Bluehost vs WordPress: Which Is Better?
Finding the best web hosting services for your site is essential to your successful online presence. The right host knows how to boost your website’s performance and reliability. Moreover, the web hosting provider is responsible for your site’s speed, security, and many other factors.
Before creating a website and choosing a web hosting provider, the first thing to do is decide whether you want to use a self-hosted platform. The self-hosted WordPress.org is the most popular self-hosted platform that helps you create your perfect site but requires you to discover and pay for your own hosting.
Using a platform like WordPress.org, which is self-hosted, means that you will have to spend a significant amount of time researching the market and comparing different hosting providers and their hosting plans. Luckily, Bluehost is on WordPress.org’s list of the best official WordPress hosts.
On the other hand, there is also a hosted version of WordPress.org- WordPress.com. With this hosted alternative of WordPress.org, you get everything you need in one place! WordPress.com offers you a premium paid plan with everything necessary to launch the best website: SSL certificates, hosting tools, enough bandwidth and storage, and more!
Even though both Bluehost and WordPress.com are reliable, worth-it hosting providers, they offer different services and hosting plans. In today’s article, we will give you detailed information about the two companies, and we will discuss their key differences, helping you decide which is best for your personal needs!
Bluehost vs. WordPress
Bluehost is ideal for site owners who use open-source platforms such as self-hosted WordPress.org. Bluehost offers exceptional WordPress plans, but you can also take advantage of the company’s shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, and e-commerce hosting plans. That variety makes it suitable for businesses and individuals with different needs.
As we already mentioned, WordPress.com is the hosted version of WordPress that is powered by Automattic. It is great for those who need a quick solution to their online website problems since it allows you to create a site without dealing with technical issues and site maintenance.
To help you decide whether you should use WordPress.com or Bluehost, we will compare the two hosting providers and the services they offer. Keep reading to find out which host will win the “Bluehost vs. WordPress. com” comparison!
Pricing
No matter what anybody says, budget is one of the most important factors to think about when choosing your hosting solution. For that reason, we will begin with a deep dive into the pricing of Bluehost and WordPress. com.
Bluehost Pricing
Bluehost offers a wide range of hosting services. You can choose between shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, shared WordPress, and managed WordPress hosting. Their shared WordPress plans are affordable, the cheapest starting at $2.95 per month. The other two, Plus and Choice Plus, both start at $5.45. The Pro plan is at $13.95/month with a 1-year subscription. All four plans include a free SSL certificate and a free domain name for 1 year.
While Bluehost offers impressive initial prices and customization options, you should be really careful with their renewal prices! Right now, Choice Plus seems like a great deal with its $4.95/mo, but after the initial 1 year expires, the renewal price is $16.99, so in the long term, that may seem like a lot of money.
In terms of managed WordPress hosting, you get to choose between three Bluehost plans, Build, Grow, and Scale. All three will ensure high visitor traffic does not slow your site, and you get exceptional security, support, and speed. They use Google Analytics, and you can quickly integrate your existing account into their Marketing center.
The Build package starts at $9.95/mo and renews at $29.99. The other two start at $24.95 and $39.95/mo and have a regular price of $39.99 and $59.99/mo. The three options are 3-year plans and include built-in high availability, 200+ global edge servers, and a staging environment. However, only the Grow and Scale plans offer business review tools and Bluehost SEO tools.
WordPress Pricing
WordPress.com is a platform that helps you start your online business or run your online store effortlessly. The best thing is that it offers a free WordPress plan ideal for building a site at no cost. If it’s your first time creating a website and you’re on a tight budget, you can give this free plan a try. Remember that there will be ads displayed on the front end of your website.
Most visitors want an ad-free experience, and to give them that, you will have to choose one of WordPress. com. other plans: Personal, Premium, Business, or eCommerce. The Personal plan costs €4 per month and includes Jetpack essential features, a free domain for 1 year, an SSL certificate, and dozens of free themes. The storage space you get is 6GB, which is quite low compared to Bluehost’s storage space.
WordPress.com Premium plan is the most popular suggestion. It costs €8 per month and includes everything we mentioned above + basic live chat support, advanced design customization, subscriber-only content, advanced social media, and more.
The Business plan offered by this host comes at €25 per month and is suitable for small business owners. It offers 200 GB storage, 24/7 priority live chat support, SEO tools, one-click rewind, and SFTP and database access. The e-commerce plan is the most expensive and extensive and costs €45/mo.
Related: WordPress SEO – The Definitive Guide 2023
The eCommerce plan will allow you to open an online store that will grow and develop with you. Like the Business plan, this suggestion includes a domain name, SSL certificate, and 200GB of storage space. However, you also get personalized expert support sessions, eCommerce marketing tools, customizable started themes, and integrations with top shipping carriers.
Security
Nowadays, hacked websites are something common. Over 40% of websites have become victims of hacking due to a vulnerability in their hosting service. That’s why deciding on a host with reliable security add-ons is essential.
Below, we will take a closer look at both Bluehost and WordPress.com security features, and we’ll give you all the information needed to decide which host scores higher in this round of our Bluehost vs. WordPress.com comparison.
Bluehost Security
Bluehost pays great attention to its users’ website’s security. The company offers daily automatic WordPress updates, SSL certificates, daily scans for vulnerabilities, and reliable built-in tools. That way, Bluehost protects your blog and the data of your visitors.
Finding a host that offers website restoration is also essential. Bluehost does that and so much more! You get daily backups, so if something goes wrong, you won’t have to recreate everything from scratch; you could just restore a previous version. As if that were not enough, the managed WordPress plans include DDoS, WAF, bot blocking, and brute force attract protection.
WordPress Security
The built-in security features offered by WordPress.com are pretty much the same as the ones offered by Bluehost. In addition to free SSL certificates, WordPress.com monitors web traffic and runs firewalls protecting your site against DDoS attacks.
The company also backs up WordPress.com site data daily. Unlike WordPress.org, which is self-hosted, WordPress.com has an experienced security team that works 24/7 to ensure all the sites running on their servers are safe and protected.
“Bluehost vs. WordPress”, in terms of security features, ends with a tie. Both companies keep their users protected and offer various security features. Moreover, both the WordPress and Bluehost sites back up their data daily and offer excellent customer service.
Load Time
We all know how irritating it can be to spend precious time waiting for a website to load. In fact, a report by KISSmetrics shows that 47% of Internet users expect a page to load in about 2 seconds. Having that in mind, Google uses load times as one of its ranking factors for search.
To ensure the ease of use of your WordPress site, you need to find a high-speed host. That way, your site will be optimized for search engines and visitors. Let’s have a look at Bluehost’s and WordPress.com’s results.
Bluehost Load Time
A 2-year analysis conducted by Hosting Facts shows that Bluehost has an average page speed of 405ms, making it one of the fastest hosts available. Keep in mind that the results shown reflect the performance of the basic Bluehost shared hosting plan.
When it comes to Bluehost’s hosting packages for WordPress, we can expect an even better performance. This is because, with such a plan, sites share less server space. Therefore, they will load even faster.
WordPress Load Time
A test performed by Winning WP focuses on the speed of the WordPress.com Business plan. They created 2 demo websites and ran them both through the Pingdom test for page speed. The results obtained are good but not really impressive.
The first site, built with the Twenty Nineteen theme, had an average speed of 603ms, whereas the second site, built with the Avada theme, had an average load time of 1.06 seconds.
Comparing Bluehost’s and WordPress’s results, we can clearly see the huge difference in load time. Bluehost’s most basic hosting plan is faster than the mid-tier plan offered by WordPress. com.
The Key Differences Between Bluehost and WordPress
The WordPress vs. Bluehost comparison is a difficult task since both companies are suitable choices worth your money if you are a blogger or a business owner. Suppose you’re a beginner, WordPress.com would be perfect for you, especially the free plan they offer.
However, if you want to build the ultimate online store, Bluehost’s plans are the better option, especially their Scale plan. Still, to help you decide which company is better for you, we’ve summarized the main differences between the two options.
- Bluehost offers discounts for new users. That way, their cheapest WordPress plan starts at $2.95/mo and renews at $8.99/mo. In terms of managed hosting for WordPress, you get to choose between three different 3-year plans starting at $9.95/mo, $24.95/mo, and $39.95/mo.
- WordPress.com does not offer discounts and works with regular prices only. Their cheapest plan costs €4, whereas their most popular one, the Premium plan, costs €8. However, you can also try their free plan that will allow you to create a simple yet beautiful site in just a few seconds.
- Bluehost offers a domain for free for the 1st year
- WordPress. com offers a domain for free for the 1st year in their paid plans
- All Bluehost’s plans include a free SSL certificate
- All WordPress. com’s plans include a free SSL certificate
- Bluehost offers unlimited storage
- The storage depends on the plan you choose (3, 6, 13, 200, or 200GB)
- Bluehost is really serious about its security, offering daily scans, automatic WordPress updates, built-in spam protection features, and CloudFare 1-click integration
- WordPress. com has daily backups and basic security protocols and features, such as DDoS protection and firewalls
- Bluehost’s average speed time is 603ms
- WordPress. com’s average speed time is 603ms for a lightweight website and 1.06 seconds for a heavyweight website
