Siteground is one of the most recommended WordPress hosting companies. They are known for their top-notch customer support, reliable, and fast hosting plans. Their WordPress optimized hosting includes everything you’ll need to create and grow a successful website or blog. Read our complete SiteGround review to find out if SiteGround is the right host for you.
In this detailed SiteGround review, we’ll put their promises to 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 their customer support?
- Features: Do they offer all the features and tools you’ll need to build your website?
- Pricing: How much would 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 faster 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 since then, it 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 2,000,000 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 for all new customers, 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. You can choose the location you prefer during signup.
Cons
As we mentioned earlier, there are some downsides to every hosting company. The following are some disadvantages of choosing SiteGround as your host.
- Limited Storage: Their plans come with fixed storage. However, this storage is quite large, and if you are just starting out, 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 bigger 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
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 own tests to thoroughly review SiteGround’s performance.
SiteGround Speed Test Results
Speed is one of the most important performance metrics that you should look for. A faster website offers a good user experience and boosts your SEO at the same time.
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 (417 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.
To test how SiteGround servers would respond to increased traffic, we used a stress testing tool called K6 by Grafana Labs.
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 purple line is the number of active virtual users on the site, and the light blue line is the server response time. SiteGround performed consistently throughout the test without any hiccups.
This test shows that if you are looking for a really fast website, then SiteGround can be a perfect choice for you.
One of the reasons why SiteGround performed exceptionally well in these performance tests is because of the recent innovations they’ve added.
Almost all SiteGround servers are now 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.
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 the downtime and got 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 response time of the server.
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 and you can choose a data center closer to your target audience for even better response times in that particular region.
SiteGround Hosting Plans and Features
SiteGround offers shared hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, and dedicated hosting plans. If you are just starting out, then their shared hosting plans would be a perfect fit for your needs. 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 website,s 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 WordPress optimized version of their shared hosting plan. It comes with SiteGround’s in-house WordPress optimizations to improve the performance of your website. 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. It allows you to use resources of cloud architecture, including multiple cores CPU and bandwidth. It is suitable for growing websites, popular blogs, or businesses. It can also be an upgrade over VPS and traditional dedicated servers. See SiteGround Cloud hosting.
WPBeginner website is hosted on SiteGround’s Enterprise hosting infrastructure which is an enhanced version of their Cloud platform for large sites.
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 in 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 hosting websites with 25,000 monthly visits. You’ll get all the features of the Startup plan, plus you’ll get 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 can handle websites having 100,000 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 comes with faster disk storage, email accounts, support for the Cloudflare free content delivery network, and Let’s Encrypt free 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 support to their customers.
Their customer support includes 24/7 phone, live chat, and ticket-based email support. Their phone and live chat response times are almost instant. Email-based tickets get the first response within less than 10 minutes.
For users who prefer to fix things on their own, SiteGround offers an instant AI assistant. 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 say with confidence 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, then SiteGround is perfect for you. They have hosting plans for every budget, and each plan comes with 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 70% discount and free SSL with our SiteGround coupon code.
All you have to do is click on this link to 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 that we are asked 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 during sign 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.
This is why SiteGround is an officially recommended hosting provider for WordPress users.
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.
Regarding overall performance, technology infrastructure, and support quality, SiteGround is better than Bluehost. 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 50% 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 their shared plans. You can try out their services during this period. 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.
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Sharon Ruth says
Thank you for the help. You are the best! *****
Rahma says
Ervin was very very helpful for a clueless customer like me. Thank you siteground for providing such a good customer service.
Nigar says
thanks so much for your valuable assistance
Helen says
Fabulous service. Patient & knowledgeable.
Thanks!
LouAnn says
Excellent service – very patient with their customer ;0)
Dalia Hassanain says
Site Ground customer support is extremely professional.
Thank you
Kyle Anthony says
The service was superb and every question I had was answered and every service I needed help with was provided. I am so thankful I am with Siteground because everything runs so smoothly.
Tom says
i would love to interduce my respect for Ervin H for his help he is really the best is he reflects professionalism of this company Site Ground
Shirley Parker says
I am fairly new to SiteGround and all of your technical support people have been very helpful so far with the transfer of hosting and domains registration. I love the sense of humor that goes along with the respectful attitudes. (I realize my own attitude has much to do with the humor.) Christian was especially helpful today with resolving an SSL issue. Thank you. Now I feel comfortable getting back to work on my sites.
josefina elisii says
Debo decir que Tasos fue muy amable y realmento se ocupó de comprender el problema que yo presentaba.
Felicitaciones a Tasos
Joefina
Nicola Boccola says
Great assistance experience, thank you again Borislav
Jesus Herrera says
Excellent service!!!!
Steve Antonini says
always a fast response and problem solved without drama
Sunit says
Great experience.
Angelica says
Viktor was extremely helpful and very friendly to work with. He fixed my issue quickly.
Kim Kalman says
I love the support at Siteground. They are always available and help you with anything and are so very patient. I would recommend them to anyone who is looking for a hosting provider. Also, there site is easy to navigate and my website has jumped from page 3 to page 1 in google rankings just from transferring my site to them. I give them an A+++++++++++++
hamid mazuji says
i became angry because i wasn’t picking up what the walkthrough was putting down. after a few screenshots to tech support, everything fell right into place
Andrea says
As always Siteground support assisted me quickly and with no fuss.
Thank you Siteground.
Chris says
Nayden was awesome, solved my issue in less than a minute. Just moved 5 sites to Siteground and more to go, confident that after many years I have finally found the best host.
Once again, Nayden was fantastic and made my issue into a non-issue.
Gary Cook says
Their support seems good so far. Spent an hour on me making sure a migration was perfect.
Tim Heckaman says
He was very knowledgeable and kind. Helped out even tough I messed something up.
Charlotte Gray says
I really enjoy the webchat service of SiteGround. As someone who is not super techsavvy sometimes reading up on a problem can be challenging and it’s really helpful to just speak with someone. Every time I’ve got in touch, I’ve been helped with by great people, and this time I had to leave a full review. I cannot commend Nikolay T enough for his support today! He was patient and friendly and answered every question I put his way. Excellent excellent service, I’m very happy that I chose to host with SiteGround to have the support of such an incredible team. Thank you!
Bruce Bussiek says
Best service ever. Friendly and extremely competent staff. Recommended 100%!
Ricardo says
Great job, until for some reason the chat stoped out of nothing white I waited for an answer. Only a tech issue, not personal
Beth Harp says
Switched to Siteground for my WordPress hosting after upgrading to a dedicated WP host plan with my old host that could not provide one of the specific extensions that I needed. Siteground migrated my site over in hours and it functioned perfectly! Chat support helped me figure out a few small details and now my site is AWESOME with all the extensions functioning. Quick and responsive as well as affordable. Thanks Siteground!
Andrea Gatley says
Siteground customer service is always top-notch. I’ve been using them for a few years now and have been super satisfied with them for myself AND for my clients. The best hosting company I’ve ever used (and I’ve used a lot).
Brenda says
Siteground to me, is by far, is the best hosting company I’ve ever been with. Top notch customer support, guidance, helpful, site loads fast with ease.
I’m staying with Siteground!
Kristy Saunders says
My agent was a lot of help. Just wish he would have at least said that he was leaving the chat. I had one more question and wasn’t given the chance to ask. But all and all he helped a lot.
Lisa Hudson says
SiteGround is the best!
Every single support person I have interacted with have been willing, patient and an expert at resolving problems.
Keep up the good work Team Site Ground!
Maria Torp Høgh says
We had 2 supporters telling us the database was corrupt and the site lost. I googled and found out we had to change the wp-config file. I contacted support for the 3rd time today and the supporter was amazing! He deserves a pay raise.
We were actually considering changing back to one.com, but now that he helped up we are staying with you.
Anne-Marie Wynne says
I have not experienced any other business that provides such thorough and fabulous support as Siteground. I would not ever even consider moving to anybody else as support is paramount. The server itself has also been faultless. Today I dealt with Claudia in WordPress and she was so kind, patient and went above and beyond.
Adnan says
Such a great support , never seen anywhere
Desi Jagge says
I am so impressed by my interaction with. Svetoslav. He was genuine, friendly and helpful. He took the time to answer all my questions and wasn’t just looking to upsell me like many other server providers did.
Brian Vincent says
Nikola was a ninja rock star who fixed my fried site in about 30 seconds. I’d love to think I fixed it myself and was just a bonehead who didn’t flush his browser cache. Really though, there’s a better chance I changed a WordPress setting that made it forget where the site lived and he retweaked it to work. Whatever the case, he fixed it so fast I didn’t even have time to get a cup of coffee. Give this guy a phat raise and promote him to El Presidente!
Novak says
Service was good. I felt like part of the team. I felt I was able to assist in the development of this issue. Manners are hard to interpret text but she did an awesome job of displaying professionalism and curiously and collaboration.
What a great experience.
Lukas says
Fantastic support as always!
adeyemi oyinlola says
They are the best ive seen yet, from hosting to support, i have no single complain. they go the extra mile to keep me comfortable and i am sure its same for all customers. siteground gets a 5/5 from me. 5 star service
Jason Johnson says
Excellent!!!
Edwin says
he was good and was fast on helping me with the issue that i was having.
Bruce says
Excellent support!
Lisa Chapman says
Gabriella was very pleasant, timely, helpful.
Thank you!
Rajesh says
A great chat support, very responsive and caring
Filip Nekic says
Great customer service. So glad I come here.
Amelia says
Amazing live chat Support from Rumen T. from Siteground. Clear and detailled information and answers to all questions.
Mike says
Very clear and excellent chat support. they took their time to answer my questions.
masum says
awesome support
Paula Foreman says
Daniel was very helpful.
He was able to identify the causes if my issues and guide me in the right direction to resolve them.
David says
Nikola was onto the problem straight away, fixed in a few minutes. Great work. Now I can get on with my day without the anxiety.
Andre Pilon says
Quick, friendly.
David Birkin says
Incredible Customer Support, even when I realized I made a basic error the representative was happy to help.
I highly rate the Technical Support!
Thank you