Three Hosts, Three Brand New WordPress Sites
Three hosts, three brand new WordPress sites. I built them all using Bluehost, SiteGround, and Cloudways. Then I raced them. These are the three hosts I get asked about constantly. And over the years, I’ve recommended different ones for different kinds of sites and goals. Here’s how the race played out.
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Quick Context
If you’ve been a reader on my blog, ryrob.com, over the years, you know Bluehost has been my go-to recommendation for beginners for a long time. Affordable, easy to get up and running, solid support. It’s why it stays on the list. SiteGround’s been the one I point people to when they want something a step up. And Cloudways is the one I get asked about most often by readers who are ready to graduate to something more serious.
Here’s What’s Changed
Hosting in 2026 looks completely different than it did even 2 years ago. AI website builders are showing up everywhere. Performance expectations are higher. So, I figured the only honest way to compare these hosts in the current landscape is to just build a fresh site on each one using whatever its fastest path is and to see what comes out. Two of these hosts have brand new AI website builders. The third takes a different approach and has their own AI website builder coming soon. I used all of it, ran the same speed tests on each site, and saw how each one shows up in 2026.
Here’s the Challenge
Same starter setup on each host: a homepage, about page, and contact page. That’s it. No 50 blog posts, no plugin sprawl, no elaborate setup. Whatever each host’s fastest path is, I’m taking AI builders if they have them. Then I ran GTmetrix and PageSpeed to score all three on their performance.
Bluehost Build
Starter Plan
Build one is Bluehost. I grabbed their starter plan. It starts at $3.99 a month and it renews at about $9.99 a month after their special intro pricing. The sign up process is pretty quick and simple. No need to check these recommended add-ons. There are ways to work around this with free plugins inside WordPress later.
AI Site Creator
Once I’m in, I want to go ahead and start building my site. So, I’ll click the staging button, and it’s going to take me over to their AI site creator. I’ll give the website builder some details about the website that I want to create, Ryan’s Coffee Shop. Select the type of site that it is. It’s a business. And then I’ll explain a bit about what my coffee shop is and where it’s located. Things that are important for the AI to make sure it builds in the direction I want it to. In about a minute, I get a few different options to choose from based on a directional style that the AI website created for me. And I like the one in the middle. Site number two. And remember, this is just a starter site.
The structure looks pretty good. The copy does sound a little bit generic, as most AI generated copy does, and the images are stock for now, though some are good choices. But the cool thing is that this took about 5 minutes from when I bought web hosting to when my site was almost live. That is super fast and I have to hand it to Bluehost for that. I’ve got options to customize this site using AI even further. But for now, I’m going to say this looks good enough as a starter site. I’m going to save and publish.
My Site Is Live
My site is live already on the internet in just a few minutes from when I got this process started. It’s currently at a staging domain because everything is still processing behind the scenes, but soon this will be live at my coffee website’s URL, and we’re ready to keep going on the building experience.
GTmetrix Report
I ran a GTmetrix report on it. Results are revealing a score of a B. Not bad. TTFB looks pretty good. Performance is decent. This isn’t ideal for a large scale website, but it’s okay as a starting point. We’ll come back to all the numbers in a bit when we compare and talk about the ways your website performance impacts your ability to rank on Google and AI answers and what you can do to speed up a site like this on a starter hosting plan too.
SiteGround Build
GrowBig Plan
Build two is with SiteGround. I chose the GrowBig plan. It starts at $4.99 a month on their intro offer and in the fine print you’ll see it jumps up to $29.99 a month afterwards. I know that’s a really big jump up in price and we’ll talk more about that later. The sign up process is simple and straightforward, though. And one quick note, with most of these hosting providers in the extra services section of the checkout process, you typically won’t need most of the stuff they’re offering. I left all these unchecked and then just went ahead and completed my account.
Website Builder
Once I’m inside, I’m ready to begin finishing up my site setup process. I’ll select start a new website. And now, we’re going to use SiteGround’s website builder. One thing I do like here is that SiteGround does offer you the option to go ahead and build it inside WordPress yourself. But if you’re a beginner, building it with AI using SiteGround’s builder is a good route. This is a pretty different flow than Bluehost’s. And it does feel a bit more polished because they’ve got more options and it starts by choosing a visual guide. This site’s going to be for a breath work studio. So, I chose the yoga studio template to begin with.
Editing the Website
And now we’re ready to start editing the website. You’ve got a bit more design control using this AI website builder. The results look a little cleaner, a little crisper to me. The layout is a bit nicer too. Color choices feel more intentional here, and I like this out of the box template. The site’s already live on my domain. This process took about 15 minutes in total. Slightly slower than Bluehost, but the output to me is noticeably more presentable, and I’m already pretty much ready to go with some things I can swap out and customize based on my breath work studio inside this website.
GTmetrix Report
Now, it’s time for our GTmetrix run. The results reveal a C grade and a 62% performance score. That’s a meaningful drop compared to Bluehost’s out of the box performance. And honestly, I was expecting a little bit more here.
Cloudways Build
Cloud Provider
Build three is Cloudways. And this one’s a different beast because Cloudways isn’t shared hosting like Bluehost and SiteGround. It’s managed cloud hosting. You pick the cloud provider underneath, DigitalOcean, AWS, or otherwise. I went with DigitalOcean because the setup process is the cleanest.
Free Trial
First, you start with the free trial. Once you’re in from the dashboard, you’ll select the flexible option. I like this because you only pay for the actual resources you’re using here. So, we’ll go ahead and get started and we’ll choose the free trial option. Here’s where Cloudways is a bit different than our other hosting providers. You’re going to want to make sure to select optimize WordPress for the settings here because we’re going to be building our site with WordPress. And then we can give it a name. We can give it a server name and a project name. None of this matters all too much other than I’m going to put the name of my site right here.
Server Settings
Next, this option is really important, the Lightning Stack. This is Cloudways’s flagship feature for increasing the performance and speed for your website. Definitely turn this on because this is part of what makes Cloudways so special as a managed hosting provider.
Provider and Server Type
Then next, you’re going to make sure to select your server. I chose DigitalOcean here because it’s the company that owns Cloudways, so in my experience it’s the most optimized setup process. We’ll leave the database type as is. And next, when you get down to the server type, go ahead and select basic. This is going to be enough for almost any type of website or blog, unless you get a high volume of traffic.
Standard Option
And I selected the standard option because this site’s going to be brand new. It’s not going to be getting traffic. So, I dragged the slider down all the way to 1 GB in terms of how much resources I plan for this site to use. You can see that drops our monthly cost down to $11. And that looks good to me. Again, this is a bit different than the other shared hosting providers, but this is set up for optimized performance over the long haul. And so now we’re ready to launch. And a few minutes later, my server is live and WordPress is auto-installed on my first application.
Cloudways Doesn’t Have an AI Website Builder Yet
Cloudways doesn’t have an AI website builder yet. They’re adding one soon, but this actually brings up a really important point. With Bluehost and SiteGround, their AI builds you a site really easily, but you are stuck inside their proprietary builder. With Cloudways, you get full WordPress straight out of the box. I just installed a simple, clean theme, and built out my three pages manually. It took a little longer, call it 20 minutes or so, but the real result is a WordPress site that I can move anywhere simply.
Lightning Stack
Here’s the other thing, and this is the reason the speed numbers look quite a bit different when you choose Cloudways. It’s called Lightning Stack. All of your technical settings are configured to work together for WordPress specifically. Cloudways has benchmarked their Lightning Stack at up to 65% faster than their previous technical setup. And this makes a big difference.
GTmetrix Report
Here’s the simple site I built for a bagel shop in Miami. And you can see it’s a pretty basic site. But more importantly, here’s the GTmetrix report for this site. And we can see the results reveal an A grade, almost a perfect performance score. Really, that’s far ahead of our SiteGround build and a big step up from Bluehost. On the surface, that may sound trivial, but it can make a very big difference in your ability to get content ranked on Google and cited in AI answers where your customers are actually searching for help.
AI Builder Verdict
Bluehost’s AI Builder
Bluehost’s AI builder was the fastest path to a live site in my test. If you only have a few minutes and you just need something online, this is the move.
SiteGround’s AI Builder
SiteGround’s AI builder is genuinely the prettiest output I found of these three. There’s more design choices, better defaults, a touch more polished, but same problem as Bluehost. Your site lives inside their builder. Try to move it later and you’re starting over or hiring help to migrate and rebuild the things that don’t carry over properly into your new building experience.
Cloudways Doesn’t Have an AI Website Builder Yet
Not having an AI website builder feels like a drawback for about five minutes, and then you realize you’ve got an actual WordPress site built. That means you can pair it with any AI tool you want. Elementor together with their Angie AI builder is my favorite pairing here. The big takeaway is that when you build in WordPress, the result is portable. If you decide to move hosts later, you take your site with you. Cloudways is rolling out their own AI website builder soon, so you’ll have both options. For absolute speed to getting your site online, Bluehost or SiteGround. For ownership, high performance, long-term growth, and flexibility, Cloudways wins for me by a wide margin.
Speed and Pricing
Speed Numbers
Here are the performance scores. Bluehost got a B with a 75%. SiteGround got a C and a 62% performance score. Cloudways got an almost A+ and a 98% performance score. If speed and performance is what you’re optimizing for, this isn’t a close race. In my tests, Cloudways wins.
Three-Year Math
Here’s the cost reality and the three-year math. Bluehost is about $155 for the first 3 years with their promo pricing, then $120 a year after that. Since you prepay for all three years upfront with Bluehost, the three-year total is a really good deal at $155. SiteGround is $59 in year 1, then around $360 a year during years two and three. The total is $778. Cloudways is about $132 per year with the basic managed cloud hosting plan I set up. No pricing jumps, which I’d really like to see. The 3-year total here is $369. So, Cloudways is actually the middle-of-the-road priced option over 3 years and delivered the strongest overall website performance in my tests.
Final Recommendation
These are different picks for different people.
True Beginner
If you’re a true beginner who just wants the simplest possible path to a live site and you’re not sure if you’ll even stick with it, Bluehost is still fine. The AI builder gets you online in a matter of minutes. And there’s real value to that.
Nicer Looking Starter Site
If you want a nicer looking starter site without paying a designer and you’re okay being locked into the hosting ecosystem for a while, SiteGround’s AI builder gives the best quick output of the three. Just go in eyes open about that big renewal price increase.
Real WordPress Site
And if you want a real WordPress site you fully own that’s fast, that scales, and that costs just a little more than the lowest price budget option over the next 3 years, Cloudways is the pick I’d make. That’s the conclusion I didn’t expect to reach when I started this experiment.
All Three Are Still Solid Picks
Cloudways, Bluehost, and SiteGround are all still solid picks depending upon what you’re building and what your goals are.
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