WooCommerce Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2021

WooCommerce Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2021

Please read the Methodology to fully understand the scope of these tests.

Note: Please check company profiles for summary of performances across multiple tiers. Some companies also offer promotions or coupon codes for a discount as well.

WooCommerce Hosting Performance Benchmarks is spawned off WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks and is designed to create a consistent set of benchmarks showing how WooCommerce specialized web hosting companies perform. The focus of these tests is performancenot support, not features, not any other dimension. These benchmarks should be looked at in combination with other sources of information when making any hosting decision. Review Signal’s web hosting reviews has insights for some of the companies with regards to aspects beyond performance. That said, for the performance conscious, these benchmarks should be a good guide.

The major differences from the WordPress methodology are the following:

Setup

All tests were performed on an identical WooCommerce dummy website with the same plugins except in cases where hosts added extra plugins or code. The Storefront theme was used with the following sample products. The following Plugins were installed: Jetpack, WooCommerce, WooCommerce Admin, WooCommerce Services, WooCommerce Stripe Gateway, and WP Performance Tester.

WooCommerce Specific Settings were a US address, $USD, digital products, Stripe payment gateway, Storefront theme, automated taxes with Jetpack installed.

Load Storm

The process for LoadStorm was the unique WooCommerce specific test. There were four different profiles created and given their own user distributions (in % after profile), all with 5-10 second page think time. The test scaled from 10 to 1000 concurrent users over 40 minutes and stayed at 1,000 concurrent users for 20 minutes (60 minute test, 20 minute peak).

Profile 1 (20%): Buyer – Homepage, add item to cart, go to cart, checkout (doesn’t submit order)

Profile 2 (10%): Customer (existing) – Homepage, login, view orders, view account details

Profile 3 (20%): Browser – Homepage, second page, product, related product, homepage, product, related product

Profile 4 (50%): Home – Homepage only, called Visitor profile last year

K6

Followed the $51-100/Month Price Tier with load going from 1-2000 users over 15 minutes.

 

 

The Companies and Products

CompanyPlan Monthly PricePlan Visitors AllowedPlan MemoryPlan Disk SpacePlan BandwidthPlan Sites Allowed
A2Hosting $17.97Unlimited4GBUnlimitedUnlimitedUnlimited
GoDaddy $24.99Unlimited-UnlimitedUnlimited1
GreenGeeks 24.95Unlimited3.0 GBUnlimitedUnmeteredUnlimited
Lightning Base $19.9525,000 Guideline5 GB5 GB100 GB cap3
ManagedWPHosting €50.00not limited by vistor amount, it is limited by disk and trafficaccount has at least 128MB PHP RAM (as said on the site ,we provide 256MB), server has 32 GB20GB400GB a month1
Nexcess $19unmeteredcloud - variable bursts30GB3 TB1
Pressable $70100,000256GB40GBUnlimited5
Seravo €100.0060,000 visits / monthN/A60GBN/A1
Servebolt $991 000 000 Dynamic RequestsUnmetered4 GB (+flex)Unmetered3 (+ unlimited dev environments)
SiteGround $39.99~100,000 Visits Monthly. The actual limits are for CPU usage.768MB per process 40 GBUnmetered Traffic Unlimited Websites
WordPress.com $45UnlimitedNA200GUnlimited1
View Full Products Table

LoadStorm Testing Results

Load Storm is designed to simulate real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing. It tests uncached performance.

Results Table

CompanyTotal RequestsTotal ErrorsPeak RpsAverage RpsPeak Response TimeAverage Response TimeTotal Data TransferredPeak ThroughputAverage ThroughputWp-login Average Response TimeWoo Buyer ProfileWoo Customer ProfileWoo Browser ProfileWoo Home Profile
A2Hosting 440813920981954.921224.489101177120.653.4933.5812736635483438
GoDaddy 571224234522359.471586.7315282181134.7255.6937.421354391497252334
GreenGeeks 230453311843.05640.151295518160.1722.09179351142836473407
Lightning Base 241437659885.95670.661513816763.9323.4418728783645479407
ManagedWPHosting 131839720638656.82366.221631265237.918.3710.53883262388006784783
Nexcess 11681921249511.75324.50842118931.9513.898874949742702735667
Pressable 26869424986.07746.371008410972.6826.6420.19459474410199196
Seravo 1795629373975707.97498.79611224938.5413.2610.71560501601579140
Servebolt 2824761311434.70784.66150819267.3234.319326270270270159
SiteGround 253766248948.42704.911517712882.3930.6222.89330318288254195
WordPress.com 196629056723.58546.19697221887.5432.4424.32471600452264267

Discussion

Lightning Base, WordPress.com, SiteGround, Pressable, and Servebolt all handled this test without issue.

ManagedWPHosting slowed down and had errors. Seravo had a bug which caused errors on a significant amount of requests but the ones that went through looked fine. GoDaddy slowed down and had errors on get_refreshed_fragment which is an important call to update the shopping cart. Nexcess had some wp-login issues on the majority of requests.

Load Storm Average Response Time by Profile

This takes deeper look at the results and analyzes the performance of loading HTML mime types, to ignore a lot of static assets which are cached and bring down average response times. This tests how fast the initial pages are delivered, which is what a user would experience before loading all the other assets like css, javascript and images.

Results Table

CompanyBuyer ProfileCustomer ProfileBrowser ProfileHome Profile
A2Hosting 736635483438
GoDaddy 391497252334
GreenGeeks 1142836473407
Lightning Base 783645479407
ManagedWPHosting 62388006784783
Nexcess 742702735667
Pressable 474410199196
Seravo 501601579140
Servebolt 270270270159
SiteGround 318288254195
WordPress.com 600452264267

Similar to last year the home profile and browser profile seem to be the fastest in that order. These would be the most static and cachable pages since we are only looking. Also similar to last year it's not clear that the Buyer or Customer profile is universally more difficult for hosting companies to deal with. Both hit uncachable endpoints and should cause load.

Servebolt, SiteGround, GoDaddy, and Pressable are your fastest four on the Buyer profile

Servebolt, SiteGround, Pressable and WordPress.com are your fastest four on the Customer profile.

Pressable, GoDaddy, SiteGround, and WordPress.com are your fastest four on Browser profile.

Seravo, Servebolt, SiteGround, and Pressable are your fastest four on the Home profile.

GreenGeeks slowed down for the Buyer profile. ManagedWPHosting slowed down for the Buyer and Customer profiles.

K6 Static Testing Results

K6 Static test is designed to test cached performance by repeatedly requesting the homepage.

Results Table

CompanyRequestsErrorsPeak RpsAverage Response TimeAverage RpsP95P99
A2Hosting 67534401489335738699703
GoDaddy 6271834513864366868351023
GreenGeeks 66698701472349733735751
Lightning Base 67779181496329744699703
ManagedWPHosting 53947573096066457416875983
Nexcess 7094908421530270775501699
Pressable 88738911956159758283
Seravo 642018261409404705955967
Servebolt 78818771749144861319385
SiteGround 8802810193324962101103
WordPress.com 8844670195119972117118

Discussion

This test used Load Impact (predecessor to K6).

A2Hosting, GreenGeeks, Lightning Base, WordPress.com, SiteGround, Pressable, Nexcess, and Servebolt all handled this test without issue.

Seravo and GoDaddy were ok, relatively flat but a bit slower especially at at P95/P99 levels.

ManagedWPHosting slowed down during the test.

Uptime Testing Results

Uptime is monitored by two companies: HetrixTools and Uptime Robot. A self hosted monitor was also run in case there was a major discrepancy between the two third party monitors.

Results Table

CompanyUptime RobotHetrixAlt Uptime Monitor
A2Hosting 99.91699.7539100
GoDaddy 99.99899.9989100
GreenGeeks 10099.9966100
Lightning Base 99.99199.9913100
ManagedWPHosting 99.81999.873100
Nexcess 99.23899.3906100
Pressable 100100100
Seravo 99.995100100
Servebolt 10099.9995100
SiteGround 100100100
WordPress.com 100100100

Discussion

GreenGeeks, LightningBase, WordPress.com, Seravo, SiteGround, GoDaddy, Pressable, and Servebolt all had 99.99% uptime or higher.

A2Hosting, ManagedWPHosting and Nexcess had some downtime issues which caused it to drop below 99.9%

WebPageTest Testing Results

WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world. Result are measured in seconds.

Results Table

CompanyVirginiaCaliforniaSalt Lake CityLondonFrankfurtCape TownSingaporeMumbaiTokyoSydneyBrazilDubaiAverage
A2Hosting 1.2981.71.7671.5121.7413.0152.72.4652.1272.4391.8913.2732.160666667
GoDaddy 2.3132.6032.5583.483.4047.3133.9725.7962.5194.0962.7914.7743.801583333
GreenGeeks 1.1851.3381.4781.4381.4122.912.2612.3371.732.2121.6433.0831.918916667
Lightning Base 1.351.4631.3612.1471.852.6182.312.6191.4961.9711.7183.2172.01
ManagedWPHosting 1.441.962.1031.2591.0611.953.9691.8342.5752.69927.0332.49025
Nexcess 1.1391.4324.1962.6162.6283.8634.9387.8063.6435.6382.2953.5963.649166667
Pressable 1.2461.291.6051.1951.5731.9232.0831.6491.9971.4892.7041.812583333
Seravo 1.6171.9631.9341.1011.0562.6411.7471.5442.5553.3182.412.6332.04325
Servebolt 1.1081.3171.4891.31.721.9981.2131.5371.1451.4321.1932.9191.530916667
SiteGround 1.0211.0571.1651.3821.4392.8972.8783.1452.0632.311.8153.1372.02575
WordPress.com 0.8940.9411.1770.960.8752.0180.9031.3370.8961.0140.9111.6721.133166667

Discussion

WordPress.com is an absolute standout here. It was the fastest in 10/12 locations. Servebolt was second fastest overall and in 6/12 locations.

On the other end, GoDaddy was the slowest in 6/12 locations and Nexcess was the slowest in 5/12 locations and they were the slowest and second slowest respectively.

Unsurprisingly, US and European locations tend to be much faster, other locations spread out considerably more based on the company.

WPPerformanceTester Testing Results

WPPerformanceTester performs two benchmarks. One is a WordPress (WP Bench) and the other is a PHP Bench. WP Bench measures how many WP queries per second and higher tends to be better (varies considerably by architecture). PHP Bench performs a lot of computational and some database operations which are measured in seconds to complete. Lower PHP Bench is better.

Results Table

CompanyPHP BenchWP Bench
A2Hosting 4.32758.1501137
GoDaddy 10.927277.3155851
GreenGeeks 12.113990.0990099
Lightning Base 6.632748.502994
ManagedWPHosting 5.2151579.778831
Nexcess 4.3011597.444089
Pressable 4.1341408.450704
Seravo 5.34196.6181675
Servebolt 3.2461481.481481
SiteGround 7.3851658.374793
WordPress.com 4.1162500

Discussion

The PHP Bench scores looked a lot faster than the normal WordPress counterparts. Servebolt had the fastest at 3.246 seconds. But WordPress.com, Pressable, Nexcess, and A2Hosting all had 4.x second speeds. ManagedWPHosting and Seravo had 5.x second speeds. Last year, only Servebolt was under 6 seconds. This year we have 7 companies under that mark. It's nice to see such huge speed increases.

The WP Bench was a run away with WordPress.com scoring 2500 which I believe is the fastest score I've ever measured in any test. Last year there was only two companies above 1400 queries per second. This year there are six companies.

SSL Testing Results

The tool is available at https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Results Table

CompanyQualsys SSL Grade
A2Hosting A+
GoDaddy A
GreenGeeks A+
Lightning Base A
ManagedWPHosting A+
Nexcess A
Pressable A
Seravo A
Servebolt A+
SiteGround A
WordPress.com A+

Discussion

A's for everyone with A2Hosting, GreenGeeks, ManagedWPHosting, Servebolt and WordPress.com earning A+.

Internet.nl Testing Results

The tool is available at https://internet.nl/test-site/.

Results Table

CompanyInternet.nl
A2Hosting 35
GoDaddy 50
GreenGeeks 35
Lightning Base 35
ManagedWPHosting 73
Nexcess 47
Pressable 50
Seravo 66
Servebolt 68
SiteGround 30
WordPress.com 52

Discussion

ManagedWPHosting had the top score at 73, closely followed by Servebolt at 68 and Seravo at 66. SiteGround was at the bottom with 30.

I'm not sure how much value there is in this metric, but the results are here for people to look at and evaluate for themselves.

Mozilla Observatory Testing Results

The tool is available at https://observatory.mozilla.org/.

Results Table

CompanyMozilla Observatory
A2Hosting D+
GoDaddy D
GreenGeeks D+
Lightning Base F
ManagedWPHosting B
Nexcess F
Pressable F
Seravo C
Servebolt D+
SiteGround F
WordPress.com D

Discussion

ManagedWPHosting had the highest grade of B. Followed by Seravo with a C, A2Hosting,GreenGeeks,Servebolt D+, GoDaddy/WordPress.com D, and the rest getting Fs.

I really don't know what to make of these results, when so many companies are failing, I have to consider whether the test is useful, or are many companies not doing a good job securing the servers or are these measuring things which are beyond the hosting provider's scope and more on the user? Or is it something else? I don't have an answer, but I am publishing the results to add another data point to the discussion.

Conclusion

There are two levels of recognition awarded to companies that participate in the tests. There is no ‘best’ declared, it’s simply tiered, it’s hard to come up with an objective ranking system because of the complex nature of hosting. These tests also don’t take into account outside factors such as reviews, support, and features. It is simply testing performance as described in the methodology.

Top Tier

This year's Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance Award goes to the following companies who showed virtually no signs of struggle during the testing.


Honorable Mention

The following companies earned Honorable Mention status because they did very well and had a minor issue or two holding them back from earning Top Tier status.


Individual Host Analysis

A2Hosting put up solid load testing results. The K6 test was flat which is what we like to see. The Load Storm test was went relatively smoothly. Unfortunately there was some uptime issues which dropped the uptime below the 99.9% threshold required to earn any sort of recognition.
Visit A2Hosting Website
GoDaddy's first entry into the WooCommerce side of the benchmarks. Let's start with the good. 99.99% uptime. The K6 test was ok, the P95/99 were a bit on slower side. The big problem was the Load Storm test, there was a lot of errors on the get_refreshed_fragment calls which updates the shopping cart and it had a wp-login response time of 1354ms both of which knocked it out of earning any awards this year. I've always been impressed by GoDaddy's willingness to come back and keep trying to improve from the very first test I've ever run until now, so I hope they come back next year with an even better product.
Visit GoDaddy Website
GreenGeeks earned an Honorable Mention this year. They had 99.99% uptime. The K6 test was good and flat. The only thing holding them back this year was the Buyer profile was 1142ms. A very solid product that slowed down just a little bit too much to earn Top Tier marks this year.
Visit GreenGeeks Website
Lightning Base earned Top Tier status. A solid 99.99% uptime rating. Very good and flat Load Storm and K6 results. It didn't stand out in any tests but handled everything very well and without any issues. A solid Top Tier performance.
Visit Lightning Base Website
ManagedWPHosting was a new entrant this year to all the benchmarks. The WooCommerce tests were a bit tough this year on them. Some maintenance issues caused uptime to drop below 99.9%. The K6 test slowed as did the Load Storm test which also had some errors. I hope to see them come back next year and show off some major improvements.
Visit ManagedWPHosting Website
Nexcess was a first time entrant on the WooCommerce test. The best part was the K6 test which it did well on. Nexcess also had the third fastest WP Bench. The Load Storm test had a few errors especially on wp-login. But the biggest problem was the uptime dropping below 99.9% because of a caching bug. I'd like to see some big improvements next year to get them up to Top Tier status.
Visit Nexcess Website
Pressable earned back to back Top Tier awards now. Perfect uptime. The fastest K6 test at every level. The second fastest Load Storm response time. It also had the fastest Browser profile and was top 4 on the other 3 profiles. The third fastest PHP Bench and third fastest WPT average response time. An excellent showing, well deserving of Top Tier recognition.
Visit Pressable Website
Seravo ran into the same error as last year, a Docker proxy bug which couldn't be fixed again. It had 99.99% uptime again. The K6 test was ok. It's a shame to run into the same problem two years in a row. Third time is a charm I hope.
Visit Seravo Website
Servebolt earned another Top Tier award this year. 99.999% Uptime. The fastest Load Storm average response time. Also the fastest wp-login, Buyer and Customer profiles and second fastest Home profile. A solid K6 test. The second fastest WPT results. The fastest PHP Bench. Clearly a Top Tier performance well earned.
Visit Servebolt Website
SiteGround earned Top Tier status again this year. Perfect uptime. Error free K6 test with the third fastest average response time and second fastest P95/P99 response times. The third fastest average response time on Load Storm. The second fastest wp-login response time and it earned second or third fastest on every Load Storm profile. The second fastest WP Bench was a nice boost compared to last year too. Easily a Top Tier performance.
Visit SiteGround Website
WordPress.com earned Top Tier status year. Perfect uptime. The second fastest K6 average response time. A solid Load Storm test. They also absolutely showed off on the WebPageTest results taking 10/12 fastest response times. The fastest WP Bench I've ever seen and the second fastest PHP Bench. A definite Top Tier performance.
Visit WordPress.com Website

About the Author

Kevin Ohashi

Kevin Ohashi is the geek-in-charge at Review Signal. He is passionate about making data meaningful for consumers. Kevin is based in Washington, DC.

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