I finally found the fastest host for WordPress

I’ve been in the website building, hosting and marketing business for over 20 years.

I think that makes me old, but I am certainly not out of touch.

In those 20 years, I have worked more with Drupal, Shopify and WordPress than any other platforms.

Sure, I’ve also worked plenty of other CMS and eCommerce platforms but like most of you, these have been my staples.

In more recent years I’ve really doubled down on WordPress as my go-to CMS.

It’s easy to build feature-rich sites that look good and, with theme enhancers like Gutenberg and bricks builder coming out, it goes from strength to strength.

The challenge I have always had is hosting. I have no design to manage my own servers (and I have on wirenine and amazon ec2). It’s a faff.

I also want support if I need it. I don’t want to be a server guru, I want to build fast, attractive and high converting sites.

I’ve been through a bunch of WordPress hosting companies looking for the fastest WordPress host.

Bluehost for many years but they kept falling over on me. Wirenine (VPS) as mentioned and also Amazon ec2 hosting. Hostinger and more.

I’ve even toyed with my own servers – stupid idea that one.

With my costs at hostinger going up recently I decided there must be a fast way to host WordPress so I started the hunt.

The importance of Google core web vitals rising in the buzz of SEO I knew it was time to pony up a little more money for a little better results.

My first port of call was Cloudways. Nice migration, nice choice of server stacks and some good customer service. Still didn’t quite do it for me.

Then the cloud parted, the sun came out and I trialed rocket.net.

As a member of the WP Speed Matters Facebook group I also made inquiries and they came up with suggestions – I believe the company owner at Rocket is a member of the group also.

Here are some of the things I needed. As a time-poor individual with high expectations I needed the hosting to be:

• Easy to manage
• Offer a staging environment and backups would be nice, not essential
• Good customer support
• Fast WordPress Hosting

My first contact with rocket.net and I was completely blown away.

Not only did the customer support guy know what he was talking about, but he also solved the issue while I was on the chat with him.

In 95% of my interactions with rocket.net the person on the live chat has been fast to reply and solved my issues before I left the live chat.

Even complex issues. Amazing.

Easy wins

There were some easy wins as soon as I signed up

• Easy setup, deletion or publishing of staging environments
• Responsive live chat staff who fixed things there and then
• Help setting up WP Rocket plugin for best effect
• They managed the migration from hostinger
• Flawless speeds

Out of the gate, the speed and responsiveness of the live chat support was staggering.

Once the site was migrated the first time it took me time to move over. I needed to ask for one more migration to have the latest version of my site from hostinger.

‘No problem’, they said. ‘Awesome’, I said.

It was honestly so easy to do that there isn’t much to add. They move the site, I disabled lightspeed cache and a couple of other modules that were not needed anymore and turned it on.

One of the best services they offer is a pre-live flight check. They go through the site and make sure everything is set up correctly and ready to go.

This is a real help for nervous site owners.

After I went live there were still some Core Web Vital issues. Pages going from green to orange. This stresses me out as I believe speed is key.

I got on live chat and again the issue was fixed there and then.

I tested the site on lighthouse (via Chrome) and GT Metrix and got speeds I have never seen before.

My WordPress site set up

For reference here is my site set up:

• WordPress
• Astra Pro theme
• ACF Pro with quite a few custom blocks on pages
• WP Rocket
• Lots of other smaller plugins like Let’s Review, AdInserter

I have external copywriting agencies writing for the site as well as myself.

I was using Swift Performance and litespeed Cache with hostinger. When I moved to Rocket.net they said they happily supported WP Rocket.

WP Rocket were having a sale so I bought that and installed it. Then I got them to check it so everything was tuned correctly.

Bottom Line on why Rocket are the fastest host for WordPress in my world

The bottom line here is that:

1. Rocket.net migrated everything for me
2. Their live support is unmatched and all included even in small accounts
3. They helped to fine-tune the speed and troubleshoot issues – usually in real-time
4. Their staging / production options are effortless and easy. No fuss, just click a button
5. They helped me achieve 100% on speed tests on lighthouse and GT Metrix with little to no effort.
6. I now have ALL my mobile and desktop pages in the green in google search console which I have never achieved
7. I was waaaay over on storage but they didn’t charge me
8. It’s the perfect set and forget hosting set up with the fastest speeds I’ve ever had.

I should note, as a side comment, that I had AMP installed prior to the migration and I wanted to get off AMP and stick with responsive only.

This was a worry as when I tried to disable it on hostinger it slowed mobile response times significantly.

With rocket.net, both mobile and desktop are fast with no AMP plugin. AMP was too restrictive for me.

These are the reasons rocket is the fastest host for WordPress in the US for me.

Rocket hosting WordPress speed results

The proof is in the pudding, right? Here are the screenshots of the GT Metrix and lighthouse reports.

I want to note again that this site was not doing well before the change. This site has a lot of blocks, ACP blocks and other content that has the potential to really slow the Astra Pro theme down.

GT Metrix

Lighthouse – Desktop and Mobile Speed Tests

Desktop

Mobile

Some comments, not criticisms

There are a couple of things that might be helpful for more inexperienced players. While rocket.net is the fastest host for WordPress (IMO), it doesn’t offer email hosting. There is no cPanel here, or similar.

They have tutorials on how to manage this including how to only move your A Records for the website in your DNS. As below if you have questions on that too – happy to help.

They support WP Rocket, but not others which is fair enough but if they mastered Swift or similar it might be nice for those who have invested in them.

Summary – because there is always a summary

After 2 decades of hosting challenges I am happy to say after a year with rocket.net that my blues are gone.

This company not only provides super fast wordpress hosting, they also provide super fast support to back it up.

They get a 5 out of 5 stars from me and I can’t recommend them enough.

Questions?

Fire away in the comments below