A More Performant Website; Switching Hosts from iPage to SiteGround

After over 8 years in business, we made a HUGE change at SellerSmile that was long overdue…

We switched to our WordPress host from iPage to SiteGround and so far it has been amazing.

The decision to change was made due to poor performance and customer service. Recently, our site would routinely crash and when it was up, the home page took over 15 seconds to load. 🐢 Now its loads in under two seconds, almost 10x faster! 🏎️

iPage wanted us to wait two months to upgrade to the newest version of PHP, why would it take so long?! When I asked why we were paying for two SSL certificates with only one domain, they couldn’t prove how it was added to our account and refused to provide any refund or credit for the unused purchase, over $200 wasted.

On the other hand, Siteground has been brilliant from the start. I had many questions about the transition, their helpful support agents answered me lightning-fast every time I entered a new chat. They helped me set the proper DNS records to ensure our email through iPage still worked while switching only the website for now. We wanted to transfer the email as well but that would’ve been another $1,000+ loss because, again, they would provide no credit or refund for over 10 Google Workspace subscriptions, we have to wait until July ‘26 to switch the email hosting.

iPage served us well at the beginning but seemed to have degraded into a slow and unhelpful entity. Sharing this experience not as a pointless dig, but as a helpful warning for others that may be dissatisfied with iPage or looking for a top quality WordPress host with excellent support and snappy speed.

I wish it could have been different, perhaps 8 years of a business relationship means nothing to a large corporate entity. Maybe I’m expecting too much, after all, I technically agreed to renew iPage’s services for a full year, but staying with iPage was literally hurting our business: our SEO/ search rank were in the gutter and browsing our site was am excruciating experience. All that is fixed now—Please enjoy our new extra fast website!: https://sellersmile.com.

Next steps are to optimize our content. We’ll resume creating helpful posts for online sellers and support teams that strive to provide the best customer experience on Amazon, Shopify, and anywhere they’re selling. We’re getting help from an expert to improve on- and off- page SEO, helping us get more leads and reclaim the market/mind share we once had.

Thank you, iPage, for helping us get started, and thank you, SiteGround, for picking us up when we were down. 😄