SiteGround Review: The Best Web Host We’ve Tested So Far

8.6/ 10
SCORE

SiteGround

Buy at SiteGround

Pros

• Great features for WordPress users
• Excellent customer service

Cons

• Several upsells within the account dashboard

Editors’ Note: SiteGround offers high-quality managed WordPress hosting, complete with tools for fast site setup, improved site speed and enhanced security. SiteGround also impressed me with its server performance and customer service — something most other web hosts fall short on. All of these factors led to SiteGround earning a CNET Editors’ Choice Award as the best web host overall.

Any time the topic of WordPress hosting comes up, SiteGround is recommended — it’s even on our own list of the best WordPress hosting companies. I spent one week testing SiteGround’s services to see if it lives up to the hype.

I used our process for testing web hosting services to evaluate SiteGround in four main categories: ease of use, performance, customer service and value. SiteGround impressed me at almost every turn, proving that it really is one of the best web hosting services for WordPress users.

Plans and pricing: All WordPress all the time

SiteGround offers several types of web hosting:

• Shared or WordPress hosting
• WooCommerce hosting
• Cloud hosting
• Reseller hosting

Reseller hosting is aimed at web agencies and small hosting companies, so we’ll focus on the other plans. If you’re curious about reseller hosting, check out our list of the best reseller hosting companies.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the customer-focused kinds of web hosting offered by SiteGround:

Let’s take a closer look at these hosting categories.

Shared and WordPress hosting

Shared hosting stores dozens or hundreds — sometimes even thousands — of websites on one server, allocating a set amount of storage, bandwidth and processing power to each site. This limits the number of pages your site can have and the number of monthly visitors it can handle, but it also makes shared hosting more affordable than other kinds of hosting.

WordPress hosting is generally shared hosting optimized for WordPress, a content management system or CMS for creating and managing website content like blog posts. WordPress hosting often includes pre-installed WordPress, plus things like automated WordPress updates, custom themes and custom plugins.

At SiteGround, all shared hosting is WordPress hosting. The plans on the Web Hosting page are identical to those on the WordPress Hosting page. WordPress isn’t pre-installed, but every plan comes with the following WordPress features:

• WordPress setup wizard
• Auto-migrator for transferring an existing WordPress site to SiteGround
• Auto-updates for WordPress
• WooCommerce enabled
• Speed optimizer plugin
• Security optimizer plugin

These WordPress features are so robust that using SiteGround with a website builder or another CMS doesn’t make sense, as you’ll miss out on SiteGround’s best features.

SiteGround’s shared and WordPress hosting plans also include:

• Free domain for the first year
• Secure socket layer certification for improved security
• Daily backups
• Caching and CDN for enhanced speed
• Firewall protection
• AI anti-bot system
• Email hosting

For most users, the main differences between plans are the storage, bandwidth and pricing. Here’s a breakdown of how these differences shake out:

WooCommerce hosting

WooCommmerce is a popular e-commerce plugin that makes it easy to create an online store. SiteGround has a page for WooCommerce plans, but they’re identical to the shared/WordPress hosting plans, so you’ll get the same service regardless of the page you buy from.

Cloud hosting

Cloud hosting involves storing your website on several interconnected virtual servers. If one of those servers goes down, your site stays functional by pulling data from another server, ensuring continuous uptime. Cloud hosting is also highly scalable, allowing you to add resources (like bandwidth and storage) as needed rather than forcing you to choose from a limited selection of plans. These benefits make cloud hosting a great choice for fast-growing sites, especially business websites.

SiteGround cloud hosting includes the managed WordPress features we’ve already discussed, plus the flexibility of cloud hosting. The most affordable pre-built plan is JumpStart at $100 per month, which includes enough storage for at least 400 pages and enough bandwidth for 5 million monthly visitors. You can also create your own plan, customizing the bandwidth, storage and processing power to meet your needs.

SiteGround ease of use: Mostly straightforward

I created an account and website with SiteGround to determine ease of use for three essential aspects of web hosting: the purchase process, account management and website/server management.

Purchase process

The SiteGround purchase process is divided into two pages. You’ll choose your domain on the first page, then create your account and enter your payment details on the second page. The second page is also where you can select your contract length and purchase any add-ons you’re interested in.

I have two issues with this page. The first issue is the tiny text under the Extra Services area that tells you discounted prices apply only to your first contract term. I’m glad the text exists — some companies, like DreamHost, don’t display this information anywhere. But it’s so small that it can easily be overlooked, especially since it’s not near the main pricing information. Unfortunately, I’ve experienced this issue with most of the hosting companies I’ve tested — with Ionos being a notable exception — so it’s an industry problem, not just a SiteGround problem.

My other issue is the Domain Privacy add-on. Domain privacy is an essential service that prevents your ownership details, like the address connected to your domain, from being displayed publicly in the WHOIS database. This is particularly important if you’ve connected your personal information to your domain, and it’s so crucial that most domain registration services (including those provided by other web hosts) include it as a built-in feature. You shouldn’t be paying an additional $12 to $24 per year for this service.

Account management

The SiteGround account dashboard displays links to all of the functions you’ll need to manage your account and website, using large text and generous spacing to make everything easy to find. This includes the Billing area, which is included in the top menu rather than hidden away in a drop-down menu like it is on HostGator or GoDaddy.

The first time you log in, you’ll see your hosting plan and a Set Up Site button. After you’ve created your site, the dashboard provides quick connections to your websites, domains and email marketing plans. My main annoyance here is a persistent upsell for premium backups, which I can’t find a way to get rid of.

Upsells are, unfortunately, a major part of the SiteGround account dashboard. You’ll find more of them in the Websites area, and again, there’s no option to delete them. Still, if you’ve trained yourself to ignore internet ads (and let’s be real, most of us have), you can easily skip over them to reach the functions you need.

Website and server management

SiteGround’s website setup area is highly organized, with clear options for starting a new website or migrating an existing one. You can also choose to use WordPress, WooCommerce or the Weebly Sitebuilder. This last option surprised me, as SiteGround is primarily a managed WordPress hosting company, with no mention of Weebly anywhere on its plans pages.

After I selected WordPress, I found… more upsells. This was another surprise, as Ionos is the only other host that’s tried to sell me new products during the website setup process. However, unlike Ionos, SiteGround provides clear options for moving forward without making another purchase.

Opening WordPress for the first time takes you to the SiteGround WordPress Starter. This plugin walks you through choosing a theme from a curated list of themes for various types of websites. I didn’t find the theme I wanted here, but this curated list is less overwhelming for beginners than searching the full WordPress.org theme database.

Next, SiteGround displays plugins for things like contact forms, e-commerce functionality, image galleries and more. You can select as many of these as you like and SiteGround will install them for you.

The process is simple and fast, helping you get the bones of your site set up in a few minutes. When it’s done, you’ll be directed to the SiteGround WordPress assistant, which includes quick links for viewing your site, managing pages and changing your theme. This feature is nice, but I expected SiteGround — a highly lauded web host in the WordPress space — to offer functionality closer to the Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting) Site Assistant.

My final SiteGround surprise was that I needed to enable SSL certification myself. Setting it up only took a few clicks in Site Tools, but I was annoyed that I had to do it at all. Of all the web hosts I’ve tested, only Ionos and GoDaddy required me to set up my own SSL certification. Every other host does this automatically.

Server management tasks are also conducted through Site Tools, SiteGround’s proprietary answer to the industry-standard cPanel. I enjoyed how easy Site Tools was to navigate, with links to its essential functions in the sidebar. Its simplicity reminded me of Hostinger’s hPanel, the best cPanel alternative I’ve encountered so far.

Overall ease of use

SiteGround’s website creation process isn’t perfect, but it’s not difficult. The upsells can easily be skipped, the WordPress starter is great and I didn’t need to contact customer support for assistance. This earns SiteGround an 8/10 ease of use ranking. The SiteGround experience is easier than what you’ll experience with GoDaddy — ranked at 7.5/10 — but more challenging than setting up a site with Hosting.com — ranked at 9/10 — or Hostinger — ranked at 10/10.

SiteGround performance: Excellent uptime, acceptable speed

I tested two aspects of performance during my SiteGround review:

• Uptime: The percentage of time your site spends online.
• Site speed: The number of seconds it takes for your site to load.

I created a SiteGround test site using the Total WordPress theme and assessed it for one week to determine how well SiteGround delivers in these areas. I also analyzed SiteGround’s performance tools.

Performance tools

SiteGround includes a Speed Optimizer plugin with every WordPress install. Speed Optimizer’s primary function is caching, a protocol for storing site data in something called a fast-access layer connected to a central processing unit or CPU — either your server’s or your visitor’s. This fast-access layer retrieves information at the CPU speed level instead of the slower speed of the random access memory or RAM used for traditional data storage.

Speed Optimizer enables Dynamic Caching, which uses a cache on SiteGround’s server by default. You can also enable other types of caching to further improve your site speed.

Speed Optimizer offers a variety of other optimization tools, including automated weekly database cleanup, HTML/CSS minification and image compression. These tools can dramatically improve site speed, especially if your website uses a lot of images or complex code.

A free content delivery network — CDN — is also included with all SiteGround plans. This improves your site speed by storing data in several interconnected servers around the globe, allowing visitors’ devices to pull your site from the server closest to them instead of requesting information from a server on the other side of the world.

Uptime

If a visitor can’t access your website, there’s a good chance they’ll go elsewhere — and with 1.1 billion websites on the internet, there’s always somewhere else to go. This makes it crucial to keep your site online 24/7, or as close to it as possible, to prevent it from losing traffic, audience trust or, in the case of a business website, revenue.

SiteGround offers the industry-standard 99.9% uptime guarantee on all plans, meaning your site won’t go down for more than 10 minutes per week due to server issues. I monitored my test site for one week with Better Stack, and it experienced no downtime whatsoever. This suggests that SiteGround exceeds its 99.9% uptime guarantee.

The 100% uptime experienced during my week of testing is similar to what I’ve experienced with hosts like Hostinger and Ionos. This is also better than what I’ve experienced with other popular web hosts like HostGator, which had a full 7 minutes of downtime during my test week.

Site speed

Bounce rate — the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page — increases by 32% when your site speed goes from 1 to 3 seconds. In other words, a slow site makes it less likely that your visitors will stick around long enough to become dedicated members of your audience.

There are many ways to improve site speed, like installing a caching plugin if you’re using WordPress. However, the best way to guarantee good site speed is to start with a web hosting company that offers fast servers.

I put two images and two text blocks on my test site to simulate a real homepage and used WebPageTest to conduct speed tests over five days. I ran tests at different hours each day for both mobile and desktop users in various countries to understand the site’s speed for a broad range of users.

Based on these tests, I came up with the following average location-based site speeds (remember, lower numbers are better):

This allowed me to establish some overall averages:

• Average mobile site speed: 3.42
• Average desktop site speed: 2.21
• Overall site speed: 2.81

At almost 3 seconds, SiteGround’s average site speed is higher than the 2.34 seconds of our second-place web host, Hostinger, but it does fall within the recommended maximum of three seconds. In short, while this site speed isn’t ideal, it’s also not terrible, especially since I hadn’t activated all of the Speed Optimizer features or the CDN. You may be able to improve your site speed by enabling these features on your own site.

Overall performance

With excellent uptime and acceptable site speed, SiteGround earns a performance ranking of 8/10. These results are similar to what I’ve experienced with other high-ranking web hosts like Hosting.com.

SiteGround security: The best security WordPress users can get

SiteGround offers the following security features to all users:

• Secure socket layer, or SSL, certification: An encryption protocol that secures data sent to and from your site, like email addresses submitted through a contact form. SSL certification also tells browsers and VPNs your site is safe — some won’t even open a site without them — so most web hosting companies include SSL with all plans. Google also penalizes sites without SSL certification.
• Firewall protection: Software that scans traffic attempting to enter your site and blocks malware and harmful traffic. It’s kind of like the website equivalent of wearing a mask during COVID or flu season: most of the bad stuff is blocked, but the good stuff (air, or in this case, regular web traffic) gets through. SiteGround uses a custom firewall and updates it regularly to keep your site safe.
• Anti-bot system: An AI system that claims to block millions of threats, like malware, every day.
• Security Optimizer: A WordPress plugin that simplifies the implementation of several top security strategies, like creating a unique login page URL.
• Daily backups: Automated backups that store a copy of your website on a different server from your main server. This allows you to quickly restore your site if something goes wrong.

This goes above and beyond the standard SSL certification and firewall protection offered by most web hosting companies. There are some hosting companies with similarly robust security, like Hostinger and Ionos, but the Security Optimizer sets SiteGround apart by offering features you’d otherwise have to install third-party plugins for. In fact, of all the hosts I’ve tested so far, SiteGround provides the best security for WordPress users. This earns it a 10/10 security ranking.

SiteGround customer support: Excellence in action

Web hosting customer service should be always available, fast to respond and trained to deal with a variety of web hosting issues. SiteGround has won multiple awards for customer service, so I went into this part of the test expecting its customer support to be all three of these things.

SiteGround offers a knowledge base to help you perform simple hosting tasks yourself and 24/7 customer support via AI assistant, live chat, phone and HelpDesk. I tested all of these customer support channels to develop a full understanding of whether SiteGround lives up to its reputation for excellent customer service.

Knowledge base

SiteGround’s knowledge base is divided into two areas: Tutorials and Knowledge Base. Tutorials provide step-by-step guidance on complex topics like how to build a WordPress website, while the Knowledge Base provides quick answers to smaller questions like “how do I upgrade my hosting plan”.

Individual articles are easy to navigate, using beginner-friendly language, step-by-step instructions and images. However, I didn’t see a single video in the support articles I read. This could be frustrating if you prefer to learn through video.

SiteGround also offers an AI assistant based on OpenAI tech and trained on the SiteGround knowledge base. The AI assistant is fast, pulling answers from the knowledge base in seconds and showing you the main information on-page with links to relevant articles for more information. However, it won’t redirect you to a person. You can also get the same answers at almost the same speed by using the regular search function, so the AI assistant doesn’t add much — the main thing it does is look flashy.

The quality of SiteGround’s knowledge base is similar to the self-serve customer support resources provided by most web hosts I’ve tested, with the main detractor — a lack of videos — existing on almost every hosting site. The only web hosting company I’ve tested with a better knowledge base is Hostinger, which provides numerous video tutorials.

Direct communication

Reaching a SiteGround customer support agent is surprisingly difficult. The Contact Us page doesn’t display a button for live chat or a phone number to call. There’s a list of categories for common questions instead.

Category pages display a list of relevant issues. Selecting your problem reveals instructions for fixing it, with links to further tutorials. I clicked “My issue is different” and received options to start a live chat or see SiteGround’s customer service number. I had mixed feelings about this process — most hosting companies list live chat and phone options directly on the Contact Us page — but everything was straightforward and the tools provided also make it easy to help yourself, reducing the strain on (and the wait time for) customer support.

A live chat representative responded in less than a minute. He answered my questions and walked me through some basic settings, helping me fix a minor issue in about five minutes. This is what I expected from an award-winning customer service team and very similar to what I experienced in my chats with the sales rep (hi, Dimitar!) before I signed up.

My experience calling SiteGround was similarly easy. I spent less than two minutes on hold, and the customer service agent answered my questions — including offering plugin recommendations for a function not built into SiteGround services — right away.

SiteGround doesn’t offer general support ticket functionality. Instead, there are specialized support tickets for tasks like having the support team transfer an existing WordPress site to SiteGround. This ensures that your request goes directly to the appropriate branch of customer service and that they can perform the requested task without much back-and-forth. I submitted a question and received a helpful response in about two hours, which is faster than the response times of other high-ranking web hosts like A2 Hosting.

Pro tip: To ask a question related to a support ticket without triggering a full support process like a site migration, type “N/A” into form areas you don’t want to fill out.

Overall customer service

My experience working with SiteGround customer service was excellent. The tutorials and knowledge base are comprehensive and easy to understand, helping even complete beginners accomplish website-related tasks in minutes. The Contact Us page doesn’t provide contact information right away, but its categories ensure that you always contact the right team for your specific queries. The customer service agents are fast, helpful and pleasant to work with.

All of this earns SiteGround an overall customer service ranking of 9/10. This ranking is great when compared to most other web hosts — even Hostinger, the company with the second-highest overall ranking from our hands-on testing, only achieved a 5/10 customer support ranking. Ionos, our second-ranking web host, is the only company to match SiteGround’s customer service, having also received a customer support ranking of 9/10.

Reputation

SiteGround has an excellent reputation, with a 4.8 out of 5 star ranking on Trustpilot and an A+ BBB rating with no open complaints. SiteGround has also won numerous awards, most notably four Stevie Awards for customer service.

SiteGround value: How it stacks up against the competition

To understand SiteGround’s value, you need to understand what other top web hosts offer. Here’s a quick breakdown of the most affordable plans from our three top-ranking web hosts:

There are a few conclusions we can draw based on this information:

• SiteGround offers average introductory prices, situated right in the middle of Ionos’ $4 a month and Hosting.com’s $2 per month — and equal to Hostinger’s $3 a month. However, you can only get SiteGround’s lowest introductory prices for one year the four years provided by Hostinger.
• SiteGround’s high renewal cost of $18 a month is dramatically more expensive than the $6 a month offered by Ionos or the $8 a month from Hostinger. Only A2 Hosting comes close in price, and Hosting.com’s most affordable plan is still $6 less per month.
• SiteGround offers average storage, with the 10GB matched by both Ionos and Hosting.com. Of the three hosts compared above, Hostinger is the only company offering more storage on its lowest plan.
• SiteGround offers great WordPress features. Both Hosting.com and Hostinger offer WordPress site assistants, and Hostinger includes a speed optimization plugin, but you won’t get an equivalent to the SiteGround Security Optimizer from any other host.
• SiteGround offers good security, with most of the same security features you’ll get from other top web hosts. Hosting.com is the only host with more server-side security features, thanks to its comprehensive security suite, which includes more advanced DDoS protection. However, Hosting.com doesn’t offer anything like the Security Optimizer plugin.
• SiteGround offers the best customer service, including a wide range of tools for fixing things yourself and the fastest phone service I’ve received from any web host. Of the hosts listed above, Ionos is the only company whose customer service even comes close to SiteGround’s customer service in terms of speed and helpfulness.

Overall, SiteGround earns a value ranking of 8/10. SiteGround offers top-notch WordPress tools, but you can get similar tools for better prices from Hostinger and Hosting.com. If you’re willing to manage WordPress yourself, Ionos is highly affordable and its customer service is as good as SiteGround’s. The main things you can’t get from another web host are SiteGround’s Speed Optimizer and Security Optimizer, but there are free and low-cost plugins for improving site performance and security.

SiteGround: Is it right for you?

To answer this question, we need to revisit how SiteGround performed in all of our testing categories:

• Ease of use ranking: 8/10
• Performance ranking: 8/10
• Security ranking: 10/10
• Customer service ranking: 9/10
• Value ranking: 8/10

This earns SiteGround an overall ranking of 8.6, making it our top-ranking web hosting company. If you’re looking for high-quality web hosting — and especially if you’re looking for WordPress hosting — SiteGround is a great choice. But there’s a catch: SiteGround is a lot more expensive than most shared and WordPress hosting companies.

If you’ve got a small budget and still want great customer service, I recommend Ionos. If you’re willing to accept less-than-perfect customer service in exchange for robust, low-cost plans, consider Hostinger — or check out our guide to the best cheap web hosting services.