The Fastest WordPress Hosting of 2023: 17 Providers Rigorously Tested

We have tested the speed of the 17 most popular WordPress hosting providers in the Netherlands.

To be more specific, we have examined how these providers do on TTFB (Time to First Byte), Core Web Vitals, and page load time.

We did this by purchasing hosting plans from these providers within the same price range (whenever possible) and then thoroughly testing them.

Let's dive into the results right away.

Why the speed of your WordPress website matters

Website speed is a Google ranking factor, and slow-loading websites have a negative impact on user experience. When your site loads slowly, this can lead to:

• A higher bounce rate
• Lower rankings on Google
• Fewer page visits
• Lower conversions
• Loss of revenue

Therefore, it will not surprise you that every hosting provider claims to be “the fastest'” or to offer “super-fast” WordPress hosting.

In practice, this isn't the case.

Hosting providers differ greatly in how they set up their infrastructure. Some are essentially resellers of large cloud parties like Google or Amazon Web Services, while others manage their servers in-house. There are also big differences in how many sites providers put on a server, whether they use LiteSpeed, NGINX, or Apache servers, and what server-side optimizations they implement.

The result of all this is hosting speeds that can vary greatly between providers.

This is how the picked the hosting providers

First, we looked at which hosting providers specifically target the Dutch market.

Next, we wanted to make sure that the largest and most well-known hosting providers in the Netherlands were part of this study: TransIP, Hostnet, and Yourhosting. These are the providers that have the most customers in the Netherlands.

We added Cloud86, Mijn.host, Antagonist, and Vimexx because these are fast-growing hosting providers that are well-rated by their users.

Other Dutch providers that we found worthwhile were Junda, WebOké, Hoasted, bHosted, Esmero, and VDX.

The Lithuanian provider Hostinger, with 2+ million customers, is the provider in this overview with by far the largest customer base.

Finally, we included SiteGround, Kinsta, and Rocket.net in this study. These are international companies that all have servers in the Netherlands. SiteGround and Kinsta have attracted a large user base in the Netherlands in recent years. Rocket.net has not (yet) managed to do this, but given the quality of their services, it wouldn't surprise us if this changes in the coming years.

Well-known hosting providers like Strato and MijnDomein weren't considered because they are unsuitable for business websites, lack quality, and offer little to no WordPress-specific features.

WordPress hosting speed test results

Here you will find all the results of our tests (the providers are listed in alphabetical order). We have divided these into WordPress hosting up to €10 per month and WordPress hosting from €20-€35 to make a fair comparison.

For example, the hosting from Kinsta and Rocket.net already has a CDN (Content Delivery Network) enabled and perfectly configured by default (in the case of Rocket.net, this is CloudFlare Enterprise), which makes a direct comparison with other hosting providers unfair.

Nevertheless, you will see that in certain areas, the cheaper hosting outperforms the more expensive hosting.

WordPress hosting up to €10 per month

*We have tested both the Webhosting Start (€3.25 per month upon renewal) and the Webhosting Medium package (€6.55 per month upon renewal). What you see here are the test results of the Webhosting Medium package. Incidentally, their Webhosting Start package is almost as fast, and it beats competing packages from other providers that are 4-5 times as expensive.

WordPress hosting between €20-€35 per month

This is how we conducted our speed tests

We have set up a test website with the following specifications:

• WordPress theme: Kadence
• Plugins: Block Navigation, Kadence Blocks, Post Duplicator
• SSL certificate (Let’s Encrypt)
• 17 images, 196 words, and various graphical elements (on the page we have tested)

You can find this site here. The site is representative of a real WordPress site, which yields more interesting results than a “bare” WordPress installation. We have cloned this site to all providers we have tested.

We have not used any optimization plugins like LiteSpeed Cache, SG Optimizer, or WP Rocket, or applied other forms of optimization.

The results you see above are thus out of the box. This allows us to make as fair a comparison as possible, or in other words, to “compare apples with apples.”

The speed test tool we have used is GTMetrix, with London as the test location, which is closest to the Netherlands. Since results can vary per test, we have conducted 3 tests per provider and used the results of the test that was median in terms of performance.

The bulk of these tests were carried out over the past 10 months.

These are the hosting packages and the corresponding prices of each hosting provider we have tested:

* Monthly costs refer to the monthly amount you pay after the introductory rate.
** In the world of web hosting, there is no such thing as “unlimited.” Keep in mind that when a host says you can install an unlimited number of sites, you are still dependent on, for example, the number of inodes and disk space that is allocated to you.

The fastest WordPress hosting in 2023 (up to €10 p/m)

#1 Cloud86

Our research has shown that Cloud86 is the fastest WordPress hosting of 2023. This is not surprising given the investments the provider makes in their server infrastructure. They use brand-new LiteSpeed servers, which makes having a fast site with them a given.

De TTFB is well below 150ms, they out-perform all other providers when it comes to LCP, TBT and CLS, and they have the lowest fully loaded time among the hosting providers we've put to the test. 

#2 Hostinger

Hostinger is a company with tens of millions of customers. But despite this enormous scale, they're still cutting edge when it comes to speed.

The fully loaded time clocks in at 626ms, which is fantastic. But they truly shine when it comes to TTFB, which is only 123ms.

#3 Mijn.host

Just like Cloud86 does mijn.host make use of LiteSpeed servers. It is a hosting provider which has been around for years and has always invested heavily in performance.

When it comes to TTFB falls Mijn.host below 200ms.

#4 Hoasted

Hoasted is a Dutch hosting provider which has been around since 2010. Among their customers are Rijksoverheid, TimeChimp and Oxfam Novib.

When it comes to speed they show fantastic results everywhere.

#5 Junda

With their generic stock photos and lacking an About page is brand-new Junda not exactly a provider which generates a lot of trust. Looks can be deceiving though, because Junda finds itself among the top 5 fastest hosting providers of the Netherlands.

Very impressive for a provider which wasn't around a year ago.

#6 Antagonist

Antagonist was a previously independent hosting provider which since a couple of years has been part of group.ONE.

Their TTFB falls below 200ms and elsewhere they're performing great, too.

#7 TransIP

TransIP is one of the biggest and well-known hosting providers of the Nederlands. While they were the slowest in a previous edition of this speed test, their performance vastly improved over the past year.

Their TTFB is great and although total load time still could be better, it's more than twice as fast as it was last year.

#8 Esmero

Esmero is a small, independent hosting provider. Their service is decent and when it comes to speed they do pretty well too.

Their TTFB is with 240ms a little higher than we'd like to see, but fully loaded time clocks in at well under a second.

#9 WebOké

WebOké takes a different approach with their shared hosting plans than almost every other hosting provider. Instead of getting specifications which can't be modified, you can customize your package with better specs (such as more memory), similar to a VPS.

When it comes to TTFB they land on 293ms and they do quite well with the other metics, too.

#10 VDX

VDX is a hosting provider which might nog ring a bell right away. And yet, they've been around for over 20 years and have 20.000 customers.

While the top 9 fastest WordPress hosting providers of the Netherlands don't differ that much performance-wise, the hosting providers which we're discussing now are not as impressive. The TTFB is 401ms.

#11 Yourhosting

Yourhosting is part of (TWS) Total Webhosting Solutions. This is a massive hosting conglomerate that has dozens of brands under its umbrella. Being part of such a conglomerate often bodes poorly for the quality of service. Nevertheless, Yourhosting performs reasonably well in terms of speed.

Their LCP comes in below a second and while their TTFB doesn't do great with 472ms, it doesn't do terrible either.

#12 Vimexx

Vimexx doesn't do terrible when it comes to speed, but can't hold a candle to the top 5. The LCP clocks in at 1,2 seconds.

#13 bHosted

The looks of the bHosted website matches the speed of their web hosting, which is to say it isn't that great.

#14 Hostnet

Hostnet's TTFB comes in at 604ms. According to Google this is too high.

The fastest WordPress hosting in 2023 (€20-€35 p/m)

#1 Rocket.net

Rocket.net is a relatively new player among fully managed WordPress hosting providers. However, the company, founded in 2020 by Ben Gabler (known for HostGator, among others), has made a huge impact within the premium WordPress segment within a short time.

Using Cloudflare Enterprise, which every customer gets for free, your site with Rocket.net is obscenely fast worldwide. The TTFB of 60ms is very impressive.

#2 Kinsta

Kinsta is a premium managed WordPress host mainly used by larger companies and serious bloggers with high traffic. They are one of the few hosting providers to have access to the lightning-fast C2 Google Cloud Platform. This is clearly reflected in their speed.

Their TTFB is 150ms and otherwise they do a great job.

#3 SiteGround

SiteGround, like Kinsta, runs on the Google Cloud Platform. Although they are using the the standard Google Cloud servers and not Google Cloud C2. This makes them slightly slower than Kinsta, but still puts them among the faster WordPress hosting providers.

SiteGround scores particularly well in terms of TTFB.

Tests we have conducted

You can measure the speed of hosting in various ways. Below you will find the tests we have conducted.

Test 1: TTFB (Time to First Byte)

TTFB, or server response time, is one of the most important factors for any hosting provider. The faster the server responds to a request (such as a click on a link), the faster a page starts to load.

Imagine you click on a link and the TTFB is 500ms; it then takes half a second before the server responds and the webpage starts loading. That's why you want this score to be as low as possible. According to Google, you should start to worry when your TTFB exceeds 600ms. Anything under 200ms is described by Google as “very good.”

Scores under 200ms are generally only achievable with highly effectively optimized websites or premium hosting. That makes it extra impressive that you get such a score with some Dutch web hosts on hosting packages that cost less than ten euros, without optimizations.

Results

Among WordPress hosting under 10 euros, Cloud86 and Hostinger score the best, with hosting from 20 to 35 euros Rocket.net and SiteGround are the fastest.

Test 2: Core web vitals

Core Web Vitals have been a Google ranking factor since 2021. They are so important that Google has included them in Google Search Console.

The Core Web Vitals are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). LCP measures how long it takes for a page to load from the user's perspective. To put it simply, it's the time it takes from clicking on a link until the largest element (image or page) appears on the screen.
• First Input Delay (FID). This measures how long it takes before a user can actually use your site. Think about clicking on a button, opening a menu, or typing an email address into a form.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This measures how stable a page appears while loading. To simplify this: if elements on your page shoot up and down and back and forth while loading, your CLS is high.

First Input Delay is calculated based on real user data, not test data. Therefore, tools outside of Google’s own Chrome User Experience Reports (CrUX) can't calculate this. Google therefore recommends TBT (Total Blocking Time) as a substitute for FID.

Results

The CLS test ultimately proved to be unhelpful because every web host scores 0ms here. This is because the theme we use for the test site (Kadence) is extremely well-coded.

We are working on a solution to still be able to say something meaningful about the CLS scores of different hosting providers.

Test 3: Fully Loaded Time

Finally, we will look at the page loading times, or fully loaded time.

To be fair, this score has become less important in recent years. This is why:

Nevertheless, it's a metric that still appears in many hosting speed tests and that many people want to see.

And although it may not be a number that is important for your actual visitors, it still provides interesting insight into how hosting providers score compared to each other.

Results

The impact of optimizations on website speed

We wanted to make this test as fair as possible by not adding any optimizations to the hosting providers we've tested.

How you can further optimize your site with a hosting provider depends on their server tech. For some hosting providers, a paid plugin like WPRocket or FlyingPress is the best option, while with SiteGround you're usually best off with their own SG Optimizer plugin. When a web host uses LiteSpeed servers, you're often best off with the free LiteSpeed Cache plugin.

To avoid making this speed test overly complicated, we didn't want to delve into what the best optimization methods are for each hosting provider.

At the same time, we don't want to withhold the result of a site optimized with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin which is running on Cloud86:

The TTFB comes in at 50ms, which is ridiculously good, and the LCP and Fully Loaded Time also drop significantly.

With the other hosting providers in this study, you can expect equally dramatic improvements when you use the right optimization methods.

To sum it up

The web hosting you choose can make or break the speed of your WordPress site.

While good web hosting is not a guarantee for a fast WordPress site (the WordPress theme you choose and the plugins you use also have a significant impact), it is nevertheless a prerequisite.

No matter how many optimizations you perform or how well-coded your theme is, without fast hosting, it will yield little benefit.

Fast WordPress hosting providers are certainly not big names like Hostnet and Yourhosting. In fact, these providers rank at the bottom of our speed test. Since these hosting providers also don't score well on factors such as features and customer service, there is no reason to choose them. If your site is currently hosted with them, consider switching.

The independent Cloud86 emerges as the fastest hosting provider. Cloud86 offers very fast hosting at incredibly good prices. Even their cheapest package leaves most of their competitors in the dust.

However, other Dutch providers like Mijn.host, Antagonist, and Hoasted are not far behind. They are also good options for fast WordPress hosting.

Rocket.net and Kinsta top the list in the premium WordPress hosting category. A significant advantage of these providers is that they offer hosting that requires little additional speed optimizations. If you don't want to get involved with this yourself (and you're looking for 24/7 support), and you have the budget for it, then they are excellent companies to consider.