Are you looking for the best WordPress hosting for your WordPress site? This comprehensive Kinsta WordPress hosting review will examine this popular and widely used host which has been serving site owners for over a decade.
Kinsta is one of the main hosts that comes to mind when website owners think about WordPress hosting. It’s dedicated to providing fast hosting speeds, robust security, and around-the-clock support. We compare these features (and many more).
Keep reading our in-depth Kinsta Managed WordPress hosting review to learn more about its features, view the user dashboard in real-time, and examine its performance data.
Let’s jump in!
Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting Review: A High-Level Overview
Kinsta offers high-performance hosting for WordPress websites. It’s a beginner-friendly host that provides advanced features to help you fine-tune your site’s performance.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the main features—we go in-depth into these in the following sections:
- Built-in caching and Cloudflare edge caching
- A CDN powered by Cloudflare
- Automated daily backups
- Site staging and cloning tools
- Advanced website security protection
- One-click user management
- Expert website diagnostic information
Kinsta makes it easy to deploy or migrate an existing site and offers advanced tools to highlight and improve your website’s performance and experience. Both white-glove migrations are available, along with unlimited basic migrations from any host.
Kinsta Core Feature Breakdown
Kinsta’s hosting offers a lot for WordPress site owners. Here’s a quick overview of the main features:
- High-performance hosting infrastructure: Your sites are hosted on Google’s top CPU servers, with isolated software container technology, along with access to the 260+ server Cloudflare CDN network.
- Focus on speed and performance: High-performance server network with built-in caching, and Cloudflare edge caching, which speeds up most sites by 50% or more.
- Priority support: 24/7/365 technical support from WordPress engineers is included in all plans and available in multiple languages.
- In-depth security: Offers enterprise-level DDoS protection, a free wildcard SSL certificate, HTTP/3 support, automated malware scanning, backups, SFTP/SSH protocols, 2 hardware firewalls, and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance.
- Advanced developer tools: Support and tools for developer workflows, including Kinsta API, database access, WordPress debugging, and a local WordPress development kit.
A Hands-On Look at the Kinsta WordPress Hosting Dashboard
Now that you know more about Kinsta’s offerings, let’s take a hands-on look at the Kinsta WordPress hosting dashboard.
When you log in to your hosting account, you’ll notice the custom-built dashboard. It’s incredibly user-friendly and easy to navigate. With a couple of clicks, you can launch or migrate a WordPress site, deploy an app, or even create a static site. You can host and manage your apps, static sites, and databases alongside your WordPress sites, all from a single dashboard.
Since this review is primarily WordPress focused, we’ll click the Create a site button to launch a new WordPress site.
After that, you can install WordPress, clone an existing environment, or launch an empty environment without WordPress installed.
Next, name your site, select the data center location, and enable CDN and edge caching for improved site performance. Note that there are 37+ different data center locations to choose from, including boosted data centers that run on C3D and provide improved performance.
Then, you need to enter your WordPress login credentials. You can also choose to automatically install WordPress multisite, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, or Easy Digital Downloads.
Once your site is created, you can build and test it on the temporary URL, which will be a version of “yoursite.kinsta.cloud”.
Now that you have a site deployed, let’s explore the individual site management options. When you open an individual WordPress site, you’ll see an overview of your server environment, data center details, database access, and more.
Domains
Clicking on the Domains tab will show you your current primary domain. This is also where you’ll add a new domain name for your site. If you’re using a Cloudflare domain, you can use the free Kinsta Cloudflare integration, or you can connect a non-Cloudflare domain.
Backups
The Backups tab gives you an overview of your website backups. Your site will be backed up automatically every day, but you can also run manual backups and download them to store them in a safe place.
You can also restore to a previous backup version of your site on this screen.
Tools
Clicking the Tools tab gives you many options for actions on your WordPress site. Here’s a quick overview of what you can do:
- Clear your website cache
- Restart your PHP engine
- View your WordPress debug logs
- Search and replace WordPress database values
- Enable PHP relic monitoring
- Password protect .htaccess
- Force HTTP to HTTPS for improved security
- Enable geolocation to identify and redirect traffic
- Enable Early Hints Web Standard to improve page rendering
- Access DevKinsta for local WordPress development
Redirects
The Redirects tab lets you create WordPress redirects. Most WordPress site owners use a plugin to manage redirects, but with Kinsta, you can create redirects that execute at a server level.
Themes and Plugins
Clicking the Themes and Plugins tab will give you an overview of the themes and plugins you currently have installed on your domain. It’ll show you if everything is up to date or if anything needs to be updated.
IP Deny
The IP Deny tab lets you ban specific IP addresses. If you’ve been dealing with a bot, spammer, or hacker, you can block them with a couple of clicks.
Analytics
The Analytics tab shows your current site resource and CDN usage, device traffic breakdown, performance data, and more. This lets you easily see all of your performance data at a glance to see if there are any issues.
CDN
If you didn’t enable a CDN during the site installation, you can do so by clicking the CDN tab. Here, you can turn the CDN on/off, clear the CDN cache, optimize images, minify code, and even exclude specific files from the CDN.
Edge Caching
The Edge Caching tab lets you manage your edge cache. Enabling this will store your page cache in Cloudflare’s 260+ PoP locations worldwide and increase page performance.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Clicking the APM tab enables the unique and handy application performance monitoring module. It helps you get to the bottom of any performance issues your WordPress site is experiencing.
While it’s enabled, it might impact your site performance, but it’ll help you collect detailed data that can help you improve your site like:
- View detailed PHP calls and MySQL queries
- Identify issues with plugins and themes
- Boost load times and site performance
- Access in-depth WordPress troubleshooting data
Note that this is available to every customer, no matter which plan you choose.
Logs
The last tab on your individual site management screen will be Logs. Here, you can see the error and access logs to see what’s happening with your site.
Manage and Monitor Users
You can access advanced user management and monitoring tools by clicking the Manage users or User activity tabs. These tools let you add and manage users for client or team access or view user logs to see actions within your site.
Kinsta WordPress Hosting Support
Kinsta support cares. Their team of WordPress engineers is available 24/7/365. In my own testing with various questions and requests, the response time has been within a few minutes and always with a dedicated real agent. First, there are some guided questions you’ll answer to help direct your needs. Once you get a WordPress engineer, they’re very helpful and thorough with any questions or support you may need.
There are also a lot of built-in self-service support options available throughout the hosting dashboard. You’ll see a pop-up displaying helpful tutorials by clicking the question mark icon.
Kinsta Performance Features and Tests
Kinsta has a rock-solid hosting infrastructure with isolated software container technology that can offer blazing-fast website speeds, even if your site gets a lot of traffic.
Based on standard GTMmetrix scores, it performed pretty well, with a 99% overall performance score and an LCP of 335ms, which is blazing fast by web standards.
I’m running the bare bones WordPress install, so your site may vary. But there are a few performance enhancements you can enable inside your hosting dashboard to help improve your overall performance.
Kinsta WordPress Hosting Pricing
Kinsta offers a range of hosting plans tailored to your needs. For a single website, the Starter plan starts at just $30 per month (when paid annually), accommodating up to 25,000 visitors monthly.
If you require support for two sites, the Pro plan is a great choice, with pricing starting at $70 per month when paid annually. With the annual plans, you effectively get two months of hosting for free every year, making it a cost-effective solution for your web hosting needs.
For agency owners or developers, the Business plans begin at $115 per month and support up to 5 websites and 100,000 visits. The total number of sites supported, visits, storage, and more increase with every plan.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the business hosting plans:
If you’re managing over 60 sites or have a single high-traffic site, then you’ll want to explore the enterprise plans, which begin at $563 per month.
You can add some paid add-ons to your plan, including premium staging environments, external or extra backups, disk space increases, and more.
You should also be aware of overage pricing for visits, disk space, and CDN. If you exceed your plan limits, your site will keep running, but there will be additional fees.
Finally, every plan has an uptime guarantee and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Final Thoughts on Kinsta WordPress Hosting
Overall, Kinsta offers a solid managed WordPress hosting service that performed well on performance tests. It provides a great level of control for site owners, helps developers or agency owners easily maximize site performance, and streamlines the site management process.
These are some of the details that stood out the most:
- High-performance Google servers with expansive Cloudflare CDN-network
- Advanced built-in security features
- One-click WordPress troubleshooting with Kinsta APM
- In-depth WordPress developer control
- Automated backups and one-click restore
- Helpful team of WordPress engineers there at a moment’s notice
All these powerful features are seamlessly integrated into a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard. Despite catering to the needs of advanced WordPress site owners, Kinsta’s platform remains uncomplicated for beginners to navigate.
The only thing I’d say is that pricing is a bit higher than other managed WordPress hosts. Plus, there are overeage charges and premium add-ons to consider.
That said, Kinsta offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you have plenty of time to test out the service and see if it’s the right fit for you.
