Choosing the right managed WordPress hosting provider is essential for anyone serious about their website's performance, security, and ease of management. With so many options available, finding a reliable host can be overwhelming. That’s where Pressable comes in—a provider that prioritizes speed, security, and user experience. Known for its seamless WordPress optimization, built-in caching, and robust security measures, Pressable aims to deliver a hassle-free hosting experience. In this review, we'll explore Pressable’s features, benefits, pricing, and performance to help you determine if it's the ideal choice for your website.
Let’s dive in!
What is Pressable?
Pressable is a managed WordPress hosting provider that has carved out a reputation for high performance, exceptional support, and user-friendly features. Established in 2010 and now part of Automattic—the company behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce—Pressable leverages its extensive experience and resources to deliver a robust hosting solution tailored specifically for WordPress users.
If you’re on the hunt for the right managed WordPress hosting service, you’ve likely encountered a
multitude of options. Pressable stands out by offering a comprehensive and optimized hosting experience that simplifies the process of maintaining WordPress websites. With automatic updates, daily backups, and advanced security measures, Pressable takes the technical complexities out of hosting, allowing users to focus on creating and managing their sites.
WORDPRESS-OPTIMIZED MANAGED HOSTING
In this hands-on review, we’ll dive deep into Pressable’s offerings, explore its dashboard and features, and share real performance test results. Whether you’re a blogger, a business owner, or a developer, our goal is to help you understand why Pressable could be the right fit for your hosting needs. Let’s dig in!
Key Features of Pressable
Managed WordPress Hosting
Pressable provides true managed WordPress hosting, designed to cater to both beginners and advanced users. This means essential tasks like WordPress core updates, plugin management, and security checks are handled automatically, allowing you to focus on content rather than technicalities.
Account and Website Management
When you first sign up to Pressable, it will automatically launch you into the interface to add a new WordPress site.
It’s super easy:
Give your site a name
Choose the PHP version.
Select between vanilla WordPress or WooCommerce.
Choose your data center from four options – Los Angeles, Washington DC, or Dallas in the USA, plus Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Once your site is set up, you can easily adjust various settings through the Pressable dashboard or directly access the WordPress admin area using a quick link. If you need to migrate an existing WordPress website to Pressable, you can initiate that process right from this screen.
Personalized Onboarding
All plans include free WordPress website migrations, so if you’re already hosting one or more sites somewhere else you can get them moved over to Pressable once you’ve signed up. They also have their own WordPress migration plugin to simplify the process of manually moving a site to their servers.
When you sign up with Pressable, as part of their commitment to delivering high-quality customer support, you’re assigned a staff member who’ll help you to set up your account, start a new site or manage your migration.
Domains
If you go to the Domains tab, you can manage domains for your site. Pressable automatically installs SSL certificates for you, so there’s no need to do that manually.
Note that Pressable does not provide a domain registration service, so you’ll need to secure a domain on your own. This process is quite simple. In the meantime, your site will be hosted on a Pressable subdomain in private development mode until you’re ready to go live with your own domain.
Automatic Wordpress Website Backups
Pressable simplifies website backup management through its Backups & Restores tab. By default, your site is backed up daily, with those backups retained for a week and weekly backups stored for a month. A standout feature is the hourly backups of your database, which captures the latest content and settings, providing peace of mind that your most recent changes are always saved. Additionally, you can initiate on-demand backups, especially useful when working in development mode or integrating new features, and restoring any backup is just a click away.
For even greater protection, you can enable the Jetpack Premium backup tool, which is included in the subscription as we mention later. This adds an additional layer of daily backups and allows for easy restoration via a user-friendly web dashboard, plus the ability to download backups for safekeeping.
For those seeking more storage options, connecting your Pressable account to Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files enables automatic daily backups, ensuring your files are securely stored beyond Pressable’s standard retention period. With these comprehensive backup solutions, Pressable guarantees that your WordPress site remains secure and recoverable at all times.
Creating a Staging Website
Creating a staging website with Pressable is a simple process that allows you to test new plugins, themes, and other modifications without affecting your live site. You can use Pressable’s site cloning tool, available in the Actions tab of your site dashboard, to create a clone of your existing site. By enabling the “Clone as Staging Site” option, you can generate a duplicate that appears in your site list, providing a safe environment to experiment with changes.
Pressable does not include a dedicated feature to push some/all of your staging changes live. However, you can achieve this pretty easily by converting the staging site to a live site and then switching your main domain over – you can find instructions here.
Access to World-Class Support
Pressable offers around-the-clock support from WordPress hosting experts, ensuring you have assistance whenever you need it, no matter where you are. Their 24/7 support team is dedicated to helping you tackle mission-critical issues or optimize your website for better performance. Every plan includes the same high-quality support, making it suitable for everyone, from individual WooCommerce stores to high-traffic enterprise sites.
Users appreciate Pressable's quick response times, often receiving assistance within minutes. This efficiency helps keep websites running smoothly. Additionally, the support team excels in effective troubleshooting, consistently identifying and resolving problems swiftly to minimize downtime for users' websites.
Free Access To Jetpack
Another benefit of Pressable is that all of the plans offer free access to the Jetpack Security daily plan, which would usually cost you $239 per year.
This includes helpful features such as malware scanning, Akismet spam protection, and more.
When you create a site with Pressable, it will automatically install and configure the Jetpack plugin for you. All you need to do is connect it to your WordPress account – there’s no need to pay for anything.
Pressable Performance Tests
In assessing Pressable's hosting performance, we can use Pingdom and Load Impact services to measure the speed and reliability of two test WordPress websites. These tools allowed us to gather comprehensive data on loading times and how well the sites handled simultaneous visitors. By monitoring the average loading times and uptime, we can provide potential users with a clear picture of what to expect from Pressable's hosting capabilities.
LIGHTWEIGHT THEME SITE SPEED RESULTS
The loading time results revealed a significant difference between the two themes tested. The lightweight Twenty Nineteen theme, often used for basic blogs or simple websites, averaged a loading time of just 538 milliseconds. This performance places Pressable favorably against other managed hosting providers, such as DreamHost and WordPress.com, which recorded slightly slower speeds of 581 and 603 milliseconds, respectively.
HEAVYWEIGHT THEME LOADING TIME RESULTS
On the other hand, the heavier Avada theme, known for its rich features, had an average loading time of 957 milliseconds. Despite being a more resource-intensive option, this loading time still positioned Pressable well against competitors like Kinsta, which showed an average of 1.25 seconds, and WP Engine, with 1.43 seconds. Additionally, even a blog post from the Avada site, which generally requires more resources, managed a commendable loading time of 1.39 seconds.
LOAD IMPACT PERFORMANCE TESTING RESULTS
To further evaluate Pressable's performance under high traffic, we conducted Load Impact testing, simulating an increasing number of virtual users accessing the homepage of the Avada theme site. The results demonstrated impressive stability; the response time remained consistent as the number of simultaneous users grew from one to 200. This capability indicates that Pressable can effectively handle spikes in traffic, making it a reliable option for websites expecting significant visitor volumes.
Moreover, the uptime testing revealed that Pressable maintains a 100% uptime guarantee, with no downtime recorded during our seven-day monitoring period. Users can feel confident in the stability of their sites, as any potential downtime could result in a refund of hosting fees, reinforcing Pressable’s commitment to reliability. Overall, our performance tests indicate that Pressable offers competitive loading times, strong reliability, and robust uptime, positioning it as a solid choice for those seeking a dependable WordPress hosting solution.
Pressable Pricing
As a managed WordPress hosting provider, Pressable's pricing is generally higher than that of generic shared hosting options, which is a standard characteristic of dedicated managed hosting services. Unlike budget shared hosts that often promote "unlimited everything," Pressable focuses on providing quality and reliability rather than exaggerated features.
However, Pressable’s prices are very competitive for the “real” managed WordPress hosting space and often come in a bit cheaper than other popular hosts. So if you’re looking to move beyond budget shared hosting, Pressable offers an affordable step up.
For the most part, there are three variables that change between the different Pressable pricing plans:
The number of WordPress sites you can host on that plan.
How many visits your site(s) can receive per month? Pressable measures visits as the primary billing metric rather than bandwidth, counting a visit as a single browser session to a site within a 24-hour period, regardless of how many pages are viewed.
How much storage you can use across all of your sites?
Pressable will not shut off your site if you exceed your plan’s visit limit, but you will be charged an overage fee (which is standard for managed WordPress hosting). The overage fee is $1.20 per 1,000 visits over your plan’s limits.
Or, you can add more visits to any plan in advance for a cheaper rate – $8 per 10,000 extra visits.
To give you an idea of how Pressable’s prices stack up, here is Pressable’s plan versus similar plans from WP Engine and Kinsta.
Pressable | WP Engine | Kinsta | |
Monthly Price | $25 | $30 | $35 |
Annual Price | $250 | $300 | $350 |
Websites | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Visits | 30,000 | 25,000 | 25,000 |
Storage | 20 GB | 10 GB | 10 GB |
Visitor Overage Fee (per 1k visits) | $1.20 | $2.00 | $1.00 |
As you can see, Pressable gives you slightly higher limits for a slightly lower price.
Additionally, you can take advantage of a special discount of 15% off all plans by using the discount code PRESS15 at checkout. This makes Pressable an even more attractive option for those looking to invest in quality managed WordPress hosting.
Final Thoughts
Pressable offers a powerful combination of performance, security, and ease of use for those seeking reliable managed WordPress hosting. With features like hourly database backups, automated updates, and seamless staging and cloning tools, it simplifies site management while ensuring data security and site stability. Pressable’s strong uptime, speed, and dedicated support make it a valuable choice for anyone prioritizing dependable, high-quality hosting.
In my opinion, Pressable represents a solid investment in your business, offering competitive value compared to similar providers. Overall, if you’re looking for a hosting solution that allows you to focus more on content and less on technical upkeep, Pressable could be an excellent choice.
FAQs
Q: Is Pressable suitable for beginners with no technical experience?
Yes, Pressable is beginner-friendly with its user-friendly control panel and managed services. Their support team is available to assist with any technical issues, making it accessible for WordPress users of all skill levels.
Q: What security measures does Pressable have in place?
Pressable implements multiple layers of security, including daily malware scanning, firewalls, and automatic WordPress updates. They also offer free SSL certificates to encrypt data, enhancing website protection.
Q: Does Pressable offer a money-back guarantee?
Yes, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, allowing you to try their services risk-free.
Q: Can I upgrade or downgrade my plan easily?
Yes, Pressable allows you to scale your plan up or down as your website’s needs change.
Q: Can I migrate my existing WordPress site to Pressable?
Yes, Pressable provides free website migration services, making it easy to transfer your existing WordPress site. Their support team assists in ensuring a seamless transition to their hosting platform.
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