I recently gave a talk about website speed at WordCamp KL 2017. One of my tips was to use a premium web host like Kinsta.

Inevitably I will get questions about whether it is really worth it to upgrade to a premium host. I usually just answer YES, but this time I wanted to give a more quantifiable answer.

I cloned a website to Kinsta and compared it to the original on shared web hosting. Here are the parameters of my test:

  • The cloned site is exactly the same as the original, except for Kinsta’s optimized hosting.
  • Original site is hosted in Michigan
  • Kinsta clone is hosted in Iowa (GCP’s US Central datacenter)
  • Test was conducted out of Dallas by GTmetrix

Here are the results:

Regular hosting vs Kinsta hosting
Regular hosting vs Kinsta hosting

The clone hosted on Kinsta has totally killed the original’s website speed. It went from 2.9s to 1.1s, improving the load time by 163.6%! With some further tweaks we can get the site loading in under 1s. That’s like going from a boring Toyota Camry to a Koenigsegg Agera RS!

I’m not exactly sure how Kinsta improves the speed so much, but when you host on Kinsta you get:

  • GZIP compression enabled by default – that’s how the total page size is less than the original
  • PHP 7.x by default – allows WordPress & plugins to run twice as fast
  • HTTP/2 protocol for faster transfers
  • Advanced, yet worry-free caching

ClickWP has been hosted with Kinsta since 2014 and I’ve been very satisfied with the performance, features and support we get. It really does feel premium. It also feels that I should be paying a lot more money for what I’m currently getting.

I know our website could be faster if I spend the time and money to tweak it, but I also know it could be slower on inferior hosting. For me, it’s a no brainer to host with Kinsta.

Kinsta has recently introduced entry-level plans starting at $30/mo. At the very least, go check them out. Switch to Kinsta and break your website’s speed limits!

Need help migrating to a new web host? Use the coupon code KINSTA to get $50 off our website migration service.

 

P.S. For the speed geeks, here’s the GTmetrix comparison report. And here are the HAR files in case the report is archived and deleted.

About David

David has over 15 years of experience with web geekery and WordPress. That experience spans every­thing from cre­at­ing affordable websites for small businesses, developing custom themes to opti­miz­ing WordPress sites for thou­sands of page views in a day. Say hi to David on Twitter at @blogjunkie.

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