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SiteGround is one of the most popular and highest rated hosting provider in the WordPress community. They provide unique in-house WordPress speed and security solutions to make your site as fast and secure as possible. They are known for the best 24/7 support in the industry. This is also why we use SiteGround for hosting the WPBeginner website. SiteGround features include automatic upgrades, daily backups built-in WP caching, free CDN, free SSL, one-click staging and GIT version control. They are also one of the few companies offering location specific hosting with 6 data centers in USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia. On top of all this, they have а special 63% discount for WPBeginner readers.

Pros:

  • Fast servers powered by Google Cloud
  • Great customer support
  • Officially Recommended by WordPress
  • 1-click WordPress install
  • Free Domain, SSL, CDN, and Website Backups
  • Easy Staging Tools
  • Free Website Migration

Cons:

  • Slightly more expensive

WPBeginner users get an exclusive 70% off discount and free SSL!

Visit SiteGround

(this discount will be applied automatically)

SiteGround Review from Our Experts

Editorial Note: We earn a commission from partner links on WPBeginner. Commissions do not affect our editors' opinions or evaluations. Learn more about Editorial Process.

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 gradeA+
Average load time397 ms
Average response time123 ms
Free domainYes
Free SSLYes
1-click WordPressYes
SupportPhone / 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.

SiteGround website

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.

Strangeloop performance case study

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:

SiteGround speed test results

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:

SiteGround stress testing results

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 uptime results

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.

SiteGround response time

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 pricing plans

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.

SiteGround AI support assistant

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.

SiteGround support

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.

WPBeginner users get an exclusive 70% off discount and free SSL!

Reader Interactions

5,020 SiteGround User ReviewsLeave a Review

  1. Syed Balkhi says

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  2. Nouman says

    Sales Rep was very friendly, helped to get everything sorted from start to end. he explained everything very well. I am more than happy from his service.

    Thanks to him for being very helpful.

  3. Tyra says

    This tech when the extra mile. Wow. This is why i have chosen to move all of my domains from ipage and bluehost to sg. Thanks

  4. Jane says

    Kostadin was amazingly helpful with many different topics, and we got through them quickly and effectively. I highly commend this tech person, he was awesome!!

  5. Chester Clark Yee says

    As a long time subscriber with siteground, they never fail to amaze me. Very supportive tech support too.

  6. SALMAN MADNI says

    very very very good response if i m there i will hug you because the way of deal is very impressive

  7. Dave K says

    Viktor You are awesome! Second time you helped me out big time. And that in such a quick reaction time.

  8. Arpit Agrawal says

    Goergi, were really helpful. Excellent customer support. If team Site Ground can work on price factor with Indian Consumer in mind like other players,,,,they really can do amazing as they already have extra ordinary customer support executives. A++

  9. Naomi Moon says

    Julian was super helpful and polite. I am used to waiting long periods of time for responses via chat but I believe I had his full attention. Very pleasant experience.

  10. Steve Duskett says

    Honestly, I’ve been with you guys for a little over 7 years now and have never had a single complaint. Your servers are fast, your support is amazing, and all the tools available to me without owning an extremely expensive dedicated server are pretty incredible.

    Top-notch, as always

  11. David Landesman says

    The support was courteous and excellent. No beating around the bush. I was given the solution to my problem within minutes.

  12. Tilden says

    Great help. Stefan walked me thru the backup restore process that got my site back to the original design before things got messed up

  13. Lidija says

    Svetoslav was great! Super polite, answered quickly and provided me with all the info I needed. Well done, keep up the good work!

  14. Kaylee says

    SiteGround support is the BEST! There is no equal. They are patient and effective every time. Thank you, SiteGround!

  15. M. Farai Willie says

    I’ve been stuck with my Hosting renewal bill and I reach out to SiteGround team, and honestly they helped me out, understanding my situation, make some flexible adjustments and I can always reach out to them at anytime. This is such a great web service company out there! I love y’all guys

  16. Brian Dunlap says

    Hello,
    Just want to drop a note and say thank you. We always get such good support when we need it. This is why we have been customers for years.

    Thank you again.

    Brian

  17. Jon Gomes says

    I am SO happy with Siteground and recommend to everyone. Every time I find the support goes above and beyond, please give them all raises. Fast website speeds and easy backups as well!!

  18. Juan Gerratana says

    The support was incredible, Martin chatted me and everything went very fast. I had a little problem with verification
    and it only took a couple of minutes to figure it out. Attention 10/10

  19. Amy Greer says

    I ended up on SiteGround trying to find the answer to a big, stupid question about web hosting at 3am my time. I started a live chat mostly just to see what would happen. I was honestly expecting an error message, a reply in about 5 hours, or a robot. Instead I got Aleksandar Ts. He was friendly, fast, handled all my questions, and gave me some really helpful tips. I went from desperately googling something I barely understood to having a solid plan and a shiny new account to solve my problem in less than an hour. I’d like to give Aleksandar an A++, and I hope his bosses hear about it. It was a really awesome and fantastically easy customer service experience, and I hope it’s representative of the work SiteGround does as a whole!

  20. Linda says

    Diana was extremely professional, supportive and patient when we worked together on the 24 hour chat support line. If there was a way to get Diana’s support to continue with the set up of my website, which I am trying to get done as soon as possible, I would be extremely happy. :-) Thank you, Diana!

  21. Jeff VerHoef says

    Agop was a great help to me this morning. I’ve had several annoying issues and he helped me resolve one and pointed me in the right direction with the others. It is great having someone to help when the need arises. Siteground is great that way and I’m glad I made the switch last year.

  22. Sarah says

    I had an issue with my site and the representative helped me troubleshoot and then gave me an assignment to do once we ended the chat to try to figure out where my problem was coming from. His suggestion worked and I was able to resolve my issue. Thank you!

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