We optimized nearly 5000 WordPress sites for speed and core web vitals and have seen hundreds of different hosting providers in the last 5 years.
We’ve worked with thousands of customers in the UK and Europe and one very common issue with see is sites hosted in the US when the target market is Europe. This is a problem for site speed as typically websites will be 1-2 seconds slower when traffic has to travel long distances across an ocean.
We get into detail on the various hosts we recommend further below BUT for most businesses in Europe our top 3 recommendations and best hosting would be:
- WPAlpha – Fully managed & self-managed options, super fast
- SiteGround – great general-purpose all-rounder with 4 European locations, London, Spain, Netherlands, Germany
- CloudWays – super fast hosting, high flexibility, huge number of locations
7 Best WordPress Hosting Providers In Europe (summary)
Hosting Company
Coupon Code
Price Per Month
Why Recommended?
Website Link
£1 first month & two months free on yearly plans
From
£15.95/month GBP
London location, huge range of powerful features like AI patching & full firewall
Huge discount on yearly plans & low promo starting price
From
€1.99/month EUR
*promotion price
Excellent general purpose host, 4x EU locations in London, Spain, Germany, Netherlands
WPSPEEDFIX ($25 FREE Credit), free 3 day trial
From
$10/month USD
*free 3 day trial!
Highly flexible, large number of Europe locations, great performance per dollar
$35/month USD
Highly Scalable, Managed WP Host, great for larger sites, several EU locations
From
€28/month EUR
One of the original managed WordPress hosts – more expensive but scales very well
Table of Contents
How To Choose The Best Hosting For You
Your website hosting is the foundation of everything you do online. Your SEO and Google Rankings, the performance of your Google Ads, paid traffic, and the volume of inquiries, calls, emails, and sales your site generates are all tied to the quality and performance of your hosting.
Most people choose a hosting provider based on price which is not a great approach. Yes, budget and price are important but shouldn’t be the first priority when choosing a host.
Selection Criteria & Choosing Your Hosting
Here are some of the key considerations to think about when deciding which host is for you:
- Location – as we talked about already, one key problem we see is businesses targeting Europe and the UK but hosting in the US. This will make your site 1-2 seconds slower for most visitors – if you’re targeting the EU you need to be hosted there ideally.
- Type of site you’re hosting – a Woocommerce site doing hundreds or thousands of visits a day is very different to a local business website. Some hosting, like WPX, is not well suited to Woocommerce.
- Volume and type of traffic you’re getting – if you’re getting a ton of traffic or large traffic spikes you’re going to need high-performance hosting to be able to deal with that
- Backups – most hosting has some sort of backup but is it hourly, daily, or weekly and can you keep a copy of your backups? Can you restore directly or do you have to log a ticket? Do you have to restore the entire site or can you restore just a single file?
- Security – the typical WordPress site gets 1000 to 10000 brute-force attacks a day, so security is a key consideration
- Storage space – a simple one, you need enough storage space to host your site. More image-heavy sites typically will need more space
- Migration – who’s handling the migration? Are you going to do it? Is it free or DIY?
- Traffic limits – nobody wants to manage bandwidth and traffic limits, a mid-size Woocommerce site can easily chew through 300-500 GB of data in a month so make sure if there are traffic limits you won’t wake up to your site offline because you had too much traffic
- Patching and updates – some hosts offer basic automated patching, and some offer fully intelligent AI patching, what is your patching strategy?
- Email hosting – we strongly recommend you do not host email where your website is as a provider outage (yes everyone has them), will take out email and web hosting. Generally, you’ll be best off using a dedicated email provider like Google Gsuite or Office 365
- Number of sites you’re hosting – do you need to host just one site or several? Some plans offer just a single site and if you’re hosting multiple sites, remember bandwidth, storage, and resources are going to be split between them
- Your support expectation – most hosts offer 24/7 live chat but many just offer basic support, what’s your support expectation?
- Price – of course, price is a consideration but with hosting you tend to get what you pay for. Expecting to run a business on hosting that costs less than a cup of coffee is a ridiculous expectation.
- Currency – similar to price this may be a consideration. Currency fluctuations and foreign exchange fees charged by credit card providers can impact the overall cost.
Selection criteria that are irrelevant:
There’s a huge number of websites offering hosting advice and much of it is written by content writers who have no technical experience and no business giving hosting advice.
There are some features that are completely irrelevant when it comes to choosing hosting:
- Free domain name – avoid buying domains from or registering domains with your hosting provider. These should be with a completely separate company. By keeping your domain with a different provider, if there’s an issue with your web hosting you’ll not be completely cut off from your domain. Side note, if you have an existing business you should renew your domain for as long as allowed, for example, 5 or 10 years!
- Uptime guarantees – these are less than worthless. Expect all providers to have outages. In addition, WordPress needs regular maintenance and patching so will need regular short maintenance windows of 1-5 minutes for those patches to complete.
- Free SSL Certificates – all modern providers offer free SSL certificates hence this should not be a consideration.
- Wordpress installers or Wordpress installed – all modern hosts provide a way to install Wordpress with a few clicks.
The Best European WordPress Hosting In Detail:
WP Alpha
WPAlpha is pitched at small to medium businesses and includes a ton of features included that are designed to keep your site fast, secure and stable.
Migrations are done for you and handled by their team and they also include basic speed optimisation and configuration as part of their services.
Their backup system offers both hourly backups along with the ability to make backups to your own storage (Google Drive, Dropbox, FTP, Amazon S3) on a nightly basis which is an excellent way to ensure you always have an up to date copy of your website.
Other features include Redis database caching, full firewall, patching done by AI and unlimited bandwidth.
Key Features:
- London data centre
- Small business focussed with many features that will save you money
- Hourly backups with ability to take daily backups to your own storage
- Patching & maintenance done intelligently by AI
- Full firewall and brute force protection to keep your site secure
- Daily malware scans
- Unlimited bandwidth and visits
- SEO tools built in
- Optional basic speed optimisation offered
Be Mindful Of:
- Not enterprise
- Management console has large number of features
- SEO tools not for beginners
SiteGround is an excellent general-purpose host. It’s a fantastic option if you have multiple low-traffic sites and want a fast host that won’t break the bank. In Europe, they have 4 locations to choose from.
One thing that sets them apart from cheap cpanel and shared hosts is that they have a more advanced caching capability powered by Memcached.
Most of the sites we see on Siteground are low to mid range Woocommerce sites, small business sites, and smaller web agencies using the reseller plans.
Key Features:
- London, Spain (Madrid), Germany (Frankfurt), and Netherlands (Eemshaven)
- Best Option If You Have Several Sites With Low Traffic
- Can Host Non-WordPress Sites & Email Too
- Host Multiple Sites (not charged on a per-site basis)
- High Quality Caching Capability particularly at this price point
- Best all-rounder and general-purpose host
- Bills you in Euros or Pounds so no additional currency conversion fees or forex rate changes to deal with.
Be Mindful Of:
- Unclear pricing structure, they offer cheap year-1 pricing that can go up substantially
- Server load, there’s a tendency for people to stick too many sites on a low-end plan
- TTFB – we’ve seen this vary quite a bit depending on the plan you’re on, we recommend Cloudflare APO ($5/mo)
- Depending on your configuration you need to be mindful of their image optimization as it may generate webp images for browsers not supporting webp
- For bigger Woocommerce sites you probably want to look at a dedicated server
- If speed is important you’re better off using WPRocket and a custom-configured cache setup vs their own cache tools
- Lower plans are very restricted in terms of resources and visits allowed
- Security is an optional addon
Cloudways
CloudWays is by far one the fastest hosts we’ve ever worked with with excellent bang for buck. They’re different to most hosting platforms in that they combined the power of a dedicated server with an easy to use management console that effectively makes them a Managed WordPress Host.
They’re the fastest because of what they call their “Thunderstack”. A highly optimized server configuration that is built for speed.
They are a little different to other hosts in that you can choose the core underlying server provider – Vultr, Digitalocean, Linode, Google Cloud and Amazon whereas most hosting providers use only one underlying service.
You can host multiple sites on the same server and typically you’ll pay $10 or $11 per month for a server that can handle upwards of 3000+ visits a day.
We recommend using either Vultr HF or Digitalocean Premium servers from Cloudways as these have faster CPUs and faster NVMe hard disks (faster than plain SSD) . While a few bucks more expensive than the standard Vultr and Digitalocean servers these performance features will make a difference particularly to sites running Woocommerce
**Use the coupon code WPSPEEDFIX to get $25 off your first invoice.
Key Features:
- 8 locations to choose from, Frankfurt Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Finland, Amsterdam Netherlands, Stockholm in Sweden, Dublin Ireland and Milan Italy
- One of the fastest Australian WordPress hosts based on performance for dollars
- Host Multiple Sites (not charged on a per-site basis)
- Advanced Caching Capability with Redis & Memcached options
- Dedicated Server In A “Managed” Style Environment
- Cheap if you have low requirements
Be Mindful Of:
- More technical admin panel and needs configuration to get the most out of it
- Security – there’s very little security built in so ideally you want to use Wordfence on each WordPress install
- Support Is Just OK
- Email hosting is Rackspace email whitelabel
- Backup system needs configuring
- Their Varnish caching is slow, turn it off ASAP!
- Best performance will be from Vultr High Frequency or Digital Ocean Premium servers
- Low spec servers can be poorly configured with no virtual memory causing intermittent database connection errors – see this post on a fix
Rocket.net
Rocket.net bundles Cloudflare edge caching to dramatically boost performance. This is a good option if you’re serving both European and international traffic.
- Priced from: $30/mo
- Disk Space Starts at: 5GB
- Backup System: Automatic daily backups and Manual backup points
- Admin Console: Custom
Key Features:
- Edge caching built in
- Fully managed WP host
- Good for higher traffic sites
Be Mindful Of:
- Higher priced
- Not super flexible
- Weird traffic model
Kinsta
Kinsta is a high end Managed WordPress Hosting provider and a great choice if you have a high traffic site.
Key Features:
- Lots of locations to choose from – Warsaw Poland, Hamina Finland, Madrid Spain, Belgium, London UK, Netherlands, Zurich Switzerland, Milan Italy, Paris France, Tel Aviv in Israel *Israel technically not EU)
- Secure
- Can scale upto Enterprise grade
- Daily backups
- Built on top of Google Cloud platform
Be mindful of:
- CDN can be slow, Cloudflare will be faster
- Weird bandwidth charging based on “visits”, again Cloudflare can reduce this
- Price: from $35
WP Engine
WP Engine is one of the original Managed WordPress Hosts and still one of the best on the market today.
This is the best option if you want your hosting taken care of, don’t want to deal with any tech nonsense and happy to pay for a quality hosting product.
We love that WP Engine take care of WordPress patches and updates and the staging area and backup functionality is fantastic especially if you’re running a complex site or Woocommerce.
**Use the coupon code WPE20OFF to get 20% OFF Month 1
Key Features:
- Locations in London, Belgium, Frankfurt,, Netherlands, Find
- Managed WordPress Patches & Updates
- Staging Area & Backups Along With Other Advanced Features
- Security Built Into The Platform
- Great For Complex Sites & Agency Resellers
Be Mindful Of:
- Weird Bandwidth/Usage Calculation (use Cloudflare to limit usage)
- No Email
- Performance On The Lower Priced Plans
- Can Be Pricey
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between managed, shared and cloud hosting?
These are loosely used terms that for the most part these are just marketing jargon. All hosting is managed to some degree, is sharing resources and is based in the cloud!
Shared hosting is usually used to describe cheaper or lower quality hosting whereas managed hosting generally has a bigger feature set with