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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Steven Serpa says
Rumen, was very helpful, he fixed my problem in about 3 minutes… support at siteground is second to none they are the best…
David Huckabay says
As usual, fast, friendly, and accurate. Where do you find these great customer service people!
Sebastian Croce says
Fantastic customer service! world class
Luis A Ramirez says
Quick help
Diana treated me very quickly and helped with the problem. She is a super girl.
frank stanley says
very helpful and fast at sorting out my query
Alaina Brandt says
Hello,
I consistently have the best customer service experiences with your team. Across the help tickets I’ve submitted, the technological issue I need help with is resolved quickly and courteously.
Keep up the great work!!
Best,
Alaina
Jacqui says
Proactive support. Helpful , friendly and super supportive. Clearly experienced and knowledgable as it was a higher standard of support I have experienced in the past.
Terrill says
The representative was friendly, patient and super helpful. I really appreciate the excellent service.
Bonita Summers says
Absolutely stellar support as usual! Thank you for making resolving a technical issue quick, painless and stress-free.
Alyssandra says
Daniel B was absolutely efficient. He is a wonderful asset today and I am so pleased he was able to help in a matter of minutes reassuring me along the way.
Janakiram Mirthipati says
Siteground has an excellent support team. It’s a breezing experience and fun to contact the support team. They resolve the issues with lightning speed. Their understanding and response time is too quick. When I moved to Siteground, I had my doubts if my choice was a good one but after using their services for more than 6 months, I’d say my choice was perfect and smart. Thank you Siteground for keeping your services above our expectations.
shehbaz ashraf says
very helpful and welcoming member , top marks
Candice says
Super Friendly, Help and Professional
Simon says
The best like always!!!!!!!
Lynn Quiring says
Great service…as always! You give the best customer service that I have experienced. Thanks!
Daniel Wilcock says
They guy was really helpful. He put up with me not knowing what I was doing and really saved my bacon.
John Archer says
Your representative was very helpful
Eric says
Outstanding service from Emil, give him a raise and promotion ASAP!!
Juliet says
Chatted with Aleksandar from tech service. I was in a panic because I thought my site was hacked. Aleksandar was there to take care of the problem in seconds. In under a minute I contact tech services and got the issue resolved and was on my way to doing business as usual. Thank you Aleksandar and SiteGround for the great support!
Anusha says
Siteground customer care has been a fantastic experience so far! So happy to have switched to this host!
Johnna Green says
We had a scare where our site was compromised.
Upon accessing Siteground’s support was quickly responded to and in a short amount of time, the site was back up and running.
Thank you Siteground
Janet Johnson says
Excellent customer service!!!!
Debora Dengo says
Diana helped me very well and very fast. She is the best! Thank you Diana
Jon Barron says
Peerless customer support. The best hosting around. I’ll never ever change hosting providers as for me – excellent customer service and technical support is essential and more important in this industry than any other I can think of.
Bob Blatchford says
Rumen did an absolutely fantastic job in helping me out. I had people screaming at me because somehow I made a change to our WordPress Slider Revolution and I couldn’t figure out how to inactivate the timer to switch to a different hero image (because we only had one image), and Rumen helped me work through the problem which was not a simple one to resolve.
David says
Handled the issue in minutes.
Bob Jarman says
I am a newbie to e-commerce and I am using Siteground for the first time. The support is first class and they respond in double quick time.
Christian Hardt says
Great support of a great assistant. Always again.
Wendy Gardner says
Another friendly and efficient engineer today Martin Sim – thank you.
Pablo says
Really great guy! He did help me create a DNS record for use on our emails.
Karen Carney says
Absolutely the best help I’ve ever received from Site Ground. I’m hoping I get him every time I have to get help, which is alot.
Kate Benzin says
Great job. Efficient.
Sadık says
Dessy is kind, understanding, helpful and the best! SG rocks!
Joel Lamoureux says
Boyana provided exceptional support and my experience was 5 stars all the way. Exceptional approach, friendly, and superior knowledge to assist in my technical requirements. Thank you Boyana for your great work and congratulations SiteGround for hiring SUPER STARS like Boyana B!
roger barone says
I was very impressed by the feedback and answers to my questions regarding selecting siteground as a self-hosted wordpress.org website. A lot of my confusion has been cleared up. Your representative was patient, quick to respond, knew exactly what I was talking about. I did not feel rushed, pressured or talked down to. Your rep did a wonderful representing your company, and I have put siteground at the top of my list. I had two others previously. Your company WANTED my business and let it be known with wonderful customer service. If this is how I’m going to be treated in all future support requests…Siteground will have an edge over its competitors.
Alice Reinheimer says
If I could give these guys 10 stars I would. Their technical support is prompt and accurate – actually amazingly so. I have finally found a host who is worth having!
I had two issues related to moving my website locally. In both cases the issues were cleared up in a matter of minutes, not hours or days. Wow!
Thanks guys, for the great service!
Fred Hawthorne says
I can always count on the CHAT support team. They have repeatedly resolved problems that would have taken me days to figure out.
Megan O'Shaughnessy says
Martin was unbelievably helpful and knowledgable and understood my frustration. I truly appreciate his time and you should feel lucky to have him.
Jake says
Support is out of this world! I very rarely leave reviews but It would be criminal if I didn’t for the Siteground support team. They have a resolution and advice for every question or objective I am trying to achieve without fail. Siteground support is probably the most efficient support in most industries.
Marco Edelman says
Not one to leave random reviews for things that aren’t great, so trust me when I say I really got some good help on a very specific issue. Great assistance, can’t say anything less!
Wendy Gentry says
I am so grateful for the patience and kindness today! Thank you for saving a day of my life trying to figure this out.
Imran says
Very Professional !
Christine Michelle says
Palvin was amazing. He was a great help as I asked 1,000,001 questions about switching my site over. he was patient and offered great assistance. Thanks so much. I am happy with my experience already!
Paul says
Excellent customer service!!
J Kim Wright says
No sooner had I reported the problem than he figured out what was wrong and fixed it. I expected to be all day and it took seconds.
Susila says
Nikol S has excellent knowledge. Very helpful and supportive. Great service. She makes a big difference.
Nick Butler says
SiteGround is absolutely the best. I’d heard great things so I match the switch and I have never looked back. I’m currently in the process of migrating ALL of my personal site as well as my client’s sites to SiteGround. I had a question I didn’t even know how to ask and Daniel was able to understand what I needed and give me a solution, he even asked follow-up questions that helped me uncover things I would need to address later on and gave me solutions on how to resolve those as well! All of this in under 10 minutes. Seriously. You can’t get support like this anywhere else, I promise you. I’ve never seen or heard a negative thing about SiteGround, but if you can find something, I can assure you that the real mistake and tragedy would be if you did not give SiteGround a try.
Charles says
I just had my website migrated to SiteGround. They have a free migration service, but that didn’t work for me. I recommend the professional migration service, as it’s only $30. On my media-heavy website, issues popped up during the migration. Solving every issue, the SiteGround people were always professional, and the service was very prompt every time.
Everything was resolved perfectly within roughly 24 hours. Coming from GoDaddy, my website now loads and navigates much faster, and my formerly super-slow WordPress dashboard is quick and responsive, due to SiteGround’s more generous server resources.
Paola says
SiteGround is the best hosting company in all my years dealing with hosting companies, I have had several websites and I have not been able to find a company as efficient and nice.
Congrats!!
Dave Argue says
Atanas was incredibly helpful, solving a technical issue that I never could have figured out. I’m very pleased with the level of customer service he provided!