In the end, the issue has been resolved, and we haven’t seen any significant downtimes since that first month (September 2016). Overall, we’ve been happy with Kinsta’s performance ever since.
Around a month after the move, we also decided to switch the site to SSL. The process itself was handled smoothly, but this did in the end bump our response times back to slightly below the 100 ms mark (you can see this in one of the screenshots above).
This is somewhat expected, though. SSL is always more resource intensive, as the software/browser on the other end has to decode the answer each time before displaying it.
Performance of Kinsta WordPress hosting
Performance is perhaps the second most important characteristic of a good WordPress host – the first one being reliability.
And site speed in itself has gotten a lot of press in the recent years. Some believe that it’s crucial for SEO, while others aren’t as convinced. However, everyone is absolutely convinced that a quick-loading site is essential for user experience, and that cannot be challenged.
So naturally, we expected Kinsta to give us top performance!
And right off the bat, I have to admit that we messed this part up a bit. I mean, the blog isn’t a particularly optimized one when it comes to the source code it uses and the various hand-made tweaks that have been done to it over the years.
Nevertheless, even with a handful of F’s awarded to us by Pingdom, Kinsta WordPress hosting still somehow manages to load everything in 2 seconds. Plus, something I showed you earlier – our TTFB – has been cut by 50% (and that including the increase we experienced when switching to SSL).
What hosting survey data says about Kinsta
A while ago, we ran what turned out to be the biggest WordPress hosting survey out there. The results have been really insightful, and we’ve used them as a data foundation for a couple of articles since.
Granted, Kinsta only got a handful of responses in that survey, but they were all really positive. In fact, they were so positive that we even looked into where those entries were coming from, and if there was perhaps anything fishy going on behind the curtain. There wasn’t.
Here are Kinsta’s ratings according to the respondents in our survey:
