Trying to find the right managed WordPress hosting for your site(s)? In our hands-on Pressable review, we’re going to take a look at this popular managed WordPress hosting service from Automattic.

Pressable offers a full-service managed WordPress hosting product that comes in a little cheaper than some of the other popular options.

At the same time, you’re getting hosting from one of the largest and most experienced WordPress businesses, so there are a lot of resources behind your site(s).

Keep reading our Pressable review to learn more about what it offers, see the dashboard and features in action, and get a look at some real Pressable performance tests.

Let’s dig in!

Pressable Review: What Does This Managed WordPress Host Offer?

Pressable offers true managed WordPress hosting, which means that it’s a step above the budget shared hosting plans that many beginner WordPress users are familiar with.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the key features – you’ll see a lot of these in more depth in the next section:

• Built-in caching system.
• Built-in content delivery network (CDN). 
• Automatic daily backups, including hourly database backups.
• Staging/site cloning tool.
• Free access to Jetpack Security Daily.
• 24/7/365 support from WordPress engineers.
• Automatic failover at no extra cost – if one server fails for some reason Pressable will automatically switch to another server to avoid downtime.

Pressable also offers some excellent tools for more advanced users/agencies including the following:

• Collaborator management to control site access and what actions users can take in Pressable.
• Git deployments.
• SSH.
• WP-CLI.

Since 2016, Pressable has been majority owned by Automattic, the same team behind WordPress.com (and WooCommerce, Jetpack, and lots of other stuff). That’s relevant because Automattic knows a thing or two about hosting WordPress sites, what with WordPress.com, WordPress VIP, and so on.

Exploring the Pressable WordPress Hosting Dashboard and Tools

Now that you know a little bit more about what Pressable offers, let’s take our Pressable review hands-on and dig into the Pressable hosting dashboard.

Then, in the next section, we can run some performance tests.

Setup Wizard to Create a WordPress Site

When you first sign up to Pressable, it will automatically launch you into the interface to add a new WordPress site.

It’s super easy:

1. Give your site a name
2. Choose the PHP version.
3. Select between vanilla WordPress or WooCommerce.
4. Choose your data center from four options – Los Angeles, Washington DC, or Dallas in the USA, plus Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

If this is a brand-new WordPress site, you can start building on a temporary domain name right away and then point your real domain name to the site when you’re ready to go live.

If you already have an existing WordPress site, Pressable also offers two easy ways to migrate your site to Pressable hosting:

1. Use Pressable’s free managed migration service to have them do it for you.
2. Use the DIY Pressable Automated Migration plugin if you’d prefer to handle things yourself (it’s super easy).

Pressable Site Dashboard

Once you’ve created a site, it will show up in your Pressable site’s list.

If you have a lot of sites, you can use filters to sort them (including adding your own custom tags).

Click on a site’s Settings button will open the dedicated dashboard for that site.

Overview

The Overview tab offers several useful options:

• Quickly see your site’s environment information and adjust if needed.
• Change your WordPress admin user password.
• Create internal notes.

You also get some useful links at the top that are accessible from anywhere in the dashboard:

• OnePress Login (automatically logs you into WordPress).
• WP Dashboard.
• phpMyAdmin.
• View Site.

Domains

If you go to the Domains tab, you can manage domains for your site. Pressable automatically installs SSL certificates for you, so there’s no need to do that manually.

Performance

The Performance tab lets you do two things:

1. You can view site analytics and see an automatic performance report every month (powered by Lighthouse).
2. You can manage the built-in CDN and caching.

If you want to manage caching from inside your WordPress dashboard, you can also install the Pressable Cache Management plugin.

Users

The Users tab lets you give other users access to this WordPress site in Pressable (it’s not actual WordPress user accounts).

Pressable is very strong here, giving you very granular access controls to choose exactly what a user can do in your Pressable account.

I think this is a strong point that Pressable has over other hosts that typically just give you preset roles and call it a day.

You can also add and manage collaborators for all your sites from the main Collaborators tab in the dashboard sidebar.

Backups the way you want them

The Backups & Restores tab lets you manage everything about your site’s backups.

By default, Pressable automatically backs up your site every day. It stores daily backups for one week and then it stores a weekly backup for a month.

In addition to the default backup settings, on-demand backups are available. This is particularly useful when you are working in development mode or integrating new options.

You can also restore any one of those backups with a single click.

One really cool thing here is that Pressable actually backs up your site’s database more frequently – every hour, to be exact.

Because your site’s database is the most likely to change, this means you’ll always have a backup of your latest content, comments, settings, etc.

This is a really cool feature that I haven’t seen at most other managed WordPress hosts and a big point in Pressable’s favor.

Git

The Pressable API is a REST-based API. Pressable can accept form-encoded request bodies and return JSON-encoded responses. The API is used by customers who are building custom user interfaces and automating day-to-day operations. Documentation on our API is extensive.

For more advanced users and developers, the Git tab lets you enter a GitHub repository to automatically deploy your site from that repository.

Logs

Finally, the Logs tab lets you view PHP logs and Webserver logs.

Staging Sites

To create a staging site, you’ll rely on Pressable’s site cloning tool, which you can access in the Actions tab in the site dashboard.

When you clone a site, you can enable the toggle to Clone as Staging Site:

Once you’ve cloned it, it will show up as a staging site in your site list.

Opening that will give you a replica of your dashboard for that staging site.

Pressable does not include a dedicated feature to push some/all of your staging changes live. However, you can achieve this pretty easily by converting the staging site to a live site and then switching your main domain over – you can find instructions here.

Email Hosting

If you want to create a custom email account – e.g. you@yoursite.com – Pressable offers built-in integration with the Titan email service.

There’s a connection here because Automattic invested $30 million in Titan in 2022.

You can test it out for 90 days for free. However, after that, you’ll pay $3.50 per month per inbox.

While it’s not free, that’s still a lot cheaper than paying for something like Google Workspace.

Free Access to Jetpack

Another benefit of Pressable’s Automattic connection is that all of the plans (excluding the cheapest one) offer free access to the Jetpack Security daily plan, which would usually cost you $299 per year.

This includes helpful features such as malware scanning, Akismet spam protection, and more.

When you create a site with Pressable, it will automatically install and configure the Jetpack plugin for you. All you need to do is connect it to your WordPress.com account – there’s no need to pay for anything.

Pressable Performance Tests

To test how Pressable performs, I imported a full demo site using the Astra theme to create a realistic test foundation.

To start, I used WebPageTest with the following configuration:

• Test from Salt Lake City Utah (my Pressable site is hosted in Dallas)
• Use a throttled FIOS connection speed to create a more realistic scenario
• Run 9 separate tests and take the median value

The median result was quite good, with a time to first byte (TTFB) of .116 seconds and a Largest Contentful Paint time (LCP) of 1.117 seconds.

To see how Pressable performs in a more high-traffic situation, I then used Loader.io to hit the site with 100 visits spread over a one-minute period.

It was able to handle this test with zero issues, with an average response time of 64 ms.

Then, I hit it with 250 visits in a one-minute period, which it also handled just fine, with an average response time of 63 ms:

Overall, Pressable performed quite well in the tests that I ran, offering fast load times even in more high-traffic situations.

To add another viewpoint, Pressable also achieved Top Tier status in Review Signal’s much more exhaustive 2022 WordPress Hosting Benchmarks.

Pressable Pricing

Because Pressable is managed WordPress hosting, it will cost a little more than generic shared hosting – this is true of any true managed WordPress host. You also won’t get “unlimited everything” like you get at cheap shared hosts – this is also true of any managed WordPress host.

However, Pressable’s prices are very competitive for the “real” managed WordPress hosting space and often come in a bit cheaper than other popular hosts. So if you’re looking to move beyond budget shared hosting, Pressable offers an affordable step up.

For the most part, there are three variables that change between the different Pressable pricing plans:

• The number of WordPress sites you can host on that plan.
• How many visits your site(s) can receive per month? Like most other managed WordPress hosts, Pressable uses raw visits as a billing metric rather than bandwidth. Pressable defines a visit as “when a single browser loads a site in a 24-hour period”. If a visitor browses multiple pages within that 24-hour period, it still counts as one visit.
• How much storage you can use across all of your sites?

Pressable will not shut off your site if you exceed your plan’s visit limit, but you will be charged an overage fee (which is standard for managed WordPress hosting). The overage fee is $1.20 per 1,000 visits over your plan’s limits.

Or, you can add more visits to any plan in advance for a cheaper rate – $8 per 10,000 extra visits.

In total, there are nine preset pricing plans plus a custom plan option.

Here are the first five plans:

And here are the last five plans:

To give you an idea of how Pressable’s prices stack up, here is Pressable’s Personal plan versus similar plans from WP Engine and Kinsta.

	Pressable	WP Engine	Kinsta
Monthly Price	$25	$30	$35
Annual Price	$250	$300	$350
Websites	1	1	1
Visits	30,000	25,000	25,000
Storage	20 GB	10 GB	10 GB
Visitor Overage Fee (per 1k visits)	$1.20	$2.00	$1.00

As you can see, Pressable gives you slightly higher limits for a slightly lower price.

Final Thoughts on Pressable WordPress Hosting

Overall, Pressable offers a solid managed WordPress hosting product that performed well in the tests that I ran, as well as third-party benchmarks like Review Signal’s WordPress Hosting Benchmarks.

There are a few details that stuck out to me when it comes to Pressable’s offerings:

• Pressable’s prices are a bit cheaper than other similar managed WordPress hosts, which offer great value.
• The fact that Pressable backs up your site’s databases every hour on all plans is unique and a very nice option for keeping the data of your site(s) safe.
• Pressable offers really granular collaborator access control, which can be especially good for freelancers or agencies who are looking for a solution to host client sites.
• You get automatic failover at no extra cost, which improves uptime and isn’t a feature you’ll find at every host.

Beyond that, you still get all the “regular” features that you’d expect from a managed WordPress host including built-in caching, built-in CDN, WordPress-specific security rules, and so on.

If you want to test it out, Pressable lets you play around with the customer panel for free with no need to add a credit card. Or, you can sign up for an account and Pressable will help migrate your sites for free.