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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Aaron Taylor says
I contacted Siteground as I was having an issue with my email. Problem was solved within a couple of minutes of chatting. This is why Siteground is my top choice of Hosts, their support is amazing.
Thankyou from a happy customer.
michael frassine says
I had the pleasure once again to speak with one very competent, kind and bright advisor. I love your services
Alison Bell-Roberts says
Superb help from Boyana today. Straightforward and explained things really well. She was so polite.
Henry says
Really Super!! great staff, very helpfull. Nothing is too much and very good in explaining stuff and helping trough all the steps to be set.
Very happy that we have found them.
We will for sure move more of our domains and hosting to them.
Meilisa Southwick says
Thrilled with Siteground so far. It’s faster than my last host which is the reason I transferred but hands down, the best thing is how good the support is. You can chat online with someone very quickly and they’re really quick to understand the issue and help you resolve it. English is perfect, very little waiting time if any, and expertise is right there. So happy I changed.
Amira says
Excellent support George T. took the time to troubleshoot any possible issues and explained everything along the way. Handled all my questions and was just great to work with. Truly took the time needed to help me and I greatly appreciated it.
Thank you!
Nitesh Tiwari says
Thank you so much Ervin, You are the best.
Terry Butler says
It didn’t take to get connect with Daniela. She was very courteous and helpful.
David Boynton says
Incredibly quick and helpful!
Jenna says
Quick, efficient and helpful support — my favorite part about SiteGround.
Joe says
My questions were answered, thank you.
Danny Deori says
Quick assistance, much appreciated.
Jennifer Brauer says
The customer service rep was outstanding. He went out of his way to solve my issue and to help me get my site properly transferred. I was appreciative of the fact that he made an extra effort to find some “lost” files and to correct their location. Thank you again!
lesley says
Zhorzh I. was very helpful! Answered all my questions!
SanjaY says
It was really amazing experience.
Andrew A. Tjoa says
SiteGround Support is amazing! They have been very helpful. Very highly recommended! Thank you very much.
Rosemary Collins says
Excellent service again from SiteGround. I had a few issues on my site that the technician were able to sort out. They were very kind, polite and very patient. I would recommend this company to anyone looking for great hosting services.
Graham Underwood says
SiteGround online chat support is excellent. Very fast response time, and the person who helped me was knowledgeable and very willing to help. He resolved my problem.
Charles Mann says
Ervin H. was extremely helpful and fast. He answered a question or two and got the problem quickly solved.
He was the epitome of customer services.
Thanks!
Charles Mann
Jordan Mynes says
Once again, I can always trust Siteround’s support chat for prompt, effective, straight to the point help with whatever it is I need.
Not only is it fast, the support is top quality, I never have to walk away just saying “Well, alright, I guess that’s all we can do.”
Instead, their support continually raises the bar. Whether you know nothing about the issue, or are a seasoned dev, highly recommend using their support when you get stuck.
Stephen Harden says
Extremely patient, thorough, and accessible… he explained things so that I could understand. Best customer service I’ve had anywhere in years!!!
linda says
I have been so very impressed with the degree of patience and help I have received from SiteGround techs since moving my domain here. Each time the techs have worked with me to figure out what problems I’m having and we’ve gotten everything taken care of. I couldn’t be happier with my move to SiteGround.
David says
I just switched hosting and boy am I glad I did. The support was almost non–existent previously and Siteground helped me move 7 sites over and installed all SSLs for me!!! Sites are super fast as well. Very glad to be a new customer of Siteground!
David says
Very good! Thank you Desislava !
Vincent says
Siteground technical stuff is simply the best. These guys are amazing indeed. I don’t imagine working or hosting with another provider. Their service is totally excellent.
Thank You a hundred times
ellah says
The best technical support in the world, very fast and friendly also. Great place to be
Lane says
I had a issue and they helped me quickly as usual. I appreciate the support siteground provides, although its not always the easiest to find the help links, when i do, they are helpful! Been with them 10 years now.
Mehdi Fahraji says
Great Customer Service
Ruban Jayathas says
Extremely professional and empathetic person.
Roderick says
Excellent service with a lot of technical knowledge. I’m always happy with this hosting service
Carlton Clark says
Siteground support is amazing. I call on them at all hours of the day and I’ll tell you 24/7 really means 24/7
AJ Zane says
Excellent service. The agent was willing to spend about 40 minutes with me going through a bunch of issues migrating a site. With their help, everything eventually worked and now I have a very happy client
Jay says
Felipe was awesome! Took care of everything quick and accurately. Thanks!
Spence says
I have been with siteground for years now and have never had difficulty in getting fast and proper help from the service department.
Paul Loader says
Very helpful, many thanks
Nikak Akpabio says
Siteground support is extra-ordinary. Providing excellent support service even during the lock-down period.
Bravo to Siteground
Ahmad says
I appreciate siteground world best services, especially the person who help me the most Agop D.
Cristian says
Excellent Service. Excellent company. Keep up the good work.
Kristopher Hawkins says
I had two queries to discuss and used the live chat and spoke to Tsacho T.
He was really friendly and super helpful. He provided me with step by step instructions on how to make the required changes.
Excellent service and knowledge, thank you Tsacho.
Regards,
Kristopher
Rubal says
Great Support. Issues resolved promptly
Thai N says
It was a great experience to deal with Stefan rep. who is very patient & helpful. At the end, I decided to be hosted by SiteGround and he is there to guide me through the migration process. Thanks again.
Barv says
He was extremely helpful and expeidiant
Katherine Lekas says
I had an issue transferring some domains and pointing them to a new server and I struggled for DAYS. Martin went way above and beyond his job description and fixed my issue in like a minute. Don’t know what I’d have done without him!
Richard says
Siteground support is superb. Quick understanding of issues, clear responses, instant escalation when needed. The best!
Rachid Chkiri says
Thank you for your patiance and your help
Brett C says
These folks are always kind, understanding, and really helpful. I’ve been hosting multiple sites with them for years, and I can’t remember a time where I didn’t have my issue solved easily. Hosting is fast. Automatic backup/restore is amazing. Best hosting around.
Susan Ray says
Loved the quick and excellent service.
Was just nervous about seeing the new nameservers and thought I would check that out first.
Ki Ho Andrew Jang says
Martin was super helpful and prompt!! thank you
Ramsay says
this company is ace! today, Nikolay provided me with superb customer service, as always. I highly recommend using this company for your web hosting requirements…
Wendy Chadbourne says
Tech support did a great job! Not only did they help me through some e-mail settings for my iPhone, they also helped edit some php code that I was not sure of how to handle. It’s great to have such knowledgeable help on speed dial!