Choosing between WordPress and BlueHost depends on your specific requirements. For starting simple blogging or building a personal website, WordPress is a good option but BlueHost is much more versatile and efficient.

The focus of both is on the web hosting for WordPress.org. They are quite different so you must learn what BlueHost and WordPress do to make the right decision.

If you are a newcomer to website building or blogging, both of these are great options. They are much easier to use i.e., best for small businesses, newbies and freelancers.

For their better comparison, you must look for the aspects like customer support, security, pricing, ease of use, features and performance etc. BlueHost is a hosting provider suitable for the owners of sites that use open-source platforms or WordPress self-hosted versions.

Bluehost provides several hosting plans like managed hosting, shared hosting, dedicated hosting and VPS etc. Whereas WordPress provides a full-service solution to help the users who need to develop and publish their website and do not want to deal with the maintenance and technical issues of the website. It is a content management system.

I. Rating of BlueHost and WordPress

●     The blue host has an overall rating of 4.80/5

–       Features 4.7/5

–       Performance 4.8/5

–       Pricing 4.9/5

–       Support 4.8/5

●     WordPress has an overall rating of 4.35/5

–       Features 4.2/5

–       Performance 4.5

–       Pricing 4.3/5

–       Support 4.⅘

II. Performance

The visitors of websites usually do not care about the hosting plans, their features or payment instead they focus on fast loading speed and best content. The search engines are often similar.

If you want to win over your competitors in the SERPs i.e., search engine results pages, your website must load quickly and should be well optimized. Therefore, it is very important to select the best host for a top-notch performance for your website.

It should have a better speed, deliver the uptime flawlessly and should be able to keep up with the business. 

III. Load Time for Full Page

This feature is the most important to be watched out for. A test was run to know the page loading time.

Both of them showed good scores but BlueHost was a bit faster than WordPress. The time of page loading in BlueHost was 1 second and in WordPress was 2.5 seconds.

Even this might not seem a big difference between the website loading time but it has a great value. According to Neil Patel, those websites whose loading time is more than 2 seconds start to lose the visitors.

BlueHost passes the benchmark of Google but WordPress lags. WordPress is usually focused on ease of usage but BlueHost is more focused on its performance.

IV. Pricing

It is important to select a host for your website by considering the price and budget.

●     The plans of BlueHost range from $3.95 to $119.99 every month. Plans of BlueHost are expensive as compared to the plans of WordPress but they also provide the users with more features.

●      Every tier of managed hosting plans of BlueHost unlimited storage and bandwidth, free SSL certificate, backups on a daily basis, built-in analytics and others. The three managed to host plans offered by BlueHost cost $19.95, $29.95 and $49.95 per month.

01. BlueHost Pricing Plan

●     The first plan which costs $19.95 per month, provides basic jetpack site analytics, a marketing centre, more than 100 free WordPress themes, scheduled backups daily, detection and removal of malware and protection and privacy of domain.

●     The second plan, with a cost of $29.95 every month, offers premium jetpack, review tools of business, SEO tools of BlueHost, integration of jetpack, video compression of 10GB and Blue Sky ticket support.

●     The third plan of BlueHost provides many advanced features for e-commerce WordPress website running. It costs $49.95 every month. It provides jetpack pro, backups and restores are unlimited under this plan, elastic search, integration of PayPal, unlimited video compression and chat support of Blue Sky.

02. WordPress Pricing Plan

●     WordPress also offers free plans to its users for site-building. But ads are displayed on the site’s front end. For freelancers who want monetization and marketing tools, it is recommended to choose a personal or premium plan.

●      The personal plan costs $4 and the premium plan costs $8 every month. Both these plans provide SSL certificates, access to free themes and some other crucial features for increasing the speed of your site, SEO improvement and protection against spam.

●     For small businesses, a business plan is recommended. It costs $25 per month.

●     E-commerce businesses who want features as unlimited products and services support, shipping carriers, built-in payment and integration with UPS should opt for an e-commerce plan which costs $45 per month. Just like BlueHost, unlimited bandwidth is offered by WordPress in its plans.

●      Contrary to BlueHost, WordPress has cap storage. There is provided 3GB storage on a free plan.

●      If you are upgrading to either of the first two tiers, storage of 6GB and 13GB will be provided respectively. On the highest tier, there is the storage of 200GB.

By paying for 12 or more than 12 months, you will get better rates with both the hosts. BlueHost provides a 30days money-back guarantee. On the other hand, the refund policy of WordPress ranges from seven to fourteen days.

V. TTFB

It is the Time to First Byte which determines if the server is performing optimally or not. Those websites which have lower TTFB are being ranked higher in SERPs.

The TTFB is not very much important in the metric of performance but if it is taken along with the full page load time results, it tells us that a website might show much better performance on the BlueHost than the WordPress.

BlueHost scored 99 i.e., an excellent score. It means that the server of BlueHost takes much less time to respond to HTTPS requests of the users.

 It also proves that the server is optimized well. Whereas WordPress scored 77 i.e., average. It means its server takes a bit longer to respond.

It is the reason that the websites load a bit slower on WordPress as compared to BlueHost.

Load Impact Test

After publishing your website, dozens or even hundreds of visitors can be expected at the same time. It is dependent on the popularity of your content.

 If you want your business to flourish, you must select a web host which can handle the traffic efficiently. After running the tests, the results showed that a full page with about 200 visitors on BlueHost loads in 3.71 seconds, on the other hand, it took 4.12 seconds to load a full page on WordPress.

 It shows that BlueHost can manage the traffic better than WordPress. It is due to its optimized hosting infrastructure and features that enhance its performance.

Uptime

Both WordPress and BlueHost provide an excellent uptime for a website. The average of an industry in terms of uptime is 99.9%.

After running the tests for uptime both the hosts showed decent results i.e., WordPress gave an uptime of 99.8% and BlueHost maintained it to 99.9%. Therefore, there is no need for you to worry about uptime in either case.

Features

BlueHost is much suitable for newbies i.e., beginner-friendly hosts. It provides dedicated hosting services and several shared, virtual private servers.

 For blogs that do not anticipate much traffic and simple websites, shared hosting is much suitable. The shared hosting plans of BlueHost include these features:

●     Unlimited bandwidth.

●     Unlimited storage.

●     One-click WordPress installation.

●     Free SSL certificates.

●     Email hosting included.

●     Customer support is available 24/7.

●     Marketing credits toward ads.

●     Automatic updates of WordPress.

●     For the first year, free of cost domain installation.

Therefore, you can choose between 16 different plans of hosting which depend on the requirements of users.

On the other hand, WordPress offers four paid plans and one free plan. The free plan is good for getting a website started. The paid plans are

●     Personal plan

It is better for personal use. It costs $4 a month billed annually and $7 a month billed monthly.

●     Premium plan

It is a good option to choose for freelancers. It costs $8 a month billed annually and $14 a month billed monthly.

●     Business plan

It is better for small businesses. It costs $25 a month billed annually and $33 a month billed monthly.

●     Ecommerce plan

It is the best option for online stores. It costs $45 a month billed annually and $59 a month billed monthly.

These are much simpler as compared to the BlueHost but you will not have that much control over the hosting of your website. WordPress provides a limited number of features which are:

●     Limited customer support.

●     Free SSL certificates.

●     Limited storage of 3GB(Free plan) to 200GB (e-commerce plan).

●     A free of cost domain with advanced plans.

●     Crucial jetpack features of the plugin.

●     In case of higher plan selection, you will have access to free themes.

Personalization

The users should know the customization level available at every platform. If you want to build a professional career, you must have complete control over your branding.

Therefore, the free plan of word press is a bit less appealing. In this, your pages will have too many ads of WordPress that you cannot remove. Even money can not be earned from them. It affects the image/ impression among the visitors.

A custom domain can be set up for your WordPress website and the ads can be removed if you choose the cheapest personal plan for it. Still, there will be issues with standard widgets and free themes which might not be much flexible.

 For removing all the branding of WordPress.com and installing the themes and plugins of your own, you would have to select a much expensive package of business. Whereas if you install the WordPress open source software on any of the BlueHost plans, you will have access to unlimited features.

It indicates that you can easily add the plugins and themes to your site along with the premium extensions developed by third-party developers. In addition to it, BlueHost has a custom domain also, from the get-go.

A professional email address can also be set up which can be used with Gmail or other services just like Office 365. There is no need for you to worry about the unnecessary and irrelevant ads on your website. If you incorporate those ads, you will get revenue from them.

In short, if you want to have the level of personalization same as the cheapest plan of BlueHost on WordPress.com, you would have to pay at least $300 to the business plan of WordPress.com on yearly basis.

Security

BlueHost security

1.    BlueHost provides daily scans for malware, SSL certification, daily automatic updates of WordPress and built-in tools for spam prevention of your website.

2.    It helps in the protection of the data of visitors as well as your blogs.

3.     It provides website restoration and daily backups therefore if anything goes wrong, the previous version can be restored instead of recreating everything from the beginning.

4.    For speeding up your site and its protection, there are some other features offered by BlueHost.

5.    These are rate-limiting, VPN, DDoS protection, caching, image and mobile optimization and bot management etc.

WordPress security

1.    For the protection of your website, WordPress offers some protocols and built-in features of security similar to that of the BlueHost. SSL certificates are installed on each site automatically.

2.    In addition to that, web traffic is continuously monitored against suspicious activity, firewalls are run, protection against DDoS attacks is provided and the data of the site is backed up daily.

3.    The dedicated security team of WordPress works very well to protect the sites which run on their servers.

Domains

BlueHost provides a free of cost domain registration if you pay for a year. The same is the case with WordPress but the free domain is not offered for the free plan. But after the year you would have to pay for the renewal of the domain name.

Monetization

In case you want your blog to be monetized, the tools that WordPress provides are out of the box. For example, by using the personal plan of WordPress, you can create subscriber-only gated content and payments can be accepted through your website with just some clicks. 

Whereas in the case of BlueHost, you would have to build yourself a membership site which is not that straightforward. The e-commerce plan of WordPress is meant for those who want to start online stores.

 A similar outcome can be accomplished by using self-hosted WordPress, WooCommerce and BlueHost and you would have to do too much of the admin work and your configuration.

By using the more advanced plans of WordPress, you can generate income through ads.

 You can also get access to the tools of marketing such as content scheduling of social media, google analytics and email newsletters. All of these features can also be set up on a self-hosted website of your own.

 But you would need to do some tasks like figuring out the technical issues and installing some plugins by yourself. Therefore, the monetization of both the hosts i.eWordPress and BlueHost is almost similar but the efforts levels involved make the difference between them.

User experience

WordPress.com is much easier to use which is the main reason to sign up with it. Only the websites of WordPress are hosted by it. It simplifies and streamlines the process onboard to make it easier to get started.

The WordPress focused user experience of BlueHost has been improved in the past few years. For instance, today you can easily choose the option of having the WordPress software downloaded automatically by using BlueHost.

Both of the hosting platforms provide you with a walkthrough that would guide you on how to set up your WordPress website and publish your first content on it. It is very helpful for those users who are new to WordPress.

Conclusion

It is a bit challenging to find the best platform for your website. The newbies usually choose BlueHost and WordPress because they contain beginner-friendly features. 

Similarly, both the platforms have some drawbacks also. So,you need to search and know the details completely to opt for the most suitable host. 

If you require a free blog where there is no hassle of web hosting and if you are willing to pay an extra amount on additional features, you can opt for WordPress. On the other hand, if you want to have a professional website that is budget-friendly which has flexible web hosting, custom branding and all the features of WordPress then you should choose BlueHost.

Author: Adila Z.

Google & Hubspot certified professional copywriter with a specialization in blogging and copywriting writing. Being the owner of 6 websites and 1 digital marketing agency, her expertise in online entrepreneurship is second to none.

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