically, websites hosted on shared hosting accounts slow down during top traffic hours. That’s because your site is sharing resources with other websites on that server.
Most shared hosting companies automatically kill the server process if your site is taking too many resources. This causes downtime on your website.
We tested our SiteGround site for downtime and got a 100% uptime result.
SiteGround Server Response Time
Your website’s content has a huge impact on page load time. For example, if you have high-resolution images on a page, then it will significantly increase the overall page load time.
This means that speed test results may not accurately reflect how fast your hosting server really is.
Instead of analyzing page load time alone, we decided to test the actual server response time as well.
To do this, we used a tool called Bitcatcha. It ignores page content and only tests the server’s response time.
Bitcatcha also gives you average loading speed from different global locations. The speed for each location is measured three separate times, and then the results are averaged.
Take a look at the results in the screenshot below.
As you can see, SiteGround is a great choice if your target audience is mostly located in the United States. The server responded in a fraction of a second in the United States.
It responded within less than a second for all locations.
SiteGround also allows you to change your server location. For even better response times in that region, choose a data center closer to your target audience.
SiteGround Hosting Plans and Features
SiteGround offers shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting plans.
If you are starting a new site, their shared hosting plans will be perfect. However, your site will eventually grow, and you want to make sure that they have other plans that you can upgrade to.
Let’s check out SiteGround’s hosting plans and their features:
- Shared hosting: Shared hosting is recommended for new websites, bloggers, small business websites, or a startup online store. It is suitable for low-traffic websites as you will be sharing resources with other websites hosted on the server.
- WordPress hosting: This plan is the WordPress-optimized version of their shared hosting plan. It comes with SiteGround’s in-house WordPress optimizations to improve your website performance. See SiteGround WordPress hosting.
- WooCommerce hosting: This plan is a WooCommerce-optimized version of their shared hosting plan. It includes SiteGround’s optimizations, which greatly improve the performance of your online store. See SiteGround WooCommerce hosting.
- Cloud hosting: Cloud hosting plans provide a flexible upgrade to a shared hosting solution. They allow you to use resources of cloud architecture, including multi-core CPUs and bandwidth. Cloud hosting is suitable for growing websites, popular blogs, or businesses. It is also a suitable alternative to VPS and traditional dedicated servers. See SiteGround Cloud hosting.
WPBeginner’s website is hosted on SiteGround’s Enterprise hosting infrastructure, which is an enhanced version of their Cloud platform for large sites. We have written a separate detailed case study on this. For more details, take a look at why we switched to SiteGround.
Breakdown of SiteGround’s Shared Hosting Plans
SiteGround’s shared hosting options are the best way to build a new website. Their shared hosting packages are available as three levels to match different budgets:
- Startup: This plan is limited to hosting one website. It includes 10 GB disk space and is suitable for hosting a website with 10,000 monthly visitors. You’ll also get all essential features like a 1-click WordPress install, free setup, website transfer, daily backups, built-in caching (SuperCacher), free CDN, free SSL, and more.
- GrowBig: The GrowBig plan lets you host unlimited websites. It comes with 20 GB of disk space and is suitable for websites with 100,000 monthly visits. You’ll get all the features of the Startup plan, plus premium features like ultrafast PHP for even faster speed, on-demand backups, an easy staging tool, and the option to add collaborators to your sites.
- GoGeek: GoGeek plan is suitable for eCommerce websites. It includes 40 GB of storage and can handle websites with 400,000 monthly visitors. In addition to all GrowBig’s features, you’ll get access to priority support, more server resources, advanced features like one-click git repo creation, and the option to manage white-label clients on your sites.
Each SiteGround plan includes faster disk storage, email accounts, support for the Cloudflare free content delivery network, and a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate.
They also include several popular WordPress plugins like WPForms, OptinMonster, and All in One SEO to help you improve your website rankings.
SiteGround Support and Customer Service
You’ll see high praise for SiteGround’s customer support service everywhere. Their support team is remarkably good at offering quick, helpful, and knowledgeable customer support.
Their customer support includes 24/7 phone, live chat, and ticket-based email support. Response times for phone and live chat are almost instant, and for email-based tickets, the first response is within less than 10 minutes.
SiteGround offers an instant AI assistant for users who prefer to fix things themselves. Built on top of ChatGPT, this AI is trained to answer SiteGround customer questions.
The helo resource center also includes a massive collection of knowledge base articles.
This includes step-by-step tutorials and troubleshooting guides with screenshots and videos.
Since we use SiteGround to host several of our websites, we can confidently say that their support staff is very knowledgeable.
Conclusion: Is SiteGround the Right Choice for You?
After reading our detailed SiteGround review, you might be wondering if SiteGround is the best web hosting company for your website.
If you want a fast and reliable web hosting provider with excellent customer support, SiteGround is perfect for you. They have hosting plans for every budget, and each plan offers a great set of features.
All their shared hosting plans include SSD storage, site tools, easy setup of Let’s Encrypt free SSL and Cloudflare CDN service, 1-click WordPress installer, and free migration.
Built-in security features protect your website against malware, and you can add additional protection by turning on Cloudflare CDN functionality.
If you are just starting a website for the first time, then you will certainly appreciate SiteGround’s customer support.
Ready to get started with SiteGround? Click here to choose your hosting plan today.
SiteGround Coupon
WPBeginner users get an exclusive 83% discount and free SSL with our SiteGround coupon code.
All you have to do is click on this link to make a purchase. The discount will be applied automatically.
Frequently Asked Questions About SiteGround Hosting
In this detailed SiteGround review, we looked at all aspects of their hosting services. The following are some of the most frequently asked questions about SiteGround by our users.
1. Where are SiteGround servers located?
SiteGround servers are located in the United States, Europe, and Singapore. You can choose the server location when signing up.
2. Why choose SiteGround for WordPress hosting?
SiteGround offers a highly optimized WordPress hosting platform. Each plan includes its own in-house security features and WordPress tweaks that boost your WordPress site speed and performance.
You can easily set up a WordPress website with their 1-click WordPress installation. You can also move existing WordPress websites using the SiteGround Migrator plugin.
3. Does SiteGround support WooCommerce?
SiteGround specializes in WordPress and WooCommerce hosting. If you are building a WooCommerce store, then you can rely on SiteGround’s optimizations for consistent performance and reliability.
They are one of the top WooCommerce hosting providers and make it super easy to start an online store without any special technical skills.
4. Does SiteGround offer a website builder?
No, SiteGround does not offer its own site builder. That’s because they want users to have the option to pick the best website builder for their needs.
This is why they allow you to easily install WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Weebly, and many other site builder platforms.
On the SiteGround platform, you can also create unlimited web pages without any restrictions.
5. Does SiteGround offer cPanel hosting?
No, SiteGround no longer offers cPanel hosting. Once cPanel raised its licensing fees, SiteGround decided to remove cPanel hosting and instead built a far superior web hosting control panel for both beginners and advanced users. This allows them to offer managed WordPress hosting-like features without the high costs.
6. Is SiteGround better than Bluehost?
SiteGround and Bluehost used to offer the same features, but with recent innovations, SiteGround has significantly improved its hosting technology.
SiteGround is better than Bluehost in terms of overall performance, technology infrastructure, and support quality. However, with all this innovation, SiteGround pricing is significantly higher.
So, when it comes to pricing, Bluehost is better than SiteGround because not only is it cheaper, but it also offers a free domain name with each account.
For more details, see our honest comparison of SiteGround vs. Bluehost vs. WP Engine.
7. How does SiteGround compare with other hosting providers?
Readers often ask us how SiteGround compares with GoDaddy, Hostinger, HostGator, GreenGeeks, DreamHost, A2 Hosting, and other web hosting services.
They all used to provide similar features and technology, but over the last year, SiteGround has really stepped up its innovation.
With all the managed WordPress hosting features, Google Cloud infrastructure, and custom performance optimization, SiteGround is now in a class of its own with its premium hosting.
8. Does SiteGround offer a free domain name?
No, SiteGround does not offer a free domain name. You can buy a domain name from another registrar and point it to your SiteGround account or buy one from SiteGround during signup at an additional cost.
9. Can I cancel my SiteGround account and get a refund?
SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee with all its shared plans. During this period, you can try out its services. You are eligible for a refund if you cancel your account during this period. However, domain name registrations are non-refundable.
10. Which SiteGround plan is best for me?
Each SiteGround plan has different server resources. However, if you are just starting out, then their Startup plan would be perfect for that. You can upgrade at any time if you need more resources. Choose your SiteGround plan to get started.
Glenda
gave me a little extra help
Tara Reed
I have been with SiteGround for a few years and when I occasionally need help they never disappoint. I recently had trouble deploying a staged site to make it live and was not only helped but reassured that I wasn’t about to destroy everything. A huge amount of gratitude for the tech team – thank you!
Joel Montgomery
Your Support Team effectively worked to transition my website from my previous host to SiteGround. When problems came up, the Support Ticket was the way to expedite steps to make the process work.
Everyone on the Support Team was thorough, professional, friendly, and efficient. Thanks to each and every one.
I strongly encourage others to take advantage of what SiteGround has to offer.
Peggi Sargent
I’m new to SiteGround, switching from Hostgator, The tech support here is AWESOME!
They actually help you get your sites up and running instead of asking you the repeated questions days later, that Hostgator does. THANK YOU AGAIN SITEGROUND
Diane Runyon
Antonia was from heaven. My website was lost to the world. She found it, returned it online and saved my business from being invisible. There are no words to express my gratitude. Thank you so much.
John Garrett
Siteground is the best: daily backups, different levels of support, and an excellent interface. I run WordPress and HTML/php sites, and they have the highest Google Page Insights scores. Simply the best.
Lucas Camara
Amazing support!!! Very fast
Marc Fuller
Siteground support is always prompt and helpful.
dingbang Peng
Very professional and excellent customer support, they always help me solve my problems.
Gary T Mize
Thanks for helping with obvious questions.
Sam Hsu
Quick response. Solve our email sending problem within a minute.
Beti Mihajlovic
Amazing service! Fast and reliable!
Gary
Thanks so much for helping me get my sites back online. Appreciate all your help.
Great service always at Site Ground.
Jerzy Kozak
5 stars! Always helpful, always fast, always helping and teaching me something new
Simply awesome!
M Morrison
I always get top notch support from everyone on the team there! Very thorough and easy to understand. Keep up the great work!
Dennis
Outstanding customer service. I have been with Siteground for over 10 years and it is because of their amazing customer support. They never cease to amaze me with their commitment to ensuring our web presence is running perfect, protected and priced right!
John Wilson
My thanks to the Siteground Support Team is immense as always over the many years I have been a website hosting client.
A few weeks back my personal computer (PC) got hacked online over the Internet, and I ended up with no Outlook email or Facebook connectivity.
Luckily, being officially an I.T. retiree, but still very community active, I understand how the Internet infrastructure works. As my community website, and associated email infrastructure is hosted by Siteground, I contacted Siteground for help to resolve everything.
As always, Siteground Technical Support have been incredibly helpful, and I am pleased to say, my Outlook email setup works again from this morning.
THANK YOU SO MUCH SITEGROUND TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR HELPING ME OVERCOME IT !
Kind regards,
John Wilson
Clint
Siteground customer service is great. I use the chat option, and the techs are always quick to reply. Most recently, they helped me move my website to a new domain.
Kenny Koyama
The support is fast and very helpful.
Brooks
Siteground tech support is professional and responsive – there is no comparison between SG and all the other corporatized site hosting services – Tier 1 support is available – there is literally ZERO wait time to chat with a tech rep – ever. They are generally very knowledgeable and pro-active. In the event they can’t resolve an issue in real-time, Tier 2 gets things resolved promptly. Startup with SG took a little longer than I had expected, but that’s bc they’ve invested heavily in security, performance, admin and other tools, so I had a slight learning curve. But their tools are vastly superior to the canned cpanel tools you get with other hosting services – I am quite pleased with the overall experience since I started with SG 6 months ago.
Hugh
Having got fed up with a previous hosting provider whose reactions to help requests all took 36 hours and were then useless because the writer had not read the question, I came to SiteGround, had an online chat with someone who was responsive and clear and helpful…well, I couldn’t resist, and moved two websites to them. Now, 4 or 5 days later, it is all working again. Not only are the humans helpful and quick, but the ChatGP-driven help is excellent and timesaving – you do have to phrase your questions clearly, though, to get the best of it.
Olga
The ticket enquiry I created was reviewed and results delivered to me in no time – superfast, most attentive, highly ethical way of communication and a real human level of understanding. Really impressed and very satisfied. Thank you!
Robert Gomez
Some important things were deleted and support had everything restored quickly. Appreciate the quick service.
Chris
The hosting service I used previously had a daily database query limit that, if reached, would have them prevent further database queries until the next day, otherwise I would have to pay to increase the limit. SiteGround’s dedicated server would solve this problem. I will definitely use SitGround to host my next website.
Christina Hicks
The support team at Siteground is courteous, polite, kind, and a tremendous help. I am not a web developer, but with their guidance am able to correct issues as needed. Highly recommend!
Jackie Lee
I really appreciate the quick response from the support team!
Ruslan
Thank you for your quick service.
Andy Mack
Thank you for the fastest technical support help I have ever received! I have been migrating my sites over to siteground from a different host. I am so pleased with the service.
Mike Adams
I have been extremely pleased with your website hosting services and especially I have been more than pleased and satisfied with your customer support team. Almost two years ago I had moved all my customers (I am currently using 4 hosting plans) over to SiteGround from a different hosting company. Customer service is a big decision maker for me and I have used your customer service agents on many occasions and every time they have met and exceeded all of my expectations and they have always solved any issues that may have arisen. Moving over to SiteGround was the best decision that I have made for my company since I started it over six years ago. I will always highly recommend using SiteGround to any person that is looking for a high-quality hosting company. Keep up the great work.
SiteGround
Thank you for the wonderful review, Mike. Knowing that we’ve constantly met and exceeded your expectations, especially when it comes to customer service, is incredibly rewarding for us.
Thank you for choosing SiteGround and for the recommendation. Rest assured, we are committed to continuing to deliver the quality and reliability you’ve come to expect from us.
Best regards,
The SiteGround Team
Robert Riesmeyer
After having problems with multiple servers from other companies and all of them blaming us for the slow speed and poor performance, telling us we needed to optimize and reduce the size of our website, we switched to SiteGround and the difference is night and day. Our website is loading way faster, the admin dashboard is faster, media is loading in a split second, and on and on.
The customer service of Site Ground has been fantastic. They handled all of the heavy lifting in transferring our website from the old server to theirs. Quick, effecient, done.
Best move we have made for our website.
Robert D. Miles
I am a motion picture Executive Producer and Producer with one a dozen film is distribution worldwide.
I have just moved my website to Siteground and used several of their services including making changes to a substantial Wordpress site.
Not only has their teams work been amazing but so very fast and affordable.
I highly recommend them for any requirement you might have.
Robert D. Miles
Dutch
The site speeds are amazing and the support is very knowledgable and thorough! I’m so glad I made the switch to SiteGround!
Anton Persson
Love their support 10/10
Karen
We’ve been with Siteground for years and their WordPress hosting support is fantastic. 9/10 they’re able to fix or helps us with whatever technical issues we’re having.
Bruno Lindberg
I got good and fast suport. Very pleased.
BR Bruno
Carla Van Walsum
Very pleasantly and effectively helped! Thank you!
Anthony Shafto
Fast, courteous and always helpful no matter how big or small the request!
Usman
Customer support is amazing
Wayne G Stadler
Tried it and cancelled. I have 7 websites of various sizes, all wordpress. their “migration tool” would work on any of them. Tried other migration plugins which all failed on the Siteground side because of settings and the lack of cPanel access. Suport did nothing but blame my current host.
I do not recommend wasting your time with these guys.
SiteGround
Hello Wayne, the SiteGround Team here.
We located your account, reviewed the support history and we would like to reply with some additional information. It appears that our SiteGround Migrator plugin had some issues completing the transfer. This is most likely due to the current site configuration or permissions on the end of the host you’re transferring from. Something we have no control over, unfortunately. Many clients are using the Migrator when moving here from cPanel setups so this is unlikely to be the cause.
We can see your account with us is no longer active but if you’d like to give it another try – we’ll be glad to investigate the issue in more detail over ticket if needed and clarify the available transfer options. Let us know if we can do anything for you, our support channels remain open for you: https://stgrnd.co/contactus/ . We wish you a productive day ahead!
Veronica
Excellent customer support. Vladislav and Dimitar were very helpful.
SiteGround
Hello Veronica,
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Your words mean a lot to our team!
If you have any other questions – we’ll be there for you.
All the best,
The SiteGround Team
Aleita Eileen Laird
great service and prompt replies
Jacques Reuter
Fantastically competent and swift help from the Siteground team.
I completely messed up my existing installation and they were of great help.
Eldon
I agree, Siteground is fast. Their claim of simple tools is correct – with emphasis on “simple”. As a Siteground customer for many years, I am disappointed too often. Yes, websites are fast, and stable, but how does that balance with the home-grown buggy tools? and most recently their disaster email spam sorting? (You don’t have a choice, and I don’t think most customers even realize Siteground is deleting some important email.) Tech support is great when you have a “typical” question, but it can take days to get an answer if you ask something more complicated. I suppose the worst part is they force you into their way, or too bad. Very few choices in how you do things. I’m not sure how to balance the disappointments against the successes. Just know it is not all rosy like their promotions say.
SiteGround
Hello Eldon, thank you for your feedback. We’re pleased you’re satisfied with our support and the performance of our hosting services as we work hard to maintain high performance for our customers’ websites. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by our tools and Spam Protection feature. We take your concerns seriously and are committed to resolving the issue you’ve reported regarding legitimate emails being mistakenly filtered. Our team is ready to investigate this matter and provide you with the necessary assistance. Please contact our team through the Help Center: https://stgrnd.co/contactus so we can verify the account in question and assist you further.
When it comes to support inquiries, our goal is to deliver prompt and precise help across the board. For immediate concerns, our phone and live chat services offer quick assistance. However, there are times when more complex issues require a deeper level of technical investigation by our second-level technicians. In such cases, a bit more time might be needed to thoroughly address the matter. We assure you that our team is working diligently to address all issues promptly and effectively.
Thank you again for your candid review, and we look forward to the opportunity to enhance your experience with us.
Sincerely,
The SiteGround Team
Leanne
Thank you for your quick support.
Moinuddin Waheed
siteground is by far the best hosting provider in the industry.
I have used it for my client website and am very satisfied by the smooth service that it has at its end.
in terms of security, in terms of scalability and in terms of performance and uptime, it is the best hosting provider in the market.
the only cons which may seem at times is its a slight higher pricing.
overall best…
SiteGround
Thank you so much for your positive feedback! We’re happy to hear about your satisfaction with our hosting services. We’re committed to providing top-notch security, scalability, and performance. It’s great to have your input, and we appreciate your support. Happy hosting!
Donnie Caves
Thanks for quickly fixing the issue.
Patrick Tondreau
So happy with SG and their legendary help desk never more than 5 minutes before speaking with a real person. Love it
SiteGround
Hey Patrick! We’re happy to hear that you’re loving our help desk service! We aim to make sure you get the assistance you need promptly. Thanks for being a valued part of our community!
Puran
The support team is really great! They responde quicky and solved the helped out without any delays. I have used other provider’s services before but this one has best support team.
SiteGround
That’s fantastic to hear, Puran! We’re thrilled that you’ve had such a positive experience with our support team. Thank you for your kind words!
Chris
Very impressed with the support!
Ray Evans
I am very satisfied with the Technical Support! Absolutely no wasted motions or useless email back and forth – I put in my request, and it got completed, in about an hour. This is REAL 5-star technical support and on a Sunday, too! Absolutely STELLAR! Thank you very much.
SiteGround
Thank you so much for your review, Ray! We’re happy to hear about your fantastic experience with our technical support. And that we could meet your expectations. If you have any more inquiries or need further help, feel free to reach out. We’re here to assist you!