Last Updated: January 2024 - By: Brendan Tully, Principal Consultant
You know it yourself, when a website is slow to load you quickly lose patience and click away. Your own site is no different, right?
We've tried 100s over different hosting providers over the years. In this post I’ll share the best and fastest WordPress hosting that we've found for UK businesses and why we use them.
Since we started in 2008, we have worked with over 2000 businesses and used a huge number of different hosting companies over the years. These are the few we use ourselves, trust and recommend to clients on a daily basis.
The Best UK WordPress hosting providers (England, Scotland or Wales based) we've found after trying 100s of different hosts all across the web.
Below are the web hosting providers we recommend for UK customers - we've tried and tested 100s of companies and these are who we'd recommend if we were sitting down face to face talking SEO and online marketing.
NOTE - a very common mistake UK business owners make is choosing hosting based out of the US when their target audience is actually in the UK. If website speed is important to you (which it should be!) you ideally want a hosting provider located in the same country as your visitors or target market. Any time visitors or website traffic has to cross an ocean or water border things start to slow down.
Generally, Cloudways is our overall #1 recommendation as you get a dedicated, speed optimization server, multiple London and Europe options and pricing starts at $10 USD per month. Rocket.net is a close followup as has some lightning fast speed features that may make it better for some companies.
These are the hosts we'd recommend if we were sitting down in person with you. In our SEO agency we've optimized thousands of sites and have a deep understanding of hosting speed, reliability and what's good and bad.
If you're interested in optimizing your site further, try our FREE site speed test tool SiteSpeedBot.com. In about 90 seconds it'll give you detailed site speed & SEO recommendations most other tools won't!
The criteria that is most important to us when recommending a host are:
We've broken down the specifications and details on each host we recommend below.
If you scroll down further on this page we've explained the key features to look at when evaluating which host is right for you - take some time to dig into that list as often simple things like server location are completely neglected when it comes to choosing a fast host.
Cloudways is a relatively new hosting provider and a bit different to most other providers in the market. In a nutshell you get dedicated server hosting without the complexity associated with running your own VPS or dedicated server.
They offer over 60 different locations with 5 different providers - Linode, Vultr, Digitalocean, Amazon and Google. (most providers only use one provider, eg Wpengine & Kinsta both use Google as their core provider).
Because it's highly configurable, scalable AND you get dedicated server resources, Cloudways is the fastest WP hosting provider on the web right now.
Why they might be the best Wordpress hosting choice for you:
More details at www.cloudways.com
More details at www.rocket.net
Best All Rounder & Fastest Cpanel Host, Not Recommended For High Traffic Sites
More details at www.siteground.com
Highly Scalable, Managed WP Host, Great For Mid Size Sites
More details at www.kinsta.com
Cheap, not great performance though so keep that in mind!
More details at www.hostinger.com
Best Value Managed WP Host, Good For Small to Mid Size Sites
More details at www.wpxhosting.com
Best & World's Leading Fully Managed WP Host ,Fantastic For Complex Sites & Woocommerce Although A Little More Expensive
More details at www.wpengine.com
Unfortunately most people choose a hosting provider based on price which is not really the best way to do it.
Ultimately with hosting you get what you pay for. Cost is obviously one of the considerations to look at when choosing a provider but that's really only one element of many. Below I’ve summarized the key features or things we look for when choosing a hosting provider.
Click play below to hear an audio walk-through and more in depth explanation of what you consider when choosing a provider. Alternatively click here for an MP3 audio or scroll down for a Youtube powered embed. /wp-content/uploads/how-to-choose-the-best-uk-based-wordpress-hosting.mp3
Server location is key and poor location choice is a common problem we see. It's really important that you host in the geographic location that is closest to the majority of your visitors.
That means if you're a UK business serving mostly UK customers you need to host at a location in London. If you're a US company, then host in the US and a Europe based business then host in Europe.
The UK is a little bit different to other countries - if you're serving a Europe based audience as well as visitors from the United Kingdom, and there's more European based visitors then you may want to look at hosting in Amsterdam, France or Germany (the options we've given you above generally all have mainland Europe data centres too).
Generally the site will run 0.5-1 second SLOWER when the visitor traffic has to cross an ocean so this is really important!
Not all providers offer hosting in all locations so before committing to a provider make sure the servers are located in the right location for your business.
**NOTE if you're serving an international audience then it's really important you use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a distributed network of servers around the world that host your content that will reduce the impact geographic location has on speed. Most top tier hosts have CDN services built in.
Obviously if you're on this page you know that site speed is really important but most people overlook uptime and reliability which are arguably even more important, after all, if your site is down is effectively has zero speed!
Your hosting needs to be well matched to the number of visitors you’re expecting and the order volume you’re catering for. If your store revenue is in the millions then you’ll need a much larger server to suit.
Don't expect to run a high traffic site or a database heavy site on cheap hosting or a low end plan. Make sure the plan is matches to the traffic level you're expect.
Sidenote: we typically use sitespeedbot.com to WordPress website speed. In an ideal world your LCP should be under 2.5 seconds, CLS under 0.1, FCP under 1.8 seconds and TTFB under 0.5 seconds. We also use uptimerobot.com to monitor site uptime.
What is your support expectation?
At some point you’re going to need support. Do you expect to be able to call your provider when the site is down? Do you expect them to be able to help with general technical problems that aren't strictly related to hosting? Being clear with what your expectation is up front is really important.
You're not going to get a high level of support paying a few bucks a month - it's just not commercially feasible. Make sure you factor in the level of support you want when choosing a plan.
If you’re a larger store doing millions in revenue you’ll ideally need your own dedicated Wordpress dev resources on top of what the hosting provider offers.
Your website CMS is no different to your smartphone or laptop. It needs regular patches and updates to ensure bugs are taken care of and security holes are patched.
Some hosting providers offer patching as part of their service, others expect you to take care of it. Bottom line, patching needs to be done by someone!
Most hosting plans will offer roughly the same specs and features but often there are some subtle differences.
Features that are worth considering are:
Free SSL Certificates - all good hosts offer free SSL certificates and SSL/HTTPS is standard across the web now. Any host you’re looking at should support free SSL certs.
HTTP2 protocol support - this is an important speed consideration. A host that doesn’t support HTTP2 is not running updated servers and should be avoided.
PHP 7.X support - your host at a minimum should support PHP v7.0 and ideally the newer v7.1 and 7.2. The PHP version your hosting instances are running can have a dramatic impact on site speed. Newer versions run faster.
Number of Wordpress instances or domains supported - how many sites do you want to run on the plan? Some providers give you one instance, some a handful and some unlimited.
Storage and Disk Space - how much disk space are you going to need? Most sites aren’t actually that big, 10-20gb is usually plenty for even larger sites.
Traffic Quota - how much traffic or quota do you need for your site? Some hosts charge on raw gigabytes or terabytes transferred, some on actual visitors.
Backups - this is probably one of the most important features so we’ve expanded further in the point below.
CPanel - Cpanel is a hosting management console. Some hosts use/provide Cpanel and some use different management interfaces. This really shouldn’t be much of a consideration because all admin panels allow you to do roughly the same thing but for some people this is important.
MySQL server version support - v5.7 is the latest version of SQL server, the database server Wordpress uses. v5.7 can be significantly faster than v5.6 for *some* types of sites so if you’re interested in absolute maximum performance this is important.
What is your backup strategy? There’s so much digital capital tied up in your website that it’s critical that you at least have some backup system in place taking daily backups.
On bigger sites ideally you’ll need to look at realtime or near realtime backup solutions where the site is backed up upon every change or on an hourly basis.
With backups there's a saying, 2 is 1 and 1 is none. What's the is implying is that it's not wise to rely solely on one backup system.
With ALL our SEO agency clients we run two backup systems - usually the hosting the site is on has a backup and then we generally use Blogvault on top of the hosting backup.
Blogvault is by far our favourite backup solution as it has a realtime option where changes are backed up on the site as they happen (perfect for Woocommerce) AND they specifically tell you which files and database tables are not being backed up.
We've used pretty much every major backup plugin on the markup - Backup Buddy, Vaultpress, Updraft, BackWPUp and a bunch of others - Blogvault is really the only one we trust.
It's not good enough to solely rely on the hosting provider's backup as problems and data loss DO happen. Even a moderately successful website will have 100s if not 1000s of hours invested in it along with SEO rankings and optimizations - most businesses today simply cannot afford data loss so at less than 10 bucks a month for the base plan there's really no excuse.
Like I said at the top, you get what you pay for when it comes to hosting. You simply cannot expect a quality hosting service when you’re paying a few bucks a month.
These hosts are known to be slow hosts and should be avoided if speed is your top priority:
Bluehost, Godaddy, Hostgator, any hosting company owned by EIG, Dreamhost, A2 Hosting, Site5, iPage, 1&1 Hosting.
These guys all run a business model that is based on price being the key feature. In order to give you that $3/month hosting plan they run their servers to the absolute limit, don't keep infrastructure up to date and provide poor quality support. Avoid them if speed is important. If price is an important concern, Siteground and Cloudways are both fast and dirt cheap.
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