Kinsta’s Chief Marketing Officer is Brian Jackson. We think Brian’s a smart guy. We quote him often on PagePipe.

We’ve written two articles about Kinsta:

1REFERENCE: Is Kinsta a reliable source of speed information?

This article above roasts the thinking of Tom Zsomborgi, the Chief Financial Officer at Kinsta.

2REFERENCE: The illusory superiority of Kinsta web speed hype.

This article above condemns the thinking of Brian Li, the Website Content Manager at Kinsta. Especially his 1-hour free seminar about website performance.

Why do we *loathe* Kinsta so much? They brag about speed. So what? PagePipe brags about speed, too. Is the pot calling the kettle black?

OK. Let’s examine something. This article by Brian Li:

How Kinsta Designed the Fastest WordPress Hosting Experience

It is on Kinsta’s blog, a self-promotional article. How fast did the page open in our desktop Firefox browser? 3.01 seconds. Is that fast? Is it the fastest WordPress hosting experience? Not even close.

REFERENCE: https://www.littlebizzy.com/blog/kinsta-wikipedia-abuse

We don’t appreciate Kinsta’s bragging buffalo and technical mumbo-jumbo to entice new customers.

Here’s WebPageTest.org speed results for that Kinsta page (sharing the server with no other domains):

https://webpagetest.org/result/200821_7C_0c14e0ec7a8a870712c49730a8237f8b/

Time To First Byte: 199 milliseconds. Dang! That’s fast!

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Load time: 8.091 seconds. That’s right over 8 SECONDS! Hey? Why so slow?

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Requests: 121. That’s a lot. But we’ve seen worse.

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Page weight: 3.7 megabytes (4.132 megabytes fully loaded). What the heck! That’s one above-normal heavy page. Like double the weight of average sites.

The average size of a website is 2 Mb for desktop and for mobile. – REFERENCE

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So are Kinsta servers fast?

Yes. Looks like it with under 200-millisecond TTFB. And their page loads? Uh. So. Hey, who screwed up the page? Who loaded it down with heavy rubbish? Probably an unknowing web designer. Sloppy.

Does Kinsta understand speed and performance optimization like they claim? Really?

Credibility is trustworthiness, expertise, and leadership.

Kinsta Failure.

Kinsta provides a fast host server … but they can’t build fast page experiences.

For comparison, this page you’re reading right now is hosted on GoDaddy. One of the most despised, corporate, shared-hosting companies in the world. Can you get a fast load time on GoDaddy with cheap shared magnetic servers?

Let’s compare test results.

THIS PAGE (sharing the server with 28 other domains):

https://webpagetest.org/result/200821_7C_0c14e0ec7a8a870712c49730a8237f8b/

Time To First Byte: 621 milliseconds. Dang! That’s pretty slow!

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Load time: 1.654 seconds. That’s right under 2 SECONDS! Hey? Why so fast?

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Requests: 15. That’s not very many.

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Page weight: 0.181 megabytes (0.182 megabytes fully loaded). Woah! That’s a super lightweight page. No wonder it’s so fast.

Speed Conclusion

Does a fast host server (like Kinsta) make your web pages fast?

Not really. Not if you mess the page up with junk. It requires site origin optimization. That’s performance strategy.

Price comparison

GoDaddy shared hosting plan: $3.99 per month – or $47.88 per year

Kinsta cheapest-hosting plan: $30 per month – or $360 per year.

In 10 years, you’ll have spent:
$3,600 with Kinsta for hosting.

You got money burning a hole in your pocket?