How to find a high performance WordPress host.

There's nothing worse than a slow site. It projects an image of sluggishness and poor quality, and gives your users a moment to question why they're even using your site, with up to 53% of visitors choosing to leave if a site takes over 3 seconds to load [1].

So how can you fix it? With wordpress there are page speed plugins and CDNs that promise faster loading times. But in my experience, the best way to get your pages loading faster, is to invest in faster web hosting. A faster host can easily cut your loading speed in half, allowing you to delight and retain your customers.

But how do you know which host is actually faster? Every host on earth claims to offer "lightning speed", but most offer the bare minimum. It's almost impossible to tell whether a certain host would actually make your website run faster without completely moving your website across to test it yourself.

Data to the rescue

And fortunately, some generous people have run tests on many different web hosts, and the results are in: This 2025 Article is the best comparison I have seen, running performance tests on real hosts and publishing the results.

The three most important metrics are:

Time to First Byte: The time it takes for the server to respond to a new user. It helps if the server is located in the same country as the end user.

CPU Benchmark: This is most important for dynamic pages like shopping carts and forums, it also determines how responsive your wp-admin panel will be.

Load Test: How well the host handled a large volume of users. Important to know that your site will stay up if you get a sudden surge of customers.

Commercial Leaders

Of the hosts evaluated, here are the winners:

8.5/10 WPBenchmark Score

~300ms TTFB

 from A$108/month

Kinsta took the top spot for dynamic performance with a score of 8.5/10 on the Benchmark Test.

WP Engine did the best on the load test, ensuring your site will stay up under load.

Rocket.Net did the best on the Time to First Byte test, taking 335ms on average to load across the USA.

A fast shared host like Kinsta, will set you back $US70/month for their 20GB plan after their discount period.

Is it possible to go faster?

But what if you're already on a high performance web host but your site is still slow? Well, these stats only cover what is commercially popular. There are other web hosts which are not tested which perform significantly faster than even the top large hosts.

VPS Hosting A VPS is a virtual, private server. With a VPS, you lease a part of the server directly and have an engineer install and manage your own software. Just like web hosts, there are many different VPS providers. Popular options include AWS, Vultr, Hetzner and Digital Ocean. This researcher tested different VPS providers and was consistently able to improve loading times by about 50% from the fastest commercial host. Nice!

This review found that Hetzner was the top VPS provider with a WPBenchmark score of 8.9/10

8.9/10 WPBenchmark Score

~200ms TTFB

A$100-$1000 per month

The downside of a VPS is it's generally more expensive, a managed VPS host might set you back anywhere between A$100-$1000 per month depending on your resources and level of support.

What if you need to go... faster?

If you need to get even faster, there is one final option. You don't hear many people writing about bare metal hosting these days, it is generally reserved for corporations with a dedicated in house IT team, but it is the final form of web hosting. The absolute fastest way to host your website.

Baremetal takes the "virtual" out of Virtual Private Server, it means that you have your own hardware running your own website, without a virtual "hypervisor" getting in the way or other users slowing your website down. This article finds that BareMetal can offer about 30% improved performance for the same hardware. In addition, with baremetal hosting, you can choose your own high performance hardware, wheras VPS providers use mid-range commodity hardware.

Between these differences, you can get somewhere between 30% to 70% performance improvement over the fastest VPS by moving to bare metal. Allowing you to achieve the fastest possible loading speeds.

9.9/10 WPBenchmark Score (!!!)

~100ms TTFB

Dedicated Server - Advance

~A$500-A$2000/month

This kind of set up can get your website loading over 3x faster than the leading commercially available web hosts.

The only catch is that between the hardware and software costs, such a set up will cost at least A$500/month, plus management fees. In addition, it might take weeks or months to provision brand new hardware.

What if you're cheap but still want a super fast website?

Well sir, you're in luck.

In order to help my clients with very high performance requirements. We've started another branch of the business. Super fast, bare metal WordPress hosting using the fastest commercially available hardware, at a very affordable price.

9.9/10 WPBenchmark Score (!!!)

~100ms TTFB

from A$69/Month

The crazy thing is, that since WordPress can only use one CPU at a time, our entry level plan gets the same page load speeds as the fastest possible hosting that money can buy. And because our servers are located in Australia, Australian visitors will load the site even faster.

In addition to hosting, when you move to SafeWP, we perform a free security audit, security hardening and then keep your site up to date and monitor the site for security issues and uptime. We're also 100% based in Australia, so you get direct engineer support in case you have any questions or issues.

There are 100s of different options for web hosts, if you want performance than dedicated hardware is still king.

And if you want a host who's based in Australia with local support and proactive management, I strongly suggest our sister company, Safe Wordpress. Yes I'm biased, but I'm also obsessed with WordPress performance, and have the receipts and tests to prove that we're the fastest for Australian web hosting.

https://safewp.com.au