BionicWP Managed WordPress Hosting Speeds in Australia with Hummingbird Pro & NitroPack

My initial impressions of the BionicWP WordPress hosting platform performance for Australian users was about what I expected: slow. Only having USA locations is not ideal for customers in Australia or elsewhere around the South Pacific. After testing every combination except NitroPack, I was pretty sure that I would not be able to recommend BionicWP for Australian businesses. Oddly enough, most optimisations actually made the performance even slower, and there seemed no beating that delay caused by crossing the Pacific Ocean. However, when I enabled the NitroPack add-on, the picture changed drastically.

BionicWP with the NitroPack add-on is brilliantly fast for Australian customers!

I was (and still am) gobsmacked.

My usual recommendation for Australian businesses looking to target Australian customers is Kinsta, their Australian locations perform fantastically well (check my Kinsta speed tests here). If the pricing of Kinsta is too high, then go with Cloudways, their pricing starts low for very low-traffic sites but still performs well (have a look at my Cloudways speed tests here). However, BionicWP with NitroPack outperforms even the best Kinsta speeds I got in my Kinsta speed tests.

I ran test after test with NitroPack enabled, I couldn’t believe how fast it was loading here in Australia.

As of right now, BionicWP with NitroPack is the fastest hosting for WordPress that I’ve tested in Australia.

There are some trade-offs though. BionicWP might start at USD $27.50 per month, but once you add NitroPack for $9, it becomes $36.50 per month making it more expensive than Kinsta at $30 per month. I’d say it’s worth the extra cost for the speed boost, but you do sacrifice a few other things.

BionicWP includes 20% fewer visitors and half the disk space compared to Kinsta. The upgrade options aren’t clear either. Support tells me I can add more data and visits, but there is currently no way to do it without contacting support, and no pricing for these add-ons. Instead, the recommendation is to add another site to your account as sites share data and visitor allocations. Sites do get cheaper as you add more, and there are some breakpoints where the visitor numbers or data storage do work out better than Kinsta, but at the lower traffic end, Kinsta is cheaper.

All that aside, it does raise the question, is it really BionicWP, or is it NitroPack? If NitroPack can make that big of a difference on what is otherwise a pretty slow web host (for Australian traffic anyway), how big of a difference might NitroPack make in conjunction with Kinsta or Cloudways? If you are looking for the best speeds in Australia, that could be something to consider. I haven’t tried it (yet) so can’t say for sure, but BionicWP has been set up and optimised to work with NitroPack so it would be interesting to see how they compare. BionicWP also provides NitroPack at a cost of USD $9/month, much lower than the AUD $27.73 inc GST charged by NitroPack to license it directly with annual billing (although if you signup for NitroPack via our referral link here, you can get 5% off your first NitroPack payment).

For a premium, managed WordPress hosting provider, BionicWP’s basic pricepoint offers a simple hosting environment with free migration that is easy to get started on. However, while speeds are great in the USA, they are dismal in Australia unless you pay for the NitroPack add-on. In fact, Hostgator’s most basic shared cPanel hosting plans (also using USA datacentre locations) actually outperforms BionicWP in most performance metrics in Australia. Ouch. Don’t believe me, you can check out my Hostgator shared hosting performance tests here for exactly the same test site.

Add NitroPack to BionicWP though and it absolutely shines!

Just to emphasise, for businesses who want to ensure their website loads quickly for Australian visitors, BionicWP with the NitroPack add-on is the way to go. At the time of writing, this is the fastest hosting and optimisation platform combination that I’ve tested in Australia.