This page records every change to our testing infrastructure, scoring methodology, and data windows. We publish monitoring failures and data gaps here alongside improvements. Our full testing methodology and the purchase invoices for every account we monitor are published separately.
2026
August 11, 2026: Every ranking page now runs on a 10-month window: October 1, 2025 to July 31, 2026. That is 304 days of continuous monitoring at 60-second intervals, or 437,760 individual tests per host. The window advances monthly and becomes a true rolling 12 months on October 1, 2026.
August 11, 2026: Monitoring gaps disclosed. NameCheap and GoDaddy shared hosting stopped reporting after June 30, 2026, so both rank on 273 days (393,120 tests) with an asterisk on every figure. Templ.io returned no data after June 2026, and Closte has no live monitoring endpoint. Neither carries current performance figures until monitoring resumes.
August 8, 2026: Our Hostinger coupon page now scores all five plans on a True Savings Score, which measures the actual dollar saving across the full contract term rather than the advertised discount percentage. Renewal pricing is included in every calculation.
August 7, 2026: We expanded our scoring from three performance tests to five. Best WordPress Hosting weights Performance at 80% and Value at 20%, split across US TTFB (22%), uptime (22%), load handling (18%), global TTFB (13%), and server hardware (5%). Best Web Hosting uses 60% Performance, 20% Features, 20% Value.
August 7, 2026: Our Core Web Vitals statistics report was rebuilt from the June 2026 HTTP Archive crawl, covering 4.4 million WordPress sites. Figures from the previous crawl were replaced outright rather than appended, so every number on the page comes from a single dataset.
July 25, 2026: We refreshed 22 individual hosting reviews against the current data window. Every TTFB, uptime, load handling, and pricing figure on those pages was re-pulled from our monitoring infrastructure rather than carried over from the previous version.
July 16, 2026: Our Cheap Web Hosting rankings moved to a dedicated scoring model: introductory price 40%, renewal price 40%, TTFB 10%, and uptime 10%. Weighting renewal equally with the intro price stops hosts ranking well on a first-year discount they claw back in year two.
July 9, 2026: We reran our Bluehost load test following their infrastructure move to Oracle Cloud. The result was 41ms average response time with 0% errors across the full test, replacing the 131ms figure recorded under our previous methodology.
May 12, 2026: We published a public archive of our newsletters, so every issue we send stays readable and citable without a subscription.
March 31, 2026: Global TTFB figures across the site now use cached results from SpeedVitals, measured from 40 locations worldwide. Cold-cache first-request numbers were removed entirely. Every host is measured the same way, so global figures are directly comparable across our WordPress hosting benchmarks, reviews, and roundups.
January 1, 2026: We bought hosting account from 10+ new hosting companies and collected 90+ days of performance data in Q3-Q4 2025. Some of the hosts are HostArmada, ScalaHosting, WordPress.com, Pressable, Interserver, InMotionHosting, DreamHost, Ionos, GoDaddy, NameCheap and EasyWP.
2025
December 22, 2025: Nexcess was consolidated into Liquid Web Managed WordPress. Our test site was relabeled and all load test records renamed on the same date. There is no separate Nexcess dataset from this point forward.
October 2, 2025: We have updated our deals page. Now, you can sort the deals by pricing, supported by our performance data. We help you choose the best hosting deal based on performance-to-price value, rather than just pricing. We also categorized hosts into categories of shared hosting, managed WordPress and Cloud/VPS for easy filtering.
September 28, 2025: We are adding new tests to our Hosting benchmarks in 2026. We began our benchmarks with the three most essential tests: the speed at which the servers can deliver the page to visitors (TTFB speed), the reliability of the servers (uptime), and how they handle load with their tech stack (load handling). Later, we included backend performance test using the Benchmark plugin, which tests the host’s CPU, Memory, Network, filesystem, and database operations. This test will be highly helpful in measuring backend performance, and sites with huge workloads can rely on these reports to find an ideal choice.
Now, we are including a few tests to measure uncached performance, such as the WP admin dashboard load time and uncached load testing. Apart from that, we are going to reintroduce the Core Web Vitals test to measure the performance from multiple locations/devices.
August 30, 2025: All the test sites (including hosts under testing) are upgraded to PHP version 8.3. Exceptions: WP Engine doesn’t show the option to change PHP, so it stays at 8.2. Performance improvements are expected across the host. We will rerun our load test to obtain the latest performance scores.
July 1, 2025: A2 Hosting, one of the top-performing hosts in our benchmarks, is acquired by WorldHostGroup and rebranded as hosting.com. Following this acquisition, the old data centers are discontinued and new locations are added.
Our A2 Hosting test site was previously hosted on the USA Michigan datacenter, which is no longer available for new customers. This makes our benchmark data not reflect the actual hosting experience that customers would receive. So, we purchased a new hosting account with Hosting.com using their Dallas Data center location.
This ensures that our benchmark results remain accurate and relevant for users considering Hosting.com for their websites.
April 24, 2025: FastComet was acquired by Hosting.com. The existing FastComet data centers are being retired and sites migrated onto Hosting.com infrastructure. Our six years of FastComet performance data reflects the old data center, so we are not recommending them until the new infrastructure has a full monitoring window.
January 2, 2025
- Rocket Hosting now offers WP Rocket, a premium caching plugin for free. We removed the WP Fastest Cache plugin on the Rocket test site and activated the WP Rocket plugin. Apart from enabling caching settings, we haven’t activated any other cache settings on WP Rocket.
- A2 Hosting introduced a new TurboHub feature exclusive for WordPress sites. It comes with speed-optimized LiteSpeed cache settings. Hence, we removed the Fastest Cache plugin and enabled the LiteSpeed plugin on the Turbo settings.
2024 and earlier
July 4, 2024
- Hostinger Update: On June 12, 2024, we upgraded our old “Single” plan, which we have been testing since November 30, 2020, to the new “Premium” plan, as the company now offers the “Premium” plan as the base plan for anyone to purchase. After upgrading, we reconducted the load test and included the latest data on Hostinger’s post.
April 4, 2024
- WordPress Hosting Benchmarks: We have updated the benchmark scores of all hosting companies for 2024 based on the last 365 days of data. Along with speed and uptime data from Pingdom, the load test and Core Web vitals scores are updated on the same day. While the benchmark post includes whole year data, we are planning to include the latest data (updated quarterly once) on Fastest WordPress hosting services post.
January 1, 2024
- We started using the SpeedVitals tool for TTFB measurement as it offers 40+ global test regions and also averages the score continent-wise, enabling users to make fast decisions. Earlier, we’ve used the KeyCDN TTFB checker tool.
September 30, 2022
- We stopped testing EasyWP hosting after 19 months. Their starter plans lack most of the essential features like automatic backups. I don’t understand what they’re trying to sell because NameCheap (EasyWP parent company) shared hosting offers automatic backups and comes at half the cost of EasyWP. They also skip the Let’s Encrypt lifetime free SSL and bundle their own SSL free for first year alone (payable from second year). Their CDN is also limited and can be used only if your domain is bought from NameCheap. There are many such restrictions and there is not a single reason for us to recommend EasyWP.
October 30, 2022
- We stopped monitoring Closte hosting. They have not been accepting new customers for over a year, but we kept monitoring them. Now, we feel our test data will not be helpful as they’re not in regular business. So, we are retiring our test site and as a stats, we have tracked them for over 20 months.
December 9, 2022
- Kinsta Edge Caching is launched and we’ve enabled it on our test sites. We expect a faster TTFB on Kinsta in the coming months.
January 2, 2022
- We added “ManageWP” to all our test sites for 1-click WordPress core, theme and plugin updates. This makes our test sites to be 99.999% identical, thus helps us to measure the most accurate speed data from our tools.
- WebPageTest.Org is removed and GTmetrix is included for Core Web Vitals testing. GTmetix presents the data in a visually better way and offers flexible test setup options.
