Kinsta Reports 60% Customer Growth, Expands Partner Program for Agencies and Enterprises

Kinsta's managed WordPress hosting platform crossed 230,000 hosted sites after adding 65,000 new properties in a single year, the Los Angeles-based company announced March 31, 2026, the same week G2 ranked it the number one web hosting platform in its 2026 Best Software Awards.

The 60% year-over-year customer growth came alongside two senior leadership appointments and a deliberate expansion of partner programs targeting agencies and enterprise teams managing WordPress at scale. Jon Penland was named CEO and Matt Reid, former senior vice president at BigCommerce, joined as chief marketing officer.

Penland's path to the top job is a product of Kinsta's own culture. He started at Kinsta as a support engineer about nine years ago and rose through roles in sales, operations, and customer success, reaching chief operating officer before being named CEO. The CEO transition is not expected to bring major shifts, as Penland has already been deeply involved in the company's leadership over six years on the board of directors.

"Web traffic is changing quickly, while WordPress businesses have become more sophisticated and more demanding," Penland said.

The 230,000 sites now on the platform span 128 countries and include brands such as LoudCloud by Barnes & Noble, The Jane Goodall Institute, McDonald's, TripAdvisor, the University of Michigan, Calm, ClickUp, NASA, and Konica Minolta. The roster signals that Kinsta's infrastructure has moved well beyond boutique WordPress shops into territory where enterprise reliability and compliance requirements apply.

The partner program expansion is central to the company's next phase. The program enables agencies to focus on delivering client wins while Kinsta provides infrastructure support and collaborative opportunities for new business, including lead referrals, co-marketing activities such as webinars and content, and a featured listing in Kinsta's Agency Directory. Kinsta also shares leads with partner agencies when prospects have needs beyond what the platform provides directly, making the arrangement genuinely two-directional.

For white-label resellers, the expanded program creates a path to packaging branded hosting and maintenance offerings without capital investment in infrastructure. As server-side performance increasingly intersects with Core Web Vitals scores and organic search rankings, the hosting layer has become as strategically significant as the CMS sitting on top of it.

Kinsta's growth trajectory also carries a broader signal for the managed platform market: enterprise and mid-market clients appear willing to consolidate around fewer, higher-quality hosting vendors. Agencies that can operationalize those partnerships and build recurring revenue models around them are best positioned to capture the margin opportunity that consolidation creates.