With high-traffic WordPress hosting, your focus will be very different from those looking for cheap entry-level WordPress hosting. Price is becoming more and more important, and performance and reliability are the centers.

Web hosting is often ignored, despite the fact that it is one of the most important aspects of any effective website. Choosing the WordPress hosting that best suits your needs can improve your SEO and increase sales. There are many different types of WordPress hosting options available, such as free, shared, VPS, dedicated, and managed WordPress hosting.

Types Of Hosting

You’ll come across many different forms of WordPress hosting as you look around:

  • Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is a fantastic low-cost starting point for new websites, but it won’t provide the efficiency that a high-traffic site needs.
  • Managed WordPress Hosting: At the server level, managed WordPress hosting isn’t always distinguishable from shared hosting, but it does have a range of WordPress-specific features and optimizations that can help you sustain higher traffic levels. The majority of these concepts are categorized according on a monthly traffic projection.
  • Virtual Private Servers: Virtual private servers (VPS) allow you to have dedicated server resources without having to buy an entire server. This packages can usually manage a lot of traffic than shared packages but they are limited in terms of resources.
  • Dedicated Server: You may hire and oversee a full server with server management packages. A single server with the necessary standards would provide reliable output for even a high-traffic area, however the server’s theoretical limits will still constrain you.
  • Cloud Hosting: Cloud computing delivers unrivaled performance and scalability by distributing resources across multiple servers and locations. If you ever need to maintain a high-traffic site operating at maximum capability even during the most heavy traffic surges, cloud hosting is the way to go.

Can WordPress Handle Heavy Traffic?

If you want your website to get a lot of traffic, make sure it won’t slow down when the tourists start coming in. You’re definitely wondering how WordPress manages huge traffic if you’ve ever browsed a sluggish WordPress site.

Absolutely, WordPress can handle a big volume of visitors. The quantity of visitors that WordPress can manage is completely unrestricted. But on the other hand, your hosting provider and on-site speed optimization will greatly affect your web’s capabilities to accommodate large traffics.

WordPress powers more than a third of all websites on the internet, so there are plenty of high-traffic instances to choose from. Your website is just as fast as the server on which it is hosted. Nothing else you do will plan your site for high traffic if you don’t have the right web host. As a result, you’ll want to pick a web server that really can manage a lot of visitors.

Top High Traffic WordPress Hosting

Before entering the list, let’s take a quick look at some considerations for hosting high-traffic sites because it can give you an in-depth understanding of why we chose the host we have done:

Smart cache:

Caching is an excellent technique to improve the efficiency of your WordPress website and minimize loading speed, which really is particularly necessary for high-traffic websites. Although many great WordPress caching plugins can help you implement caching at the application level, the higher performance approach is usually to provide cached content at the server level, as it eliminates the need to load WordPress/PHP when providing caching content.

Dedicated resources:

By letting you “share” resources with other sites on the same server, the cheapest WordPress host can provide budget prices. This is great for low-traffic sites, but not a good choice for high-traffic WordPress sites. Instead, you need dedicated resources only for your site. Although a dedicated server can provide you with these resources, you will see a more popular method which is to use cloud hosting from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, or other cloud providers. You can still get resources dedicated to the site, but you can expand and reconfigure it more easily if needed.

Nginx:

Nginx is a web server and reverses proxy, which is particularly popular on high-traffic websites because it can usually outperform the popular Apache web server in high-traffic situations. Although Apache is the overall market leader in the web server space, when you look at the 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 sites with the highest traffic, Nginx is the current market leader. Therefore, for a website with a lot of traffic, you want a host that uses the Nginx stack.

Scalability:

If your website has a lot of traffic now, it is likely to have higher traffic in the future. To solve this problem, high-traffic WordPress hosting should make it easy to expand your plan as needed. Most of the hosts on this list use cloud hosting infrastructure, which makes it easy to add resources when needed.

Uptime:

Uptime is important for all websites, but it is especially important for high-traffic websites because the impact of downtime will be magnified. Stayed for 30 minutes on a low-traffic website? You may affect several visitors. On a high-traffic website? You may hurt hundreds of visitors. Don’t just accept the text on the marketing copy, but look for an actual service legal agreement (SLA) that guarantees a certain uptime. If the landlord cannot meet the guarantee, you can also choose a remedy. Generally, if the host cannot meet its uptime guarantee, you will get a refund or refund.

Content delivery network:

A content delivery network (CDN) can help you speed up the global load time and reduce the load on the server by delivering static content from a global server network instead of just a single server hosting a site. Many premium WordPress hosts now provide integrated CDN features to improve performance without forcing you to integrate with third-party CDN services.

For high-traffic and big WordPress websites, here are the best hosting options:

1. Kinsta

Kinsta is a popular managed WordPress host that uses an infrastructure powered by the advanced layer of Google Cloud Platform, which is the same infrastructure that Google uses for its services.

In addition to a performance-centric architecture for high-traffic websites, Kinsta also provides convenient features for WordPress users, such as simple staging, automatic daily backups (or more frequently, at an additional cost), and custom hosting meters board.

Kinsta is the host of our CodeinWP blog, you can learn more in our detailed Kinsta review. CodeinWP receives more than 10,000 visitors every day, which I think can be regarded as “high traffic”.

Key features:

  • Nginx web server.
  • Nginx FastCGI cache provides server-level caching.
  • Google Cloud Platform’s backbone.
  • KeyCDN-powered CDN built-in.
  • By letting users to upgrade or downgrade your plan, Kinsta allows for flexible scaling.
  • Add-ons for Elasticsearch and Cloudflare Railgun to boost performance.
  • Overages that are visible. Kinsta will never shut down the domain due to a traffic spike; instead, you’ll be charged an overage fee depending on your use.
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee.
  • New Relic tracking and a detailed analytics dashboard to track use.

Plans and Pricing

This is by no means an exhaustive compilation of Kinsta’s plans for different needs.

Each plan, like some other controlled WordPress hosts, has a monthly visit limit. If you go over this cap, Kinsta will not shut down your account, but you will have to pay for overages or upgrade to a higher tier. The average is $1 for every 1,000 extra visitors:

  • Starter: $25/month
  • Business 1: $100/month
  • Business 3: $300/month
  • Enterprise 1: $600/month

2. Pagely

Pagely is one of the oldest managed WordPress hosts and a pioneer in this field. Although many WordPress hosts have entered the “low-end market” to provide more affordable plans for casual users, Pagely has entered the “high-end market” and focused on quality and service rather than price.

Pagely’s prices are not cheap, but if you want the best WordPress hosting service for high-traffic sites, you may not be looking for the cheapest option.

Features:

  • Infrastructure powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Premium DNS powered by Amazon Route 53
  • Nginx webserver
  • SLA guaranteed uptime
  • Image optimization on-demand to reduce load times.
  • Northstack offers a serverless WordPress hosting option.

Plans and Pricing

Pagely has VPS and enterprise plans available. Here’s an example of pricing:

  • VBURST-1: $199/month
  • VPS-1: $499/month
  • VPS-1+ [HA] (High Availability): $1,249/month
  • Preconfigured Enterprise plan: $2,500/month
  • Custom clusters: $5,000/month

3. WP Engine

Driven by a $250 million investment in 2018 and the recent acquisition of Flywheel (previously a competitor), WP Engine had unquestionably solidified its status among the most well-known and prominent wordpress providers.

WP Engine itself refers to itself as the “WordPress digital experience platform”, and I want to show that this is not just hosting. For example, since WP Engine acquired StudioPress, you can get the popular Genesis framework and sub-themes for free.

WP Engine also has many convenient managed WordPress features, such as automatic backups and staging sites.

Key features:

  • Server-level caching
  • Performance monitoring
  • Dedicated Page Performance tool
  • Built-in CDN service
  • Nginx server stack.
  • AWS cloud infrastructure.
  • 99.95% SLA uptime guarantee

Plans and Pricing

WP Engine provides three pre-configured plans as well as a personalized design for those with more complex requirements. Like Kinsta, each plan comes with a monthly visit limit, and you’ll need to upgrade (or pay overages) if you go above that limit. WP Engine charges the same $1 per 1,000 visitors over your limit as Kinsta:

  • Startup: $20/month
  • Growth: $115/month
  • Scale: $290/month
  • Custom: varied price

4. Pantheon

Pantheon is a well-known wp Engine host with a Google Cloud Platform-based extensible system Pantheon is similar to Kinsta in this regard, but it runs on a webserver technology stack on top of the Google Cloud Platform. In addition to the high-performance technology stack, the Pantheon also has many convenient features built-in, such as multiple staging environments, automatic backups and updates, and so on.

Key features:

  • Nginx webserver
  • Server-level caching
  • Elastic hosting
  • Global CDN built into your hosting
  • Application performance monitoring
  • SLA Guaranteed 99.95% monthly uptime

Plans and Pricing

Pantheon plans, like Kinsta and WP Engine, have a traffic limit, and you’ll be charged extra if you go over it. At $2.50 per 1,000 visits, Pantheon’s overage fees are slightly higher than those of the other two hosts:

  • Basic: $4/month
  • Performance: $160-$916/month
  • Elite: agreed price for maximum visitors

5. SiteGround

SiteGround may be known for its budget-friendly managed WordPress hosting plan, which packs advanced features such as segmentation, server-level caching, automatic updates, etc. into a low-priced package.

SiteGround’s sharing plan applies to high-traffic WordPress sites to a certain extent. The highest-level GoGeek plan supports 100,000 visits per month, and smart caching/optimization can help you exceed this limit.

However, for websites with higher traffic, a better option may be SiteGround’s cloud hosting plan, which provides dedicated (and hosting) resources at an affordable price.

Key features:

  • Server-level caching with Nginx and Memcached.
  • Cloud plans with dedicated resources and fast scalability
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee on an annual basis via an SLA.
  • Free CDN integration via Cloudflare.

Plans and Pricing

There are no arbitrary visitor restrictions in place at SiteGround. For its shared plans, SiteGround provides average visits, but these are just estimates, not hard limits.

SiteGround’s real limitations on shared plans are based on CPU use, while cloud plans don’t have arbitrary limits because you’re paying for dedicated resources:

  • GoGeek shared plan: $14.99/month (promo pricing) ($39.99 for regular pricing)
  • Cloud hosting: $80- $240/month

Finally, it’s not a myth that WordPress can handle a lot of traffic; many of the popular websites you visit are probably driven by WordPress. You should have no trouble scaling your site to any amount of traffic if you select the right hosting provider with the right features that will work for you.