Tag Archives: Tested

12 Best WordPress Hosting Providers of 2024 Compared & Tested

[ad_1] So who wins the battle to become the best WordPress hosting overall? Okay, I know that everyone’s hosting needs are different, so instead of pointing to one “best” solution, I’ve opted to highlight the top hosts based on what they’re likely best suited for. Here’s how they stand out according to the research presented about and our long-term methodology toward evaluating hosting: SiteGround – best overall 🏆 If you’re looking for a well-rounded hosting option that combines strong performance, reliable uptime, excellent customer support, and ease of use, SiteGround is our top recommendation. It’s a great choice for all types of WordPress users, from small personal sites to larger businesses. Bluehost – easiest to use for beginners 🚀 Bluehost is my top choice for beginners who are new to WordPress. Its user-friendly interface, straightforward setup process, and affordable pricing make it ideal if you’re just starting out. Plus, it offers solid performance and support to get your site up and running with minimal hassle. Kinsta – best for power users 💪 Kinsta is ideal for advanced users who need top-tier performance and scalability. With features like free CDN and edge caching, built-in performance monitoring, and a global network of data centers, Kinsta is perfect for WordPress power users. It offers excellent security with a managed firewall, DDoS protection, and malware removal, making it a great choice for handling larger, more complex websites that require superior performance and expert-level support. FYI, WPShout is hosted on Kinsta. Hostinger – most popular host 🔥 Hostinger delivers incredible value with its low pricing and feature-rich plans. It’s highly popular among WordPress users (most popular host in our surveys) thanks to its affordability without sacrificing key features or performance. If you want reliable hosting that’s easy on your budget and trusted by many, Hostinger is an excellent pick. I’d like to stress that none of the WordPress hosting providers here failed any test. The overall standard was refreshingly high. Furthermore, all providers also offer a full range of more advanced hosting options if you start to outgrow the entry-level packages. My hope is that the information above will help you do two things: (1) provide a framework to distinguish between high-profile providers, and (2) use their overall offerings as a sensible reference point if you are comparing with other hosting services in the market. Let’s zoom back out 🔭 Our methodology Choosing the right hosting provider can be challenging, so we’ve developed a thorough methodology to test and review web hosting companies. Since 2009, we’ve reviewed over 50 providers using a combination of expert analysis, real user feedback, and performance monitoring. Our team of experienced reviewers offers honest opinions, while our annual hosting survey provides additional insights from real users. We continuously update our reviews to ensure they reflect the latest information. Our review process starts by signing up for hosting plans and setting up test websites with demo data. We then conduct performance tests, measuring load times from various global locations and tracking uptime over time. Each host is rated based on pricing, performance, features, and user reviews. Pricing is carefully reviewed, accounting for hidden fees and discounts, while performance is evaluated based on real-time testing of uptime and load times. We also assess features like storage, bandwidth, and tools available for building or managing websites. WPShout’s annual WordPress hosting surveys Our WordPress hosting surveys started as a way to gather real-world feedback from users about their hosting experiences. While many publications review hosting services, we wanted to go beyond our own testing and tap into the collective opinions of our readers. By doing so, we could get a broader perspective on what hosting providers truly perform well in different scenarios. Initially, our surveys focused on experienced WordPress users, but the sample size was too small to draw solid conclusions. To improve the quality of the data, we now open the surveys to a wider audience, including beginners. These surveys run discreetly as a pop-up on our site, with no active promotion, allowing us to gather honest, unfiltered feedback without spammy interference. We’ve been doing them since 2016. The surveys ask key questions like which host users rely on, their satisfaction levels, and plans to switch providers. Depending on the responses, users are guided to relevant follow-up questions, helping us get detailed insights into both positive and negative experiences with various WordPress hosts. 👉 To learn more about the surveys, go here. Month-to-month load time and uptime tracking We began our hosting performance tests around 2019, initially just comparing Bluehost and SiteGround. Over time, our testing expanded to 16 different hosting accounts, which we maintain solely to measure and compare performance. Each host is independently purchased, and we never inform the companies of our testing. We set up WordPress on all test sites with the same theme, content, and plugins to mimic real-world conditions as much as possible. This helps us evaluate the true performance of each host in a more authentic scenario. For load time measurements, we focus on the total time it takes for a page to fully load, rather than just initial response times. We use WebPageTest to conduct tests from six global locations and perform multiple runs to average out the results. This method allows us to simulate a real user’s experience across different locations and connection types and handle over 480 monthly tests. For uptime tracking, we use UptimeRobot, which monitors each site 24/7 and logs any downtime. While uptime isn’t directly related to site speed, it’s another critical factor in a host’s reliability. 👉 To learn more about how we track host performance, read this. I hope this guide has been helpful and that it’ll assist you in picking a host that matches your needs exactly. I’d love to hear more about your experience in the comments below. Get in touch! [ad_2] Source link

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7 Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins and Tools (Tested) – 2022

[ad_1] Searching for the best image optimization plugins or tools to speed up your WordPress site’s images? By now, you probably know the importance of website loading times and page speed. The internet has been abuzz with news about how loading times impact your bottom line and Google has been pretty clear about favoring fast loading websites and blogs. While there are many ways to optimize the speed of your website, one of the first places you should look to make improvements are the images you use. To help you with optimizing your images, in this post we’ll take a look at seven best image optimization tools and compare their results with real testing. We’ll start by sharing details for each image optimization tool along with its individual performance. At the end of the post, we’ll put everything together into a few different comparison tables so that you can easily see how the different tools and plugins stack up. 📚 Here’s everything that you’ll find in this post: Seven Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins and Tools: Individual Details and Performance Below, we’ll share details for the seven best WordPress image optimization tools and plugins. Beyond sharing basic features and pricing information, we also tested each plugin on this list by seeing how well it was able to optimize the same two test images using both lossless and lossy compression: Both images are 1280 px wide and we’re sharing data for the full size image (rather than one of the smaller thumbnail sizes that WordPress automatically generates). We also did not convert them to WebP, which is a feature that a lot of image optimization tools offer. Instead, we kept them in their original image formats. Of course, beyond the file size savings themselves, you also might be concerned with the quality of the compressed images. To my eye, all of these tools resulted in more or less the same image quality, so I don’t think it needs to play a role in your decision: For lossless compression, there was no difference in quality (which is the definition of lossless). For lossy compression, there was a small reduction in quality, but it was very difficult to notice and I didn’t see any noticeably different results between the different tools in terms of image quality. 1. EWWW Image Optimizer When you install and activate EWWW Image Optimizer, it will automatically optimize any images that you upload to your website. It can optimize JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and PDFs and it also allows you to go through your existing media library and optimize already uploaded images. The plugin can also convert images to the best format if you decide to enable this option in the plugin settings. One of the benefits of EWWW Image Optimizer is that it allows you to optimize images using their specialized servers to provide both lossy and lossless compression. In short, this means that image optimization won’t cause additional load on your server. The paid service also offers other enhancements such as a built-in CDN, WebP conversion, automatic scaling, and more. Alternatively, you can do the processing on your own server for free, but you can only access lossless compression if you use your server. Pricing: If you use your local server for processing, you get unlimited usage for free. However, this only supports lossless compression, which is a pretty big limitation. Paid plans start at $7 per month for unlimited image optimizations for a single site, along with a built-in CDN. 👉 Use our exclusive EWWW Image Optimizer coupon to get 15% OFF. How did the plugin do? Image File Type Compression Type Original Size Reduced Size Percentage Reduced JPG Lossless 271 KB 271 KB 0% JPG Lossy 271 KB 151 KB 44.2% PNG Lossless 416 KB N/A* N/A* PNG Lossy 416 KB 105 KB 74.8% *I couldn’t get EWWW Image Optimizer to run a lossless PNG compression for some reason. Even if I chose lossless, it still used lossy compression. 2. Smush Image Compression and Optimization Developed by WPMU Dev, Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin is available in both free and premium versions. After you install the plugin, you’ll be taken to the plugin settings page where you can see how many images were already optimized and configure which thumbnail sizes you want the plugin to optimize, whether images should be resized, and more. The free version of the plugin lets you optimize unlimited images, but each individual image cannot exceed 5 MB. The plugin can optimize your JPEG, GIF and PNG images individually or you can use their bulk optimize feature. In addition, you can optimize image files that are uploaded outside your media library such as images stored in your theme files. Pricing: To remove the 5 MB limit for individual images and access other paid features such as CDN image delivery, WebP conversion, and more, the paid plans start at $7.50 per month. How did the plugin do? Image File Type Compression Type Original Size Reduced Size Percentage Reduced JPG Lossless 271 KB 268 KB 1% JPG Lossy 271 KB 224 KB 17.5% PNG Lossless 416 KB 320 KB 23% PNG Lossy 416 KB 74 KB 82.3% 3. ShortPixel ShortPixel is a freemium plugin that can compress JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs. After the plugin installation, you will prompted to sign up for an API key by providing your email address. The plugin will automatically optimize every uploaded image and you can also bulk optimize images already present in your media library. The plugin supports both lossy and lossless compression methods. It will also optimize all the thumbnails created by WordPress, remove EXIF data, set a maximum resolution for your images, and save a backup of every image you upload to a new folder. Other useful features include the following: Conversion to WebP or AVIF formats for smaller file sizings. Retina image serving. PDF optimization in addition to images. The original ShortPixel plugin optimizes the images on your site’s server. However, there’s also

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