The Hostgator WordPress plan contains all the features that are lacking in ordinary Hostgator shared hosting. Here’s the entire Hostgator coupon code list showing all the discounts in one place.
My Rating: ★★★★☆
Here’s the pricing chart for the WordPress plans from Hostgator, including the maximum discount:
Click Below! 🡇 |
WordPress Starter | WordPress Standard | WordPress Business |
|---|---|---|---|
Hostgator WordPress Hosting |
$5.95/month
|
$7.95/month
|
$9.95/month
|
The discount from this coupon is less than the discount for regular web hosting, though. Nothing beats their 78% off deal for 12-months on regular hosting!
Ordinary Hostgator plans ranging from Hatchling to Business are severely lacking in features, and that really drags them down. Hostgator’s WordPress plans correct these oversights and finally offer you something that you can stick with for the long term.
Best Hostgator WordPress Hosting Coupon
To get the maximum discount on WordPress hosting from Hostgator, use the following coupon below:
Duration: 1-3 years
Maximum Discount: 57% off
Hostgator WordPress Hosting Coupon (click to copy):
Here’s a screenshot of the deal:
As expected, you get the biggest savings when you sign up for three years. That way, you also get cheaper renewals when your need to re-subscribe!
Table of Contents:
Hostgator’s WordPress Plan is Surprisingly Good
I was recently asked a question on Twitter about which web host has decent WordPress plans. This guy had been disappointed by web hosts like GoDaddy, that promise “optimized” WordPress hosting, which ultimately turns out to be nothing by regular shared hosting with WordPress pre-installed. I told him that contrary to expectations, The Hostgator WordPress package was one of the best in the “normal” hosting categories.
It’s surprising, because we don’t usually associate Hostgator with standing out. They have solid, reliable, and cheap shared hosting plans – nothing spectacular. But their WordPress plans are an anomaly. They’re actually pretty good!
“WordPress Hosting” is Usually Just Shared Hosting
Until a short while ago, most specialized WordPress hosting plans were “premium”. The plans were considerably more expensive than regular shared hosting and were designed to host websites with hundreds of thousands of visitors. Examples of premium WordPress hosting:
However, sometime in 2018, web hosts started offering “low-end” WordPress plans. These are actually nothing but ordinary shared hosting with WordPress pre-installed. Even SiteGround, which normally differentiates itself from other hosting providers, fell prey to this. Bluehost felt the pressure too and created a separate, distinct “WordPress” package, which is basically just shared hosting.
This leaves a vacuum in the market. A market for specialized WordPress hosting, that truly adds value over ordinary shared hosting. And surprisingly, it was Hostgator who stepped in to fill the void.
Hostgator WordPress – Cheap, But Feature Packed
I’ve written a more detailed review of Hostgator’s WordPress plans. But here are a few special things that you get:
- Free CDN
- Free server caching
- SSD drives instead of HDDs
- Free malware scanning
- Much more resources compared to shared hosting
As you can see, there’s a lot to like about Hostgator’s Wordpress plans. They’re not just repacked shared hosting. You actually get more resources, and a bunch of features that are useful for any website. I particularly like the server-side caching, because it removes the need to install 3rd party caching plugins. Here’s a more in-depth review of caching on shared hosting.
No Other (Cheap) WordPress Plan on the Market Compares
As mentioned above, there are quite a few premium WordPress packages that offer excellent dedicated support for WordPress. Kinsta immediately comes to mind – they’re laser-focused on WordPress, after all. But even their basic plans are expensive.
Hostgator WordPress plans don’t rise to the level of premium hosting (obviously). But they’re a great “in-between” service for when you want more than shared hosting, but don’t want to go the whole hog and pay a ton of money for premium services.
Many people view Hostgator as a commoditized service – especially since they were snapped up by EIG, and in many ways that’s true. But their WordPress plans are a departure from the norm, and they’ve managed to carve out a niche for themselves in a saturated market. Good for them!
Hostgator Cloud Architecture
Normal web hosting stores your data on a specific server in a specific location. The Hostgator WordPress packages however, use the same architecture found on Hostgator cloud hosting. Meaning that the data is spread out across three different servers, instead of just one. This makes it much more secure, since if one copy fails, the others are there to gracefully pick up the slack.
Note however, that all three of these servers are located in the same region. It does not mean that your site will be served from a different region depending on which is closest. The cloud architecture only increases security and provides a failover.
SSD Drives Instead of HDD
For its basic shared hosting, Hostgator uses HDD instead of SSD drives. This allows them to offer “unlimited” disk space in their plans since storage is so cheap with HDD. However, this comes at a price – SSD drives are much faster. Though I should note that Hostgator uses SSDs for MySQL databases.
However for its WordPress plans, Hostgator uses their Cloud architecture, and that means SSD drives! Which is perfect for a database heavy CMS like WordPress.
Hostgator WordPress Has Backups
Unlike ordinary shared hosting, the Hostgator WordPress plan has backups included. This is the standard CodeGuard solution that is normally an add-on for regular uses. It makes a huge difference to the stability of the hosting plan, since you’ll have daily backups up to 2 GB for your entire site. And restoration is easy as well.
This fills one of the largest holes with Hostgator – namely, the lack of backups. With CodeGuard however, you can rest easy.
Dynamic Caching: Optimized WordPress Hostgator Plans
WordPress pages are generated dynamically from the database whenever a visitor comes to your site. It means that on each visit, your database is being hit, the server’s CPU is being used to create the page. This slows things down and can even bring your site to a crawl if you get a lot of visitors suddenly.
Dynamic caching stores a copy of these pages after they’re generated for the first time. For all subsequent visits, the static pages are served to visitors, meaning there’s no additional load on your server. This allows your traffic to scale up significantly without much strain on your site.
Here’s an in-depth article about caching on shared hosting, along with a list of hosts that support server side caching.
All good WordPress sites use dynamic caching in one way or another. Most of them resort to using a plugin like WP SuperCacher, W3 Total Cache, or W3 Rocket. While these do work, they’re still slow. The Hostgator WordPress plan optimizes this at a server level, which places hardly any load on the server.
Not many web hosts include dynamic caching as a default part of their regular web hosting. SiteGround is on exception with their “SuperCacher” functionality (but not for the StartUp plan). Here’s a list of SiteGround coupons if you want to compare prices. The Hostgator web hosting plans don’t include dynamic caching, but the WordPress plans do. If you’re running WordPress, dynamic caching is a “must have”.
Hostgator CDN Included
This is a unique feature of the Hostgator WordPress plans, that’s not found anywhere else. They all include a global CDN supplied by the “SiteLock” add-on. While with normal web hosting you have to specifically purchase SiteLock, it comes free with all optimized WordPress Hostgator packages.
The CDN is a “Content Distribution Network”, and allows your site to serve images, Javascript, and other static content from servers all around the world. So a visitor from Japan will see the same loading speed for these resources, as a visitor from Brazil. Without a CDN, at least one of these locations will experience slow loading speeds.
While the value of a CDN is unquestioned, I personally wonder if the SiteLock CDN is the best one to use. My opinion is that Cloudflare is the best CDN, and I recommend that you use that as well. But if you don’t want Cloudflare, then SiteLock is fantastic, because otherwise you would be paying for the CDN as a separate service.
More Resources Compared to Normal Web Hosting
Just as with the cloud package, Hostgator WordPress plans have fewer users on each server compared to normal shared hosting. In fact, here are the comparisons to standard web hosting vis-a-vis compute power:
- WordPress Starter – 2x the power
- WordPress Standard – 2x the power
- WordPress Business – 5x the power
Note that you’re still on a shared server. It’s not a VPS plan. But these servers are “low density”, and this means faster site load speeds and fewer chances of you being throttled.
Malware Scanner and Removal with SiteLock
All Hostgator WordPress plans get free complimentary malware scans. This is extremely important in today’s world because of the scary number of site hacks being discovered every day. A compromised WordPress site can leech visitors off your business, plunge your rankings in the search engines, and you might even lose control of your site altogether. A good WordPress malware scanner looks for known vulnerabilities and notifies you before they can do any harm.
Regular web hosting includes a complimentary malware scan of the first five pages of your site daily. But optimized WordPress Hostgator hosting includes all the features including automatic removal as well!
Customized Dashboard Instead of Hostgator cPanel
While cPanel is a staple feature of all Linux hosting, it’s not really necessary for running your website properly. Most people don’t need all the features anyway. Hostgator WordPress hosting comes with a custom built cPanel that’s specifically geared towards WordPress. From there, you can:
- Change your cache settings
- Configure your e-mail accounts
- Manage CodeGuard and SiteLock
- Manage FTP users etc
In other words, it has everything you need to manage WordPress without the clutter of cPanel. For many people, this is a significant benefit, since it also reduces the chances of messing things up accidentally!
Automatic Updates of Plugins and Themes
A shocking number of WordPress installations are out of date and insecure. Most of this can be avoided simply by keeping your plugins and themes up to date. But this usually needs to be done manually, and when you don’t log in for a while, routine maintenance can build up.
The Hostgator WordPress plans can do this for you automatically, so you always have the latest version of software running. This improves security and ensures that you get the latest bugfixes without any delay.
Free SSL
Just like with all their plans, Hostgator WordPress hosting includes free SSL with Let’s Encrypt. While these are not “positive SSLs”, they’re still good enough to get you the “green lock” icon on your site, which means that all traffic between you and your visitor is encrypted, and no one can snoop on it. Plus is correlates with higher rankings in search engines too. Google in particular has made it very clear that it prefers SSL sites.
Also, browsers like Chrome won’t display scary warnings!
Hostgator Limitations on WordPress Hosting
Because of the management and resource intensive nature of optimized WordPress Hostgator plans, there’s a limit on the number of WordPress sites you can install on each plan. Here they are:
- Starter: 1 site
- Standard: 2 sites
- Business: 3 sites
It also means that you can’t have multi-site WordPress installations, unfortunately.
Hostgator WordPress vs SiteGround WordPress
The SiteGround WordPress plans is exactly the same as their shared hosting plan. With Hostgator WordPress however, there are a lot of additional features as mentioned above. SiteGround doesn’t have their own CDN or security solutions for free. Hostgator WordPress has all this and more. In addition, SiteGround is more expensive. And they don’t even give you a free domain when you sign up!
SiteGround used to be my favorite web host for a long time. Then they increased their prices by 50%, and removed cPanel. It’s why I don’t recommend them anymore.
SiteGround WordPress Rating: ★★★☆☆
Hostgator WordPress Rating: ★★★★☆
Hostgator WordPress vs GoDaddy WordPress
GoDaddy has improved some of its features in recent years. For example, the WordPress plans have recently got a free SSL certificate for the duration of the hosting, which is a big plus. It also comes with a built-in CDN. However, unlike with Hostgator, the GoDaddy CDN appears to cause all kinds of problems. It’s not as responsive, and can even interfere with various plugins. In addition, it’s more pricey than Hostgator – if just a little bit.
In all, I would say the two are around the same, but due to the sheer number of complaints about GoDaddy’s hosting and WordPress plans, I would rank it behind Hostgator’s WordPress offering.
GoDaddy WordPress Rating: ★★★☆☆
Hostgator WordPress Rating: ★★★★☆
Bottom Line: Is Hostgator WordPress Worth it?
Surprisingly, yes. Unlike a lot of other “WordPress hosting” packages from other providers, this is not just standard web hosting with WordPress slapped on. It actually includes useful features that you would normally have to pay for separately. Like a CDN, and malware scanning. The other perks like dynamic caching and cloud architecture are really important for a fast WordPress site.
It’s better to have these features implemented on a server level instead of an add-on with plugins. So I’d say that the Hostgator WordPress plans are definitely worth it. And that’s more than I can say for many other web hosts!
