CSS Hero Gets A Super Hosting Sidekick: A2 Hosting Review

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s —

No, not Superman. It’s CSS Hero!

All joking aside, CSS Hero we’re a company dedicated to offering great products backed by great customer service. As a business that stands behind such ideologies, we are always on the lookout for other WordPress products or services that stand behind that same philosophy so that we can help our customers even more.

We recently took a look at A2 Hosting’s WordPress hosting service and have review their service to help you out when choosing your next great host provider for your WP site.

A2 Hosting: Lighting Fast Speed for WordPress

There is a lot to like about when it comes to the features that A2 Hosting has to offer. Perhaps the most impressive feature is the speed factor that A2 Hosting brings to the table:

• SSD (Solid State Drive) which is a new type of server disk that serves up your site faster than a server without one
• A feature called Turbo with implements various things to boost your page load times up to so they load 20X faster
• An added bonus called SwiftCache — an A2 exclusive cache software that helps boost your site speed once again

A closer look at the other features that are offered with the WordPress hosting packages also adds to the edge that A2 holds:

• A2 Optimized feature. This feature essentially takes your average cPanel and adds things like built-in Recaptcha and caching on your WP sites. Plus, it come pre-installed and configured on your WP installs to make things that much easier
• CloudFlare CDN integration.
• A Free integrated Manage WP account.
• 99.9% Uptime
• Free Site Transfer
• Server rewind backups
• FutureServe Green Hosting meaning that their servers create no carbon footprint

Pricing for A2 is also very reasonable:

• Lite | $3.92 per month for a single WordPress domain and 5 subdomain
• Swift | $4.90 per month for unlimited domains plus additional features not available in Lite
• Turbo | $9.31 per month for unlimited domains plus all the features that A2 hosting has to offer (i.e. use of Turbo Server, SwiftCache, Railgun Optimizer and more)

For a WordPress Hosting service, it’s clear that these guys pay attention to detail and offer you all the things you could want and more of the things you need but just didn’t know it yet.

All praise aside though, we wanted to know, what’s in it for us? How well would this host work with our Hero Ready Themes and CSS Hero itself?

Well, we tested two of our most popular Hero Ready themes — Divi 2.0 and the Genesis Framework — on the host provider with CSS Hero to see how they worked.

A2 Hosting Versus Hero Ready Themes and CSS Hero

Let’s start with the Genesis Framework, shall we?

Now, when you opt-in for the Lite Package of A2 WordPress Hosting, although you don’t get the Turbo or SwiftCache options as part of that package. You still get the A2 Optimized feature and W3 Total Cache pre-configured and installed in your WordPress installation.

Though it doesn’t give you the full features of the WP Hosting by A2, these both help boost overall Page Speed and site performance and are already a step above what over host providers offer.

Below you can see a screenshot of the Page Speed grading from GTMetrix after I activated the Genesis Framework, but before I used CSS Hero to implement any CSS on the site.

Also, keep in mind that I didn’t mess with any configurations on either the A2 Optimized details or W3 Total Cache in the backend which already had CSS and JS scripts minified to help better loading times.

Score was pretty good, I’d say:

• Page Speed Score: 87%
• YSlow Score: 97%
• Load time: .85 seconds
• Number of requests: 7

After this speed test, I went ahead and activated CSS Hero and made some basic CSS alterations to the framework to give it a bit of personality and to just test and see how things were handled on the A2 powered site.

Below you can see the before and after of the site using CSS Hero. Incidentally, these tweaks only took me about 5 minutes to implement, but that’s beside the point.

Though the tweaks I’ve made are seemingly small, they do generate quite a bit of code, as the picture below can attest to.

After I implemented the changes on the site, I went ahead and tested the Page Speed on the site again.

Surprisingly, after using CSS Hero on the Hero Ready Genesis Framework with A2, the Page Speed of the site actually improved, and other factors changed, as well. 

 

• Page Speed Grade: 90% (3% better)
• YSlow Grade: 96% (1% decrease)
• Page Load Time: .74 seconds (.11 seconds better)
• Number of requests: 9 (2 more than before)

 Now let’s move on to testing out Divi.

I went through the similar steps while testing the Genesis Framework but started out by purging the cache first to get a clean slate.

Below is a screenshot of the Page Speed of using Divi on A2 hosting with no tweaks made to the A2 Optimized options or W3 Total Cache. Also, I didn’t add any modules to the front page and just have it set as the blog posts to display there so that it is similar to what I tested with the Genesis Framework.

 

• Page Speed Grade: 95%
• YSlow Grade: 91%
• Page Load Time: 1.07 seconds
• Number of Requests: 18

 The grade that were kicked out we’re half bad. Now let’s see how things go when I add some code via CSS Hero. Here is the before and after pics:

 

 

I made some basic tweaks using CSS Hero rather than Divi’s customizing options in the front-end due to the fact the I actually get more control and a few more/different options for customizing Divi with CSS Hero.

The change I made were rather basic, but much like Genesis, the CSS that was generated was quite a bit (as is to be expected).

How did the theme and host handle those changes?

Here are the Page Speed results after I made the changes to Divi:

 

• Page Speed Grade: 95% (same as before)
• YSlow Grade: 91% (same as before)
• Page Load Time: 1.39 seconds (.32 seconds slower)
• Number of requests: 21 (3 more than before)

 Although page load time and requests increased after making some alterations to the theme, the grade on Page Speed and YSlow didn’t decrease in anyway showing that A2 could handle the added code and still deliver a fast website. 

Thoughts on A2 Hosting + Hero Ready Themes + CSS Hero Plugin

Overall, A2 Hosting’s WordPress package seems to offer up all the good stuff. Even without the Turbo and SwiftCache options implemented on this test site, both Divi and the Genesis Framework performed really well right out of the box.

Even after using CSS Hero to make changes to each theme, A2’s features was able to handle what some would consider added weight to each theme and keep speed grades on the high end meaning that even after those changes, the sites would still load fast in a browser.

During my tests on the site, I didn’t run into any glitches with the CSS Hero plugin running along side A2 Optimized or W3 Total Cache, but I also didn’t mess with any configurations on either of the latter mentioned.

The only downside that I could come up with for A2 Hosting was the fact that in order to gain access to Turbo and SwiftCache require purchasing the Turbo package which could be a little pricey for some people — but that’s about it.

 A2 offers a serious and solid foundation to build any WordPress based site on, which is exactly why we’ve joined up with them.

Joining Forces with A2 Hosting 

With A2 being a great host provider with a bend toward offer fast speeds and great customer support, we are happy to announce that CSS Hero has partnered up with them to really kick some butt on the WordPress scene.

Want to Hero Up your WordPress install and get great page speeds so Google loves you even more? Then be sure to check out A2 Hosting and suit up you theme with CSS Hero.

Discount Code for A2 Hosting Plans

As an affiliated partner with them our CSS Hero users (and groupies) can enjoy a special discount using code with a 51% OFF:

51SPEED

SPEED UP HERE