ClickPress Review: An Underrated Hosting Option in 2024

1

Before writing this review, I’d never heard of ClickPress – and my guess is most of you haven’t either. The host is owned by DreamVPS, an Israeli company, but it has server centers in the US and the Netherlands. The impression I got from its website and support team is that ClickPress mainly serves European, American, and Israeli customers.

ClickPress offers managed WordPress hosting, but it’s not your everyday WordPress shared hosting. You don’t share resources and there’s greater security because ClickPress isolates each site in a dedicated software “container.” While it’s not what you’d call a “budget” host, ClickPress does give you a great deal of value for your money.

So, I was eager to give it a try. After a bit of a bumpy start, I’m pleased to say I found the experience surprisingly pleasant. This small host delivered more than I expected. Read on for all the details.

ClickPress Takes Website Management Seriously

We’ve all seen managed WordPress plans that leave us wondering just what the host actually does in terms of management. Not so with ClickPress. As you’ll see, the array of features and services it provides is impressive. And even when you’re left to your own devices, you can do a lot with just a simple click of your mouse.

The ClickPress Dashboard

Just about anything you’d ever need to manage for your site is just so easy with ClickPress’ WordPress dashboard. It’s pretty, it’s laid out well, and it’s totally user-friendly. Using your actual WordPress dashboard is probably more cumbersome, especially if you’re not used to its accordion-style menu. In fact, the only part of the dashboard with a drop-down menu is the Backups manager, but only because you have four options to choose from.

As a non-techy person, I love that most of the dashboard buttons generally have clear and concise one-click options. For example, the Performance section has three boxes: Cache Memory, Clear Cache, and Development mode. You can simply turn the feature on or off – and you can clear your cache with that same simple click.

24/7 Website Monitoring

Ever have a plugin update crash your site? Or a traffic issue that slowed things down? Or had to deal with an SSL certificate expiring? And you were sleeping when it happened?

With ClickPress, you never have to worry. Its 24/7 website monitoring will notify you if anything goes wrong so you can address it as quickly as possible. Luckily, once I had my site up and running, I had no need for alerts. But it was nice knowing that I could get real-time updates, even on weekends.

Smart Themes and Plugins Management

Remember when I said the ClickPress dashboard was easier to use than WordPress? When it comes to themes and plugins, you don’t even need to bother with your other dashboard. WordPress who? You can install over 5,000 plugins right from ClickPress, without ever opening your WP admin link. I had the option to install about a dozen different themes as well.

This makes customizing your site quick and easy. Each plugin and theme description has an estimate of how long it will take to install. You’re also told which version of WordPress you need. I gave it a try with LiteSpeed Cache, and while the estimated install time was off, the convenience of not having to go through my WordPress admin made up for the short wait.

Strong Security

ClickPress partners with Cloudflare to offer DDoS protection and a web application firewall. Because Cloudflare’s DDoS protection spans 330 different cities across 120 countries around the world, your traffic doesn’t have to go through distant scrubbing centers to stay safe from these attacks.

Besides the DDoS and firewall, ClickPress also offers free SSL certificates, daily backups, and SFTP protocols. Hackers will have more than a bit of difficulty compromising your ClickPress site.

ClickPress Features at a Glance

It Doesn’t Get Much Simpler Than This

ClickPress is ideal for most non-techy site owners like me because it is so easy to use. It took me mere minutes to get my account set up and ready to use. There was a small hiccup along the way, but that was remedied by support.

Creating a New Account With ClickPress

ClickPress offers 6 different hosting plans, which range from accommodating 1 to 40 websites. To get started with your plan, all you have to do is click the Start Free button. The first screen after that asks for your personal info, while also giving you a review of what your plan includes.

Next, you’ll need to enter payment information. ClickPress accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover credit and debit cards, as well as PayPal. Finally, ClickPress will ask you to confirm your account via text on your mobile phone. Once that’s done, your account is immediately activated and you’re ready to go.

One thing to note: ClickPress’ data center in the Netherlands is your default choice during setup. If you’re in North America, you’ll want to select the US data center unless you’re specifically targeting a European audience.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

Once you get the details of your WordPress site out of the way, ClickPress offers you a window with some recommended plugins. Choose what you want and your plugins will be pre-installed with your WordPress site – yet another way that ClickPress makes managing your site easier.

Since ClickPress doesn’t sell domains, you’ll need to have a third-party domain parked elsewhere. But ClickPress does make it easy to connect your domain by providing nameserver information right in your dashboard’s Domains section. The Support Center even has comprehensive how-to guides on connecting your domain for some of the more popular domain registrars such as NameCheap and Domain.com.

There was a bit of an issue with connecting my domain that put a bump in the road to getting started. I kept getting an error saying that I had no active sites to connect to even though my hosting plan was clearly active and my WordPress installation had a temporary domain name.

I waited 24 hours and tried again, thinking it was a simple account setup issue. As we’ll see in more detail in a bit, support was able to clear things up with just a single ticket submission. Let’s look at some other ways ClickPress makes it easy to use your WordPress hosting plan.

Free SSL Pre-Installation

I’ve tested many hosts that provide a free SSL certificate. Most, however, required me to go into my control panel and manually activate that certificate. Not so with ClickPress. In the same window as your data center location choices, you’ll find a friendly message informing you that your SSL certificate is automatically added to your WordPress site when it is set up.

Website Migration Plugin

A feature I didn’t get to use – but still found impressive – was ClickPress’ website migration plugin. All you have to do is install the plugin, copy-paste a token, and click a Start button. Your site is never down and there’s no cost involved. You can migrate as many sites as your hosting plan allows. This is honestly one of the simplest migration processes I’ve ever seen.

A Built-in WordPress Playground

I have a love/hate relationship with my WordPress sites. I love all the customization choices WordPress gives me, but I hate it when I want to make changes and don’t know how those changes will affect my site.

ClickPress provides a testing environment specifically so you can preview your changes before making them live. It’s like a playground for WordPress and it doesn’t change your site unless you want the changes to become permanent.

Speedier Than Expected

Web hosts often make big claims about their performance that our testing proves to be an exaggeration. So, when I saw all the statements on the ClickPress site about “3X faster” and “speedy page loading,” I was a little dubious. ClickPress, though, didn’t disappoint at all.

GTmetrix Performance Tests

Before we get into the testing results, I have to let you know that while ClickPress doesn’t disclose its precise data center locations, my educated guess is that one is somewhere on the East Coast of the US. While we use GTmetrix’s Chicago server as our default for testing, I always got slightly faster, better results with the Danville, VA server.

You can see a typical Chicago test in the image above. A 1-second loading speed is good. Not quite as good as our top recommended hosting provider, but as good as (or better than) some of the hosts on our top ten list. Using the Virginia server, however, resulted in a 0.9-second fully loaded speed.

But one thing that concerned me a bit about ClickPress’ performance was its inconsistency. Usually, a hosting provider’s weekly report graph like the one above is a fairly straight line. As you can see, ClickPress shows very little stability, its fully loaded times bouncing from well below 1 second to almost 3 seconds. Your site visitors would have to hit the site at just the right time to get the best loading speeds.

GTmetrix Global Speeds

You can see a bit of the same inconsistency in the GTmetrix global scores, with the server in the UK outperforming the San Francisco server. Overall, a North American or European site visitor would find loading speeds within acceptable time limits of 1 to 3 seconds.

UptimeRobot

When it comes to server reliability, ClickPress never wavered. My UptimeRobot results proved that ClickPress’ promise of “always online” is true – my site was up 100% during my testing period. After reviewing the GTmetrix report, I expected far less so ClickPress has definitely surprised me here.

Stuck in the Middle With ClickPress

I’ve had some pretty awful experiences with hosting providers’ support teams. And I’ve had some pretty awesome ones, too. ClickPress support falls somewhere in the middle. Not awful and not awesome, just in the middle. I gave it both high marks and low marks, as you’ll see.

ClickPress offers support via ticket system, live chat, and a small online knowledge base. (Chat is only available in English or Hebrew.) I never could get an agent to respond to online chat, so I can’t give that good marks. The online knowledge base is quite limited in what it covers, though I will say that what it does cover is quite detailed and useful. Perhaps ClickPress will eventually expand its offerings.

The ticket system offered the best experience. When I couldn’t get my domain to connect, I first tried the online chat to no avail so I submitted a ticket on a Thursday. I received an answer about 10 hours later. (I didn’t think much of the time lapse because of the time difference between me and the support team in Israel.) By Monday, the issue was resolved.

The most interesting thing in my communications with support was that the first agent who answered my plea for help was not the same agent that followed up on the issue. It seems that several support agents monitor the same email inbox.

All in all, I found ClickPress support to be very lacking on live chat, mediocre on the knowledge base, and good via ticket.

Not the Least Expensive Host but a Lot of Value for the Money

ClickPress doesn’t offer budget WordPress hosting – see our list of the best cheap WordPress hosts and you’ll know what I mean. In fact, it’s pricier than most hosts that offer managed WordPress plans. However, ClickPress’ features and user-friendliness are well worth the cost.

Take the entry-level Basic plan that I tested – it includes 1 website, 5 GB of NVMe storage, the ability to send 300 emails a month, and can handle 60 GB of traffic or about 15,000 monthly visitors. You also get all the security measures, daily backups, and other easy-to-features that I’ve already discussed.

The resources might not look that generous for the [-]/month price tag at first, but remember that this isn’t run-of-the-mill shared hosting, it’s managed hosting with dedicated resources. It’s bound to be pricier. And then there’s the 30-day free trial, which adds to the value.

As with most hosts, the more you pay, the more you receive. After the first tier, plans cover 2 – 40 sites, 120 GB – 2.4 TB of bandwidth, and 10 GB – 250 GB of storage. (With the average WordPress site requiring at least 1 GB and most e-commerce sites requiring 10 GB of storage, 250 GB of storage for the Large Agency plan would probably not be enough space to accommodate the 40 sites you’re allowed to host.)

Luckily, ClickPress does allow for overages in usage. Your site won’t crash if you go over your allotted limits, as it might with some hosts. Instead, you’ll incur a small overage fee while your site stays up and running. There’s no need to upgrade your plan – simply pay the low fee and continue on your way.