Bluehost vs WordPress: which one comes out ahead?
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Choosing between Bluehost and WordPress can be confusing at first glance. While both are major names in the hosting space, they serve different types of users and offer distinct approaches to building and managing a website.
Bluehost typically appeals to users who want more control, stronger built-in security options, and flexibility for scaling projects. WordPress, on the other hand, simplifies the process and is often easier for beginners starting their first site.
For this Bluehost vs WordPress comparison, our research team and I ran hands-on tests on both providers. Below, I compare their pricing, security, usability, interfaces, and marketing tools based on what we found to help you determine which platform fits your needs best.
There are two WordPress options out there: .com and .org. WordPress.com is a service I’ll be reviewing in this comparison. It helps you build a site using the WordPress software, while with WordPress.org, you’ll have to get a third-party hosting service and build the site yourself.
Bluehost vs WordPress: overview
Bluehost and WordPress seem similar, but they serve different needs in practice. I found that Bluehost offers better value with more built-in features, stronger security options, and greater flexibility, while WordPress stands out for its simplicity and beginner-friendly setup. In short, Bluehost will work better for more advanced users, whereas WordPress is ideal if you just want a quick and easy way to launch a site.
| Bluehost | WordPress Hosting | |
| ⭐ Rating: | ||
| 💵 Price: | From $1.99/month | From $2.75/month |
| 📑 Uptime guarantee: | 99.9% | 99.999% |
| 🔥 Coupons: | Bluehost coupon 78% OFF | WordPress Hosting coupon 69% OFF |
| Storage space (from): | 10GB SSD | 6GB |
| ✂️ Free domain (first year): | Yes | Yes |
| 🔒 Free SSL certificate: | Yes | Yes |
| ➡️ Site migration: | Free WordPress migration | Free WordPress migration |
| 💾 Automated backups: | Free automatic weekly backups | Yes |
| 📧 Email accounts: | Free (up to 100MB of storage) | Unlimited (paid) |
| 👨💻 24/7 live support: | Yes | Yes |
| 💰 Money-back guarantee: | 30-day | 14-day |
Our in-house research team and expert writers work hand in hand to regularly test hosting services and provide accurate and fact-checked information. Discover the ins and outs of how we test and evaluate website hosting providers.
Bluehost vs WordPress pricing
Bluehost is much cheaper than WordPress when it comes to their shared hosting plans. The provider’s prices range from just $1.99/month to 5.99/month. Meanwhile, WordPress.com paid plans start at 2.75/month and go all the way up to $31.50/month.
Let’s start with Bluehost, which offers 3 hosting packages:
- Single Site – from $1.99/month
- Starter – from $2.99/month
- Business – from $5.99/month
Bluehost plans are feature and resource-loaded, ensuring a great kick-start no matter which one you pick. All plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee as well, so you’re not required to instantly commit long term.
- If you want to snatch the best deals, check out all of our constantly updated Bluehost coupon codes
If you’re planning to make a small portfolio, the Single Site plan will do the trick. However, you’ll quickly run out of storage, so the Starter plan is more suitable for bigger projects. It allows you to host 10 websites and comes with 10GB storage. The Business plan adds on domain privacy.
Moving on, WordPress has 4 paid plans in addition to a single free one. Here are what the premium plans look like:
- Personal – from $2.75/month
- Premium – from $5.50/month
- Business – from $17.50/month
- Commerce – from $31.50/month
WordPress is less generous when it comes to resources in different plans. To compare, the cheapest plan of WordPress ($2.75/month) comes with only 6GB of storage, while Bluehost’s similarly priced ($2.99/month) Starter plan comes with 10GB of storage.
The upside of WordPress is that, unlike Bluehost, it provides you with a free plan to test things out. You even get 1GB of storage, an SSL certificate, and free themes. Every premium plan of WordPress comes with a 14-day money-back guarantee.
That being said, what you get with Bluehost is much more worth getting considering you get more benefits for a lower price.
Bluehost vs WordPress: ease of use
Bluehost and WordPress.com have no issues when it comes to ease of use. WordPress.com is slightly easier to use since it doesn’t involve any hosting-related features, such as CMS installation or domain and SSL certificate setup.
Meanwhile, Bluehost provides you with more freedom management-wise, but that doesn’t make it beginner-unfriendly. With this provider, you’ll have to set up WordPress first, while with WordPress.com, you can jump straight into website building.
Overall, my best advice is simply to choose what you feel better fits your needs. But I have to note that WordPress.com just makes things a little easier and straightforward.
Bluehost
The registration process with Bluehost is very simple and straightforward. All you have to do is pick a plan. Then, you’ll have to provide your account details and pick extra features such as Codeguard Basic Yoast SEO Premium or SiteLock Security. Lastly, you’ll have to provide payment information, and that’s it.
Once you’re all done with the setup, you’ll be redirected to Bluehost’s user interface. You’ll find that it’s very organized and even comes with a checklist of steps you need to take to create a WordPress website. You can manage all the main features here, including domains, email accounts, an SSL certificate, and plugins.
Bluehost also includes an intuitive cPanel control panel. This panel is meant for more advanced settings, like managing your databases or files and adjusting security measures.
This is the place where you also get the one-click WordPress installation feature. You have to add a site and click Install WordPress – it doesn’t get easier than this. Not to mention that Bluehost has loads of guides as well as videos to help you set your WordPress site up.
WordPress
WordPress was made for beginners, but you’ll still have to go through a learning curve, even if it’s an easy one. To sign up, you’ll simply start by getting a domain and choosing a plan. After completing the purchase, you’ll be sent straight to the WordPress dashboard.
The interface is filled with elements, giving much freedom for customization. Considering that all main elements are neatly displayed on the left side of the dashboard, you won’t have trouble finding what you need.
You can start exploring by picking a theme for your site. There are thousands of options ranging from $20 to $100, but you can also find some basic free ones.
Meanwhile, the WordPress Gutenberg editor allows you to customize your site using blocks. This gives you much more flexibility and makes it much easier to create a modern site.
However, keep in mind that WordPress.com is a simple interface meant for customizing how your site looks. So you won’t be able to access staging features, file databases, or similar features.
So, if you prefer more control over your site, note that WordPress.com lacks flexibility, which could become a source of frustration. But if you simply wish to just create and release content, WordPress.com could save you some time.
If you really enjoy how it works, take a moment to explore our exclusive deals on WordPress hosting for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Bluehost vs WordPress performance
In terms of performance, the Bluehost vs WordPress.com race is a tight one. After a few performance tests, it became clear that both are very reliable and fast. However, WordPress.com did demonstrate a slightly more reliable uptime and faster response time, while Bluehost single-handedly won in terms of site loading speed.
Uptime and response time
We monitored Bluehost for around 2 months and WordPress.com for around a month, to see how they fare. Both platforms performed extremely well, with WordPress.com having a slight edge over Bluehost.
To start, Bluehost proved to be extremely reliable. Our server saw a 99.99% uptime for well over 2 months, which is close to perfect. There were 11 minutes of downtime during our observation time, but this is to be expected from shared hosting, so I’m more than willing to overlook it.
Bluehost also did extremely well with response times, averaging at 361ms – well below the market’s average of 600ms. If it weren’t for a single jump midway through, the result would’ve been even more impressive. To know more about the host’s performance, visit our Bluehost review.
As for WordPress, the builder is rock-solid when it comes to reliability. In a month’s time, our site maintained a flawless uptime of 100%. Of course, this perfection isn’t feasible in the long term, but it does speak volumes about WordPress’ reliability.
WordPress also had excellent response times that averaged out to a very speedy 311ms – barely half of the market’s average of 600ms, too.
My one concern here is that neither Bluehost nor WordPress has an uptime guarantee etched in their SLAs. This could spell trouble, as you’d be left without any avenues for compensation if their servers were to go down for an extended period.
However, ultimately, both Bluehost and WordPress.com knocked it out of the park when it comes to reliability and response times. However, WordPress.com performed slightly better with 100% uptime and a fast 311ms average response time.
Website speed
To find out how fast the providers are when loading fully built websites, I also ran a page loading speed test. To create equal conditions, both sites were hosted and tested from the US.
Now it’s also worth mentioning that Bluehost hosts all its sites in the US alone while offering a free Cloudflare CDN, while WordPress.com uses a more advanced network straight out of the box.
Before we go any further, here are the 2 main measures I’ll be examining:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – this signifies the time it took to load the biggest element on your site. For better search engine search result page rankings, aim for a time that’s under 2.5s.
- Fully Loaded Time – as its name gives away, this shows the time it takes for your site to be fully loaded. For the best user experience, you want to keep this under 3s.
These tests were performed using the GTmetrix tool that monitors your site and gives you a summarized report about your project’s performance.
Let’s take a look at how WordPress hosting vs Bluehost fare:
With Bluehost, its LCP and fully loaded time took the same amount of time: 1.8s. By keeping both measures under the benchmarks of 2.5s, Bluehost proved to be a speedy hosting provider. Your site visitor won’t have to worry about a long load time.
On the other side of the race, WordPress’ results were a little more contrasting. The provider showed a very speedy 1.5s LCP, which is noticeably faster than the undesired 2.5 seconds.
However, the builder’s fully loaded time dragged behind at 3.1s. While 3.1s is only 100ms slower than the 3s benchmark, I'll be keeping a close eye on this to see if this is just a fluke or an indication of troubles to come.
In brief, in terms of site loading speed, Bluehost took the lead and presented a website quickly.
Marketing features
Bluehost has quite a few marketing features in its arsenal to optimize your project. Here’s what you can expect to get with this provider:
- Pro SEO Assist. With this package, you can get an SEO expert to perform on-page SEO for up to 2 hours per month to help your website gain more organic traffic.
- Google Ads. Bluehost offers an intuitive platform that helps easily set up Google Ads, track ads, and do A/B testing.
- Google My Business. This platform makes it easy to get your business on Google Maps. Bluehost lets you set it up straight from your hosting account.
WordPress, on the other hand, doesn’t really come with loads of business features. Yet, it does have a massive plugin store that you can use to find exactly what you need. Here are some plugins for different needs:
- SEO. You can use such SEO plugins as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO for optimizing your site for search engines.
- eCommerce. To build a fully functioning eCommerce site, you can use the popular WooCommerce plugin.
So if you want a provider that has all the features already included, Bluehost is the way to go. But if you’d rather have a whole plugin store to choose exactly what you need, WordPress is what you’re looking for.
Website security
When comparing WordPress vs Bluehost security-wise, WordPress is slightly more well rounded with its measures in that it has firewalls for all of its plans. However, unfortunately, the full stack isn’t available for both platforms – especially if you’re on their cheaper plans.
Let’s start with the similarities. Here’s what Bluehost and WordPress have in common:
- SSL certificates – Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates to protect personal and payment information, as well as other sensitive data, with encrypted connections.
- DDoS protection – security against a malicious attack where your site is flooded with traffic to disrupt it.
- Backup and recovery – Bluehost and WordPress offer daily automatic backup and easy recovery for their premium plans.
- Control site access – with both WordPress.com and Bluehost’s WordPress, you can assign different roles to users so that you always know who has access to what.
- Two-factor authentication – both providers offer multiple-step authentication using mobile. However, Bluehost also allows email setup.
- Anti-spam features – Bluehost offers SpamAssassin to protect your email accounts at all times. With WordPress, you can only get plugins for this security measure.
Now, let’s take a look at how Bluehost’s and WordPress’ offerings differ from each other. Alongside the above-mentioned free features, Bluehost also offers a few more security measures for an extra cost:
- Daily backup, monitoring, and restoration of your site via CodeGuard for $3.99/month or free with Choice Plus and Pro plans
- Monitoring and prevention of malicious software and attacks via SiteLock for $2.99/month
- Domain Privacy + Protection for $11.99 per domain name
As for WordPress, I expected more security measures. After all, the builder doesn’t allow custom plugins or code for its Free, Personal, and Premium plans, which means that you have to put the safety of your site in WordPress’ hands. Plus, most website builders usually take care of all aspects of security for their users.
However, WordPress doesn’t really offer all that much more. It does offer automatic updates – with the Business and Commerce plans, WordPress will perform automatic updates for all your plugins and themes. Other than that, it relies on the basic security features I’ve listed above and third-party plugins.
Overall, Bluehost and WordPress.com’s security measures are underwhelming and suitable for both beginner and intermediate users. With Bluehost, you can also get third-party plugins – many of which are free. Meanwhile, you’ll only have this option for WordPress if you’re on its premium plans.
Scalability
Both Bluehost and WordPress have great scalability options. Whichever provider you choose, you can be guaranteed that there will be plans for upgrading.
Starting with Bluehost, with the Business plan, you’ll be able to create up to 50 websites with 50GB of storage. With the eCommerce Essentials plan, you’ll get up to 100GB of storage and the ability to create 100 websites.
As for WordPress, it has loads of subscription options no matter the business size. The Business plan is a great kick-start for medium-sized projects that comes with all the essentials. If you plan on opening an online store, the Commerce plan is even better, as you’ll get all commerce features ready for use.
Lastly, even if you outgrow the Commerce plan, you can get the Enterprise plan that’s used by popular brands such as Slack, Disney, and more. It allows you to scale to billions of users, providing enough resources for any business.
Overall, both services come with many upgrade options for different business sizes. However, WordPress even has options for enterprises, catering to billions of visitors.
Customer support
| Bluehost | WordPress | |
| Live chat | ✅ | ✅ |
| ✅ | ✅ | |
| Phone line | ✅ | ❌ |
| Knowledge base | ✅ | ✅ |
Both Bluehost and WordPress offer live chat, email support and informative knowledge bases. That being said, only Bluehost offers phone line support for its users.
Another difference between these two providers is that Bluehost offers round-the-clock live chat support every single day. WordPress also offers 24/7 support, but to be connected to a human agent, you’ll need a paid plan.
I put both providers’ customer support agents to the test. Both of them were very professional and helpful. I had zero issues or complaints about the services. The reply time was fast as well – from 1 to 3 minutes.
Bluehost vs WordPress: final recommendations
Bluehost is a more comprehensive service than WordPress.com since it comes at much cheaper prices (starting from $1.99/month compared to WordPress and its $2.75/month) and ensures much more comprehensive security features. Plus, it even has more customer support options, including a phone line and 24/7 live chat.
Meanwhile, WordPress is an easy-to-use provider that is ideal for beginners. Yet, you have to invest in more expensive premium plans to even get the necessary security or marketing plugins. But the performance aspect is excellent, ensuring a smooth experience.
Overall, Bluehost provides you with better value for your money. That being said, WordPress is still a high-quality service that’s suitable for novices. But it lacks the affordability and features that Bluehost promises.
However, WordPress.com could still be a good platform for those who want an easy, fuss-free website and have no intention to scale. It’s also a good option if you just want to get a site up quickly.
Alternatives to Bluehost and WordPress
While both Bluehost and WordPress.com are great candidates for easy website creation, there is an abundance of great hosting providers to choose from. Especially when it comes to WordPress.org hosting, there are 2 great alternatives – the budget-friendly Hostinger and the premium SiteGround.
Hostinger
Hostinger is a very budget-friendly website hosting solution, with prices starting at just $2.69/month. However, do not be mistaken by the low price point. The host comes with an easy-to-use hPanel, great performance, and many WordPress optimizations like the newest PHP version and a LiteSpeed web server. If you're looking for a cheap and performance-oriented host, Hostinger just might be it for you.
SiteGround
SiteGround is a slightly more premium yet very powerful hosting provider with many advanced features. With prices starting at $2.99/month, SiteGround comes bearing good performance, an extensive set of security features, the newest software/hardware, as well as many in-house developed features to optimize WordPress site performance. If you're looking for a secure, fast, and highly functional hosting provider, SiteGround is worth a look.
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Wix vs Bluehost: comparing the giants
Bluehost vs GoDaddy: which is better?
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WordPress.com vs WordPress.org: what's the difference?
Bluehost vs WordPress FAQ
Is Bluehost the same as WordPress?
No, Bluehost is not the same as WordPress. Bluehost is a hosting provider that hosts the WordPress.org content management system, while WordPress.com is a self-hosted platform.
Is WordPress free with Bluehost?
Yes, WordPress.org is free with Bluehost. While you do have to pay for your Bluehost plan’s resources and features, you can install WordPress.org without any additional costs.
Can WordPress host my website?
Yes, you can host your site on WordPress.com. It has a flexible pricing scheme, including a free plan. With WordPress.com, you won’t need to purchase a domain, and the platform will always be updated without the need for your interference.
Is Bluehost good for blogging?
Bluehost is suitable for blogging. It’s very cheap and allows you to connect a domain for free. Plus, it guarantees excellent performance, all essential features, and a one-click WordPress installation process.
Do I need both Bluehost and WordPress?
No, you can successfully use either Bluehost or WordPress alone. Bluehost is a hosting service, while WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that lets you host sites. So you can use WordPress without buying any additional services. Meanwhile, if you purchase Bluehost, you’ll also get a free website builder.
