Best UK web host for WordPress websites 2019

My 12 year experience of UK web hosts

Having been doing web design for over 12 years, I’ve worked with a lot of different UK web hosts (hosting providers) from the slow and disappointing to the downright terrible. In fact, it is only very recently that I have found a UK web host suitable for WordPress based websites that I would actually consider excellent and would wholeheartedly recommend to others. For years I have just made do with a web host that I considered good but not great. Sure, they had pretty good customer service, were fairly reliable, but what tends to let most hosts down (and this host was no exception), is the speed of their servers. When it comes to servers, the technology and how loaded up they are, are 2 major determining factors with regards to speed and by that I mean website loading times. Unless you have a large budget for web hosting, which most of my clients being small businesses, don’t have, they are usually limited to a fairly standard hosting package which is known as shared hosting. Shared hosting means the servers are shared with, in some cases, hundreds of other websites and if even one of those websites is demanding on the servers resources, perhaps it has lots of heavy scripts or self hosted videos, then it can cause all of the other websites to run slower too. This can potentially have a dramatic impact on the speed and response time of your website. If a hosting provider’s server is overloaded with too many websites then your website will indeed run at a very slow pace. Not only does this have a huge impact on the usability of a website (no one wants to be waiting around for a website to load) but it can also be a terrible thing in the eyes of a search engine. If a website takes forever to load you can guess what’s going to happen to your ranking on Google. Sometimes, simply moving the website to a quicker host, using newer technology on less crowded servers can turn the slowest of websites into a lightning fast user friendly website. I have seen this happen before. On one such occasion I was constantly contacting the host to ask them if they can do anything to speed up my client’s website, their answers were always the same, “use such and such plugin, or try this or that”. Nothing made a difference. When I finally decided to move away from that particular host, guess what happened, the website was fast and I mean lightning fast. No longer did I have to wait over six seconds for the home page to load, it was there almost instantly. It was all going so well until the website was hacked into. Yes, server security is another issue and a web host that manages this properly is a must! So the search for the perfect UK web host continued.