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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Darren says
Excellent support from Dimitar Poy! Thank You!
Francis says
It’s great with your assistance, thanks.
Rafi Machluf says
Hi There!
I am pretty new at the area and your customer support really been helpful to me.
so thank you very much and keep up the good work.
sincerely regard
Rafi Machluf
Jeff Gadjiev says
Martin P was able to help me resolve the issue that I was having in a fairly short period of time. He was able to explain why my website wasn’t loading properly and also gave me advice when it came to keeping my website from experiencing the same issues in the future.
Steve Attarian says
Great Service as always with Site Ground.
Ruth Bowe says
I find the support team any time i need anything is quick and very helpful.
Elaine says
I have been with Siteground for a few years now and their chat support is OUSTANDING. The staff are always so helpful and never treat you like you’re an idiot, even though you feel like you are asking a base-level question. They have also helped sort out some very complicated issues too. I have no hesitation in recommended Siteground. Also since I have moved to Siteground, the amount of attack issues that hit my site are ZERO.
Jamie says
Service from ground site staff in resolving problems have been consistently exceptional. Grateful for their help.
Terrilyn says
I am SO very impressed with support here at SiteGround, so glad I switched over…..
Denise Traver says
Fabulous and efficient service. Have recommended you to other friends due to the excellent service and will continue to do so. Thanks!
Jovan B says
Siteground customer services is probably the best in the industry. I’ve experimented with multiple hosting providers and no one can even come close to this. No matter how many issues pop up, big or small, they were always fast to help.
Nothing buy praise for their customer support team!
Alfonso says
Siteground has stunning customer service. They solve any problem you have, quickly and kindly.
Henry says
Will you please pass on my thanks to you and all your colleagues for their supportive, non judgmental and focussed approach to the problems raised. All of you have a nice day, but I may need you again!
Henry Douglass; formerly IBM UK Marketing Manager Mid Range Systems.
Ishan Fernando says
Siteground support service is HIgh quality. We don’t need to worry about anything and they solve every problem quickly.
Johanna says
Thank you as always for helping me to sort out technical issues. Always so prompt, helpful and you make difficult things easy.
brian says
Great help,thanks my friend
Scott says
I’m adventurous with IT and the web but still a bit of a novice in some areas. Siteground and their team members ensure that my novice status is covered with excellent support when I need it. Did I mention FAST – I’ve not come across any other host services that respond so quickly and nothing is too much trouble to explain.
A special big thanks to Totyu (Chat Support) for his assistance today – fantastic.
Ilenia Gennari says
The operator was very kind and professional! Thank you very much Siteground, great work!
Rich Brannan says
SiteGround ROCK after having a Nightmare with another webhost who will remain nameless I moved over to SiteGround after watching Darell Wilson on youtube with WordPress and the Elegant Themes theme he rocommended and Boy am I glad i did Tech are awesome the UI is Fantastic
joel chant says
Nora was a brilliant customer service person – really helpful
James Ross says
Quick at responding and getting me the information that I needed
top marks
martin says
Siteground support is amazing. For me I mucked up a url change and had a big problem of not being able to access my site anymore.
I lodged a ticket and it took 8 minutes to fix!!!
Thanks so much.
Mark Royer says
Diana was fast, friendly, fair and saved my butt!
I would give her a 10-Star score if I could.
Thank you for having a Rock Star Support group.
Joanna Stephens says
Siteground goes above and beyond my expectations to help solve my problems quickly and efficiently. The representatives are always friendly and so knowledgeable.
phil cheney says
Alen was great, did what I wanted immediately and explained well
Ing says
Siteground is the best!! I’m so happy I signed up with them. Super friendly and understands and addresses your questions with great efficiency! I couldn’t be happier.
Erin says
this is my second interaction and amazing service
Nicholas Norton says
Vasil did a fantastic job helping me today. We spent 2 hours together working hand in hand. Give him a raise. He’s doing great. Thanks for the great service Siteground.
Bryan Seton says
Great service every time, thanks again
Ofir says
Very good service , fast and professional
Greta Asparuhova says
Great hosting!! Great support!
Donnevin says
Petar was amazing really friendly and Awesome support … give him a raise.
Fay says
Ivan G was amazing! He spent approximately 55 minutes, answering my questions, sending me useful tutorials, and waiting on the chat with me to ensure I got my issues sorted out. I kept coming up with more and more questions and he was incredibly patient throughout. I never felt like I was being a bother, or that I was asking too many questions. I appreciate his time and expertise and most importantly, he helped me address all my tech issues! Thank you!
Fay
Gina Kane says
What a great team of support techs! I’ve been trialing their GrowBig hosting service for a few days now, migrating sites and emails over which usually causes a few issues. They have really gone out of their way to help me resolve any issues. Thank you!
Kit Mckee says
This is the greatest hosting company in the world. Why? Because their customer service is beyond impressive. They help trouble shoot issues related to my site that are not even their problem. Outstanding
Denise says
Very paciente and efficient.
Thank you
Matthew says
Awesome service, fast and reliable. Easy install. Ace A++
Joan Zuniga says
Honestly super good way better hosting that what I use to have my site load way faster now I never get even close to that speed And I have the pro plan from bluehost so this is a more better hosting company by far so a definitely recommend you to use them
Thanks
Regards
Joan
John Taylor says
Great help from Todor. Much appreciated
Faisal Hussain says
Great service by Bozhi Top notch service and the people really know what they’re doing. Much appreciated.
Everest Louis says
I had a small technical problem with my website and I contacted Siteground support staff and they immediately fixed it.
I really appreciate their very prompt support. I have hosted two websites with Siteground and I am extremely happy with their service.
Alice Yates says
This was an awesome experience. I was answered within minutes. My inquiry was attended to perfectly. Can not say enough and thank you.
Rob says
This gent had my site up and running within minutes, fixed some code.
Great support and great start to me hosting my site with siteground
Matt says
Absolutely brilliant support, as always. Cheap, reliable and the support, no words, just wow.
Sam Brook says
Easy to use hosting. Great customer service. Reasonably priced. Excellent value for money.
Renato Ranghini says
Always correct, professional and … nice
Ciarán Toner says
Kiril always gives great customer service. It’s truly next to none in the industry. Recommend SiteGround for anyone who needs WordPress hosting.
Kenny Sing says
I purchased a 3 year membership today, migrated 6 websites with the SiteGround Migrator plugin, and installed SSL on all sites. Ran into a few hiccups along the way as one would expect, but SG support was as close to instant as it could have been. 5 different support tickets opened and closed in a single day. So glad I made the switch.
Mike Barker says
Excellent support. I recommend Siteground to everybody I speak with, because of this incredible support. It s what sets Siteground apart from any other supplier.
Kim says
Diana was super helpful, quickly made the changes we needed to see, and even recorded a tutorial video for us so we could make these changes ourselves in the future if needed. Prompt and seamless customer service!