Today, we’ll be pitting our High-Performance Basic plan ($18.99/month) against one of the most frequently recommended hosts in the industry – SiteGround.
We signed up for a month of their GrowBig plan, which costs $9.99/month for the first year, with a lock-in contract, and $29.99/month thereafter. Their GrowBig plan offers:
- Unlimited Websites
- Cloudflare CDN
- 20 GB Web Space
- 25,000 Visits Monthly
- SuperCacher – NGINX-based
- 20 GB SSD Storage
- 50 GB Bandwidth
- 50 GB CDN Bandwidth
- 1 Domain
- Custom, also NGINX-based Cache
Special Notes:
- SiteGround requires its SG optimizer plugin installed to enable its full-page cache. Therefore, throughout testing, we had this plugin installed for the GrowBig plan and toggled the caching options on and off.
- SiteGround would not let me add the subdomain I used, sg.cynderhost.com, to Cloudflare as our nameservers were not pointed to CF. Therefore, we did not use their CDN and set our own CDN to pass-through mode.
- SiteGround provides a memcached option in their plugin. This option was toggled on during the cached setup, but off during no-cache. CynderHost offers redis and memcached pools, but neither were used during any testing.
- CynderHost uses a customized Mod Pagespeed installation that rewrites and optimizes scripts and images automatically. This was enabled through all tests
- Both CynderHost and SiteGround offered an NGINX Direct Delivery option that delivered static assets directly via NGINX. This was on for all tests.
Results (Lower is Better)
Site #1
Without further ado, here are the average load times from Dotcom Tools for a default WordPress 5.4.2. website (rounded to the nearest hundredth of a second) (1st visit / 2nd visit):
Read More About Our Testing Methodology and Site Setup
| Setup | CynderHost | SiteGround | Difference** |
| No Cache | 0.85 sec / 0.63 sec | 1.1 sec / 0.79 sec | 29% Faster |
| Cached | 0.79 sec / 0.58 sec | 0.93 sec / 0.67 sec | 18% Faster |
| Cached, with SG Optimization* | – | 0.91 sec / 0.6 sec | 15% Faster |
*We enabled the minify and combine options in SG optimizer for CSS and JS, and optimized all images via the included tool.
**We used the initial load time to compute the difference. Refers to the speed of CynderHost HP relative to SiteGround.
Site #2
Here are the results of the second, resource-heavy WooCommerce + Elementor, tested with FastOrSlow (TTFB / First Meaningful Paint):
| Setup | CynderHost | SiteGround | Difference** |
| No Cache | 737ms / 1.35s | 1.52s / 2.01s | 61% Faster |
| Cached, with SG Optimization* | 237ms / 692ms | 620.79ms / 1.15s | 66% Faster |
*We enabled the minify and combine options in SG optimizer for CSS and JS, and optimized all images via the included tool.
**We used the First Contentful Paint time to compute the difference. Refers to the speed of CynderHost HP relative to SiteGround.
When it comes to speed for a basic website, it looks like SiteGround is no slouch. However, when the site starts to become more heavy, it appears that SG starts to slow down, with an also 3x slower cached TTFB compared to CynderHost.