SiteGround review 2023: shared web hosting made better?

SiteGround is one of the best shared hosting providers that has some unique qualities. It is a little expensive but it equips you with the latest tech like Google Cloud infrastructure and LiteSpeed web servers for outstanding performance. Plus, you get in-house security solutions, including a firewall.

But is it easy to use for absolute beginners? How secure and fast is it? In this SiteGround Review, we’ll guide you through all of our tests and provide answers to all your questions. You’ll find out everything you need to know about security, performance, usability, support, and more.

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SiteGround pros and cons

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SiteGround prices

SiteGround is a slightly more premium hosting provider with shared hosting plans starting at $2.99 a month.

The host doesn’t offer dedicated hosting options, but it does have VPS services as well as cloud hosting available from $100/mo for very large and popular sites. But because shared hosting is the more popular option for site creation, we’ll mainly cover the shared hosting plan prices.

For starters, all 3 shared hosting plans come with free SSL certificates, email accounts, native CDN, automatic daily backups, unlimited bandwidth, and built-in caching. While there’s no free domain available, you get different server resources and additional features depending on the plan you choose.

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SiteGround plans are very impressive and offer reasonable prices. However, be mindful that the prices above are for a 12-month billing cycle, and after renewal, it will increase significantly.

For shared hosting, SiteGround offers a 30-day money-back guarantee even for renewals. You’ll get a full refund if the renewal period hasn’t yet started, but you paid already. In other cases, the first month's cost will be deducted from the refund.

All in all, SiteGround has complex pricing but offers really good value for money. The tools and features included are significantly more than what other shared hosting providers offer.

Hosting management – is SiteGround easy to use?

Concerning ease of use, SiteGround managed to make quite the impression, which landed it on the top of our best web hosting list. With a native hosting control panel and an interface that is easy to use, the provider made sure that everything is effortless to find and use.

After you purchase a plan, you are sent an email with all the account details. Once you log in, you’ll be welcomed by SiteGround’s user interface, which looks like this:

It’s kinda cool that SiteGround added some tips and suggestions on the homepage. It’s brilliant for beginners. Plus, the whole design and animation are very eye-pleasing.

The bar on the top includes all settings regarding your account, websites, billing information, the marketplace, etc. Of course, you can read, so we're not going to insist on telling you what’s in every single menu item.

Instead, we're going to focus on some of the most common steps each new website owner takes to create and manage a successful website. We're talking here about taking advantage of the control panel, installing WordPress, activating SSL, and creating a professional email account.

SiteGround control panel

SiteGround has ditched cPanel that the company was using up until 2020 and replaced it with Site Tools. It's an in-house developed hosting control panel – a modern and functional option that’s easy to use even if you’ve never seen any control panel before.

On the other hand, we did see many salty SiteGround reviews of grieving customers when the new panel was announced. Well, the king is dead, long live the king.

You can reach Site Tools from the management area of each individual website.

By the way, this is also a very useful interface as it has shortcuts to specific Site Tools menu items as well as WordPress admin panel login button.

We personally enjoy using Site Tools. The main menu on the left is easy to navigate, and each tool has an explanation. At the same time, you can customize it to fit your individual needs – pin the most used tools to the main screen.

Also, this is the place where you see how much disk space you are using and how many visitors entered your website.

Overall, Site Tools is no less functional than cPanel. Plus, it looks better.

SiteGround for WordPress

WordPress installation on SiteGround doesn’t require much effort or prior knowledge. The provider will simply guide you through the needed steps. All you need to do is find WordPress installation in the main dashboard. Alternatively, you can click on Websites > New Website in the main menu.

You can also choose to migrate an existing website to SiteGround. It’s a free and convenient option – the host has its own WP Migrator plugin to help you smoothly change your hosting provider. In all other cases, simply choose a wanted app – WordPress or WordPress together with WooCommerce.

After that, all you need to do is simply fill in the information such as your email address and password. Finally, you can choose to add some extra security for your website. We personally skip this one and fill security gaps with third-party tools.

Once you click Finish, it will take just a couple of minutes for the installation to be completed. SiteGround will then launch its WordPress Starter Sites plugin that helps you set up the actual website. You'll get to choose from a number of themes and set up the most common features for an easy start.

Overall, the entire process is effortless. SiteGround proves itself to be a convenient WordPress web hosting provider that takes care of everything. You just need to select your options and think of a secure password (even that can be generated automatically).

Installing an SSL certificate with SiteGround

Unfortunately, SiteGround does not activate an SSL automatically but you can easily do that from the control panel.

In fact, you have 3 options, 2 of which are free.

For some reason, we wasn't allowed to choose the basic free Let's Encrypt that you get with 99% of the hosts. But we're not disappointed at all because WildCard SSL is free – it protects not only your main domain but all of its subdomains as well.

Premium SSL is good if you collect a lot of sensitive data from your visitors. It provides a $10,000 warranty.

In any case, select the certificate that suits your needs, choose a domain on which to install the SSL, and Activate it.

Once you’ve done that, go to the HTTPS Enforce that you'll find in the left-side menu and make sure that it’s on.

Altogether, getting your site protected with an SSL takes less than 2 minutes.

We're not even angry that it’s not done automatically. We get to see how well Site Tools function and feel like pro developers, seamlessly clicking through the settings.

SiteGround email hosting

SiteGround has a standard control panel-based email hosting option. The process of creating a professional email address with SiteGround is just as easy as creating a new website. If not easier. All you’ll need to do is think of a name for your mailbox and generate a secure password.

You can create as many email accounts with SiteGround as you wish, even with the entry plan. It’s great – having [email protected] makes you look way more professional than [email protected]

To do that, simply go to the Email Accounts section in your Site Tools management panel.

SiteGround limits your mailbox is 512MB by default, but you’re free to change it anytime you want. Just press those 3 little dots by your email.

In the same menu, you can also reach your actual mailbox – it’s the Log into Webmail option.

SiteGround uses RoundCube email client, which itself is rather outdated. Nonetheless, it gets the job done. Plus, there is a convenient menu on the left added by the provider so you can set up autoresponders or forwarders.

You should keep in mind that for the email, you will be using the same server as your website. This means limited storage and that you are sharing reputation with all the other websites hosted on that server.

For this reason, free email accounts are good for casual use, such as collecting contact for submissions. For actual email marketing campaigns, you should look at paid options. Email hosting sounds fantastic in this case, like Google or Outlook.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to break a sweat about creating a professional email account with SiteGround. Not even a tiny, little drop. It should take just a few minutes, and nothing is confusing about the process. The limited storage and shared reputation kinda burst my bubble, but that’s why third-party email clients exist.

SiteGround staging

SiteGround is one of the very few providers that include a website staging tool in shared hosting (starting with GrowBig). When available, it’s an essential feature to keep your website’s development and improvement smooth and secure. Moreover, SiteGround makes it very easy to set up.

How does staging work?

Basically, you are creating a carbon copy of your website to test out changes or make improvements. Developers often use it as the first stage – this copy is only visible to them. Once everything functions flawlessly in this staging copy, you can push all the changes to the live version of the website.

To create a staging environment, all you have to do is give it a name and push on the Create button. If you have many features you want to test out, feel free to create as many staging environments as you wish. The sky’s the limit. Or your plan storage, in this case.

When deploying the changes from the staging environment to your published website, you can choose what to deploy. You can transfer all changes or just some files, depending on what you think works best.

Overall, we think it’s one of the best tools to have in your pocket. Plus, it is so easy to use that you don’t have to be a pro developer to take advantage of it.

So, to conclude this part of SiteGround web hosting review, all we can say is that it is very easy to use. The user interface is simple and functional. No matter what you want to do, whether it’s installing WordPress or creating an email account, you’re going to have an easy time doing it.

SiteGround hosting for business

SiteGround has a bunch of useful tools when it comes to website management. But as we found out, it has some cool stuff for businesses as well.

For example, if you opt for the Grow Big or more expensive plan, you can add collaborators to your account. This way, everyone will get their own access to an account and a specific project they are working on. This helps with workflow and security.

SiteGround is also a very secure, very reliable, and very fast solution for a small WooCommerce site hosting. Each new WordPress installation already has a pre-installed WooCommerce plugin, which makes it that much easier to start an online store of your choice.

And if you’re set on growing your business to new heights, SiteGround offers Cloud hosting plans that start at $100.00/mo. The plans are based on Google Cloud infrastructure, meaning the most high-end hardware will power your site.

The Cloud hosting plans are fully managed – SiteGround takes care of the launch, set up, and software. You, on the other hand, get a functional control panel to focus on your website.

Performance – SiteGround speed, uptime, and stress testing

SiteGround is one of the fastest providers we've tested when it comes to shared hosting. Not only that, but it is also highly reliable and capable of handling big loads of traffic.

We’ve tested SiteGround’s performance on the GrowBig plan. Which is not even the most expensive one.

SiteGround uptime and response time

At first, we looked at how reliable the provider is. Over almost 2 months, SiteGround had only 3 outages. It's a total of 7 minutes downtime. This puts the average uptime at a much desired 99.99%.

While the standard and SiteGround’s offered uptime guarantee is 99.9%, the actual result is much more impressive.

To put it into perspective, 99.9% would give us almost 9 hours of yearly downtime. Meanwhile, 99.99% equals just 52 minutes. Bravo!

SiteGround speed test

For the second SiteGround test, we wanted to check how fast the provider loads an empty WordPress installation from different locations. Fast it loaded.

My website is hosted in the US, so the website speed is best there – to get Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), it took 311ms. That’s just a little bit more than a regular eyeblink. Meanwhile, London and Mumbai times were a little slower. But even they were very much okay.

How do we know that?

Google’s benchmark for LCP is 2.5 seconds. SiteGround fits into that time with some seconds to spare.

But that’s not a real website. Next up, we installed a nice theme with demo content on it. Made it pretty heavy, in fact.

And SiteGround did not flinch. LCP increased to 0.8 seconds but that’s still very fast.

In fact, we believe that’s the fastest result for shared hosting that we got this year.

And… It’s possible to make it better.

SiteGround has many tools for increasing website speed. Some of them are automatically on, while others you can set up yourself. We wondered how much faster the provider could be if we maxed out on all the optimizations.

Well… 160ms faster.

For a human eye, this number is not a big deal. But for computers, it is.

If you’re in a competitive market, every tiny little detail counts. You need those 160ms to beat your competitors in search engine rankings and overall visibility. So SiteGround is a solid choice if you're looking for a fast hosting.

On the other hand, a real person won’t care if your website loads in 1s or 1.2s. So if it’s a personal website or a local business – don’t worry about the speed that much.

SiteGround stress testing

Finally, the most important thing is how much traffic and how well a provider can handle. SiteGround promises me 25 000 visits a month on GrowBig.

To see if that’s close to the truth, we’ve sent 50 virtual users to my website. And SiteGround received them with open arms.

What’s important here is the blue line, which represents speed, and the grey line that represents visitors. That blue line should stay as flat as possible.

Flat it stayed. There was one bump, but overall, SiteGround did not care that we put major pressure on its servers. It remained as fast with 50 visitors on the site as it was with 0.

But are 50 visitors a lot?

Well, let’s say that there were 50 visitors on your website every single minute, and they kept changing. Some come in, some come out. That would mean 10s of thousands of monthly visits. So we think this test shows that SiteGround can handle more than its promised 25 000 visitors per month.

We can only give the host A++ for performance. It passed all of my tests with ease.

What makes SiteGround hosting fast?

SiteGround is capable of showing one of the best performance results because it has a very strong technology behind it.

• Server location choice. SiteGround’s servers cover the majority of the world. You can pick a server from 7 locations – the US (Iowa), Europe (UK, Netherlands, Germany, Spain), Singapore, and Australia.
• Newest technology and software optimizations. SiteGround implements the newest updates as soon as they are secure. Some of the examples that your website will be using are the newest PHP versions, HTTP/2 and QUIC, TLS 1.3, and OCSP Stapling.
• In-house speed solutions. Ultrafast PHP and custom MySQL setup. For GrowBig and GoGeek plans, SiteGround introduced a custom PHP setup which they named Ultrafast PHP. For all plans, a customized MySQL setup is also implemented, which fixes the issue of slow MySQL queries, boosting the speed even further.
• SuperCacher and SG Optimizer. SuperCacher is a 3-layer caching tool that reduces page loading times, caches static website content, and saves CPU resources. The SG Optimizer allows you to manage cache settings directly in your WP admin dashboard as well as gives you a bunch of useful tools for boosting speed.

The bottom line is that SiteGround’s performance is pristine. The uptime is better than guaranteed, and it loads websites very fast. Not to mention that the provider didn’t lose face when we loaded up my website. We made it hard on purpose, but SiteGround jumped through all the hoops. Plus, we got to see that all of the cool speed optimizations actually work.

SiteGround security

Like any other hosting provider that respects itself and its customers, SiteGround takes security seriously. To that effect, the provider has multiple safety features designed to protect its servers as well as all websites hosted on them.

SiteGround is in your face with how well it handles security, so we decided to see what the fuss is about. We weren’t disappointed. The provider doesn’t stop at free WildCard SSL certificates. Here's what else it offers:

• Real-time monitoring system – the server status is checked every 0.5 seconds.
• A custom web application firewall (WAF) – SiteGround adds new rules every year. Hundreds of them. This helps to protect from the emerging application vulnerabilities.
• An AI anti-bot system – designed to block millions of threats every single day.
• SiteGround Security plugin – it protects from common attacks such as brute force, common malware, and other issues, known all too well for the WordPress community.

Moreover, all websites enjoy daily automated backups. You can restore your website with a single click. Plus, you have the freedom of choosing what to restore:

• Emails
• All files and databases
• Just files
• Just databases

The backups are distributed and stored in different data centers for increased redundancy and security. So even if one copy is damaged, there's a perfectly good backup still available.

Another notable security feature is that all plans deliver a free native CDN setup. This helps to protect your website against DDoS attacks and blocks anything malicious as well. When your website’s content is distributed to multiple servers worldwide, the original IP is masked. Also, it can boost your website's speed for those visiting your site from a faraway location.

One downside to SiteGround’s security approach is that it makes domain privacy a paid option – $12 for the first year, and it costs $24/year to renew. A lot of domain registrars out there don’t even bother to charge for domain privacy. If you’re from Europe, however, you don’t have to worry about it.

Generally, we were happy with SiteGround’s security features. It’s a truly secure web hosting provider. While domain privacy is an extra expense, there’s a lot of additional security features that compensate for that.

SiteGround customer support

SiteGround offers customer support via multiple channels. The live chat, phone support, and help desk tickets are available 24/7. There is also an extensive knowledge base, a help widget on every page of your account control panel and Site Tools, and a smart AI chatbot.

We read a lot of SiteGround reviews, and they all said that SiteGround’s customer support is excellent. That, combined with a couple of Stevie Awards for customer service and the provider's claim of 97.7% customer satisfaction rate in previous years. Of course, we wouldn’t believe it, so we decided to give it a go myself.

The first thing we noticed was that SiteGround prefers you to use the help widget. It’s on every page, after all. The widget takes you to the Help Center where you'll find a ton of information in articles and tutorials.

Of course, you might want to contact an actual person instead of reading countless tutorials.

SiteGround support proved to be very efficient and fast. And that’s what we’re looking for.

SiteGround video review

SiteGround hosting review – final thoughts

SiteGround is one of the best web hosting services because of its high uptime guarantee of 99.99% and great speed of 311ms. All of its shared hosting plans include free SSL certificates, email accounts, native CDN, automatic backups, and built-in caching.

While the pricing is a bit premium, SiteGround employs the latest tech solutions, such as Google Cloud infrastructure and LiteSpeed web servers, to ensure the best performance. Plus, their customer support team is very professional and friendly.

If you didn’t have the time to sift through my way-too-long SiteGround review or want to refresh your memory, here’s a quick summary:

So who do we recommend SiteGround to?

SiteGround's shared hosting is best for business websites, freelancers, and small agencies. Especially those who need to beat competitors in every department – the provider has all the tools and top-level performance to help you out.

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Who we don’t recommend SiteGround to:

If you are going for a small personal site, SiteGround might be too much for you. After all, you don't buy a huge truck if you'll drive it alone daily in crowded NY streets, right? It's getting the right kind of service for personal needs that matters. That’s why we picked out a couple of alternatives that offer different services at different price points.

Best SiteGround alternatives 2023

SiteGround might be great but that doesn’t make it great for you. If you have different needs or requirements for a hosting provider, we would recommend looking at Hostinger or Bluehost

Hostinger

Hostinger is a much cheaper alternative to SiteGround that still manages to deliver great performance. The prices start at $2.99/month.

While the pricing difference is obvious, Hostinger is not much slower than SiteGround, when it comes to performance. What you do sacrifice though, is advanced website management tools – Hostinger is easy to use but doesn’t have as many features.

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Bluehost

When it comes to functionality, SiteGround and Bluehost are almost on the same level. It’s just that Bluehost is way cheaper with the starting price of $2.95/month.

Bluehost focuses on WordPress hosting and includes many helpful features such as staging. It’s one of the best providers to start an online business. It's a good option if you don't require top-tier performance.

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