Five Things You Should Know About WordPress Hosting

When building an online presence for your business, it’s hard to resist the attraction of WordPress. The popular content management system powers a staggering 39.5% of all websites, and the flexibility it offers website owners is virtually unparalleled.

When starting to use WordPress, to retain full control of your site you’ll need to find a hosting provider that suits your needs.

There are countless WordPress hosting options available, and anyone starting their own website will need to make an informed decision before signing up for a service. Wading through the options can be overwhelming.

In this guide, we’ll discuss five things every website owner should know about WordPress hosting.

1. You’ll Want Reliable Support

If you’re running your website for business purposes, you’ll want to be sure that it is running smoothly all of the time. If you’re paying for WordPress web hosting from a third-party company, you’ll need to know that you can get in touch with your host’s support team when you need them.

Before deciding which hosting service is right for you, consider how you’ll be able to get in touch with them when you need help. If they only offer email support, there’s a risk that when you need them most, they won’t respond in time.

When you do get to speak to a support agent, what’s the quality of their advice like? Check out customer reviews to find out about the experiences of others and make sure you’re getting the best support and advice possible.

Check out the support resources that they offer. If their website is filled with ‘how-to guides’, FAQ sections, or even a support forum, any time you run into problems with your hosting service, you’ll be able to clear up the issue in no time.

2. Flexibility and Scalability

If you’re running a growing business, you’ll probably see your website as an integral aspect of this growth. The more customers you have accessing your online services, the more pressure there’ll be on your website.

Does the WordPress website hosting service that you signed up to when your business was still germinating offer the flexibility and scalability to grow at the speed you need?

For many running a fledgling business, cost-effectiveness rules supreme. But the cheapest web hosting service doesn’t always have the option to scale up at a later date.

Make sure you plan ahead when choosing a host. It’s much easier to upgrade your hosting package than it is to go through the rigmarole of migrating your website to a new host.

3. Make Sure You’re On the Right Hosting Platform

From the very outset, it’s important to understand the type of hosting platforms available, so that you can find the one that you actually need.

There are three different hosting options, these are:

• Shared hosting – These are best suited to websites that are not expecting a lot of traffic as they share server resources between numerous websites
• VPS – A virtual private service will provide you with a dedicated section of a shared server meaning you get your own resources that nobody else will use
• Dedicated hosting – Websites that are likely to get a lot of hits should get dedicated hosting as you’ll be able to secure all of the server’s resources for your own use

Plan ahead. If your business is on an upward trajectory, you won’t want to be stuck on a shared hosting plan where your website will compete with potentially hundreds or even thousands of others for server resources.

Not only can this severely limit the performance of your website, but it could also be a security disaster.

If you’re looking for a cost-effective solution that doesn’t involve limited resources, choose a WordPress hosting service that severely limits the number of clients it hosts on each server. That way, your site will have room to grow.

4. Consider Backup Frequency

Backing up your website is important. In the event of a major crash or problem with your site, you’ll be able to restore it to the last working iteration effortlessly.

The adaptability and flexibility of WordPress as a platform are fantastic. Website owners can easily make changes to their website’s themes and install plugins that offer enhanced functionality both to the backend and frontend of a website.

But with the ability to make changes easily comes the chance to break your site.

This is why backups are essential. You should be backing up your website on a daily basis to ensure you’re always able to quickly roll back to when it last worked.

For the less tech-savvy website owners, this can be a task that is easily neglected. Find a host that will carry out a backup of your site on your behalf every day. This will give you the peace of mind that you’ll be able to

5. Find the Fastest WordPress Hosting

Did you know that more than half of all users will leave a website that fails to load within the first three seconds? Page load speeds are crucial to minimizing bounce rates. They’re so important that they are one of the leading SEO ranking factors.

While there are plenty of things you can do to speed your site up such as minifying JavaScript and CSS elements, using caching, uninstalling and removing unused plugins, and using a lazy load plugin – nothing you do can make up for a slow host.

If your website is crammed into a hosting server with resource-hogging neighbours, you’ll pay for it when people bounce from your site en-masse.

Pick a website host that offers superior speeds, runs the most stable version of PHP, and provides servers where you need them.

Don’t Take Chances With Your WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting is not something you should leave to chance. Thoroughly research your hosting options and go with a company that provides great service, great speeds, and that won’t force you to share valuable resources with hundreds of others.

To learn more about the best WordPress hosting for your website, get in touch today.