by Last updated: January 12, 2022

Liquid Web Managed WordPress Hosting Review 2022

What do you need the most for your WordPress website?

 The most obvious answer to this question would be fast speeds, high uptime, and robust security for most of us. 

This is where choosing a WordPress hosting can primarily help you since WordPress hosting is optimized to meet the performance and security needs of WordPress sites. 

You can have an even better and fully managed WordPress hosting environment by choosing a managed WordPress hosting. I use Liquid Web Managed WordPress as it comes with the benefits of fast speeds, high uptime, free site migrations, and dedicated customer support. 

Table of contents

Overview & Highlights

  • Lower Starting Price – only $19/month
  • 10 PHP Workers Per site
  • Unlimited Email
  • Automatic Plugin Updates
  • No Overage Fees
  • Free Staging Environment
  • Free SSL

Pros of Liquid Web Managed WordPress Hosting

1. Performance ( 100% / 200ms)

Liquid Web Managed WordPress offers you brilliant speeds backed by the latest technologies such as PHP7, SSL, and Nginx. 

Being a Liquid Web VPS customer since 2015, I bought their Managed WordPress plan for my personal needs. I'm using it for some months and impressed with the performance.

Although, there are few downtimes initially happened due to the transition of complex site from cPanel to Liquid Web Nexcess dashboard. However, the team took the utmost responsibility for a complete transformation.

This is my recent performance report, where the site loads in 245ms on an average and 100% uptime.

The primary thing I love about their Managed hosting plans is no traffic limits, unlike most companies like Kinsta, WP Engine, which charges extra for additional pageviews.

2. Industry's lowest price

Liquid Web Managed WordPress hosting plans come to be lowest price in the industry. You can get started for $19/month where the server configurations are comparable to $30/month plan of other hosts.

There is a $15/month plan from FlyWheel. However, it got a traffic limit of 5000 per month. Here Liquid Web puts no traffic limits.

Apart from the starter spark plan, the next tier plan too comes with an affordable price range yet offers more resources than other managed hosts. Here is a short comparison.

3. 10 PHP Workers

Managed WordPress hosting have this concept called “PHP Workers”

These PHP workers are responsible for processing concurrent requests happening on your site. If you have a less PHP workers and a lot of concurrent processes are happening, then the visitors will get a 504 error on your site.

Once the existing processes are completed, the PHP workers will process the next request in the queue. To overcome this issue, Liquid Web offers 10 PHP Workers on all their plans, which is almost five times higher than what other managed hosts offer in this price range.

More the PHP workers, the more the process will be happening at the same time, thus minimizing the risk of downtime.

4. Auto Plugin Updates

There is a visual comparison tool in the dashboard. The job of the tool is to compare the site before and after updating a plugin.

If the visuals didn't change, the tool pushes the plugin updates to production site. If the tool saw any visuals broken, then the plugin update will be abandoned.

Liquid Web takes a dig at competitors, ” We launched this features two years back, and our competitors are still this fixing this problem for you.”

Update: I check other managed hosts and found WP Engine introduced this feature recently and named as “Smart Plugin Manager”. This can be bought as an addon for $100/year.

2. Multi Layered Caching

Caching is the most important thing when it comes to Managed WordPress hosting space. The Liquid Web caching is something special that comes from a team that's operating since 1997.

In simple terms, the Nexcess Cloud accelerator combing Ngnix micro cache with optimized Redis instance on WordPress application for caching. At one-click, you can enable caching from the dashboard.

2. Automatic Daily Backups

Liquid Web Managed WordPress not only supports automatic daily backups but also stores the backups for 30 days. 

On top of that, restoring or downloading the backups is a pretty effortless process and does not need more than a single click.

There is also an option for instant backups when needed. You can take as many backups till your disk space limits.

3. Free Staging sites

Liquid Web Managed WordPress hosting offers you the feature of Staging Site, which helps you to develop your site on production mode and test it before moving into the production site. 

This is a pretty handy feature for users that look forward to creating advanced websites, and the feature is offered for free. 

There might be some situations where you created a staging site earlier but also added new content and made few changes on the production site. In that case, you can simply use sync option, Liquid Web adds the new changes to your staging site.

Apart from it, there is a feature called “Stencils”. The work of stencils is to create a stencil from an existing site, and you can use it rapidly to build a new site by using these stencils as the baseline.

5. Customer Support

Liquid Web support has done a commendable job over the years in helping the customers with their technical difficulties through Live Chat, Phone, and Email. 

The support team is well-versed with all WordPress technicalities and is proficient in troubleshooting issues.

7. Free site transfer

Site Transfer is pretty painless and hassle-free in Liquid Web. The Liquid Web experts will handle the entire white glove site transfer, from transferring your website files to updating the DNS. 

You can transfer as many sites as you want with expert’s assistance for free.

8. Developer tools

Liquid Web Managed WordPress Hosting includes a lot of developer tools comprising SSH, Git, and WP-CLI. Besides, Liquid Web makes it exceptionally simple for you to give your developer access to your site with full access to the server and database.

Since Liquid Web operates its own data center, you can even host WordPress databases or custom applications, and it's not only about sites.

9. Email Hosting

Liquid Web allows you to create unlimited email accounts on all its managed hosting plans even though most providers have already stopped this feature and charge additionally for email hosting. 

10. iThemes Security Pro

All Liquid Web Managed WordPress Hosting plans come with iThemes Security Pro. This offers your WordPress website strong protection against Brute Force and other WordPress Security Breaches. 

Besides, it includes File Change Detection, 404 Detection, Strong Password Enforcement, Log out bad users, Hide Login & Admin, Database Backups, and Email Notifications.

Cons

1. Average user interface

As seen above, there are some powerful features like stencils, visual comparison tools that are found only with Liquid Web. However, the user interface is not up to the mark.

Kinsta and WP Engine have some industry best interface for better work. I hope, Liquid Web might be working on the next-gen interface, we need to wait for some time.

2. No Free CDN

Both WP Engine and Kinsta offers free CDN on their plans. However, its an addon service with Liquid Web.

Pricing

Liquid Web provides users with as many as six different Managed WordPress hosting plans to choose from. Spark for $19/mo, Maker for $79/mo, Builder for $149/mo, Producer for $299/mo, Executive for $549/mo, and Enterprise for $999/mo.

The lowest tier plan, Spark, is ideal for those that need just one site, and it includes 15GB Storage, 2TB Bandwidth, 30 Day Backups, Unlimited Email accounts, Beaver Builder Lite, and iThemes Security Pro and Themes Sync.

Maker is the ultimate plan for those who need more than one site as it supports 5 sites. Besides, it includes 3TB Bandwidth and 40GB Storage.

Builder consists of 25 sites support, 100GB Storage, and 5TB Bandwidth. Producer consists of 50 sites support, 5TB Bandwidth, and 300GB Storage. 

Executive comprises 100 sites support, 500GB Storage, and 10TB Bandwidth.

The highest-tier plan, Enterprise supports 250 sites and includes 800GB Storage and 10TB Bandwidth.

Wrapping Up

Liquid Web Managed WordPress Hosting comes with comprehensive features, and there are a few places wherein it has a bit of advantage over the other managed hosting services. 

For example, Liquid Web allows unlimited traffic, unlimited email accounts, and free professional site migration while other providers charge for it. 

Besides, the service provides users iThemes Security Pro for free on all plans. 

Apart from that, Liquid Web sites are extremely fast. Moving over to pricing, Liquid Web offers customers a lot of options to choose from. Liquid Web also has a dedicated Support team to assist the customers at every step within their hosting accounts.