Choosing the right hosting provider is one of the most important decisions you’ll make when building your website. Hosting is essentially the service that stores your website’s files and makes them accessible on the internet. While there are many types of hosting services, if you’re running a WordPress site, hosting with a company that specialises in WordPress can make a world of difference. WordPress-specific hosts offer optimized performance, enhanced security, and dedicated support tailored to WordPress needs, which can significantly boost your site’s speed, reliability, and protection against potential issues. In this blog, I’ll walk through what makes WordPress hosting unique and why it’s worth the investment for serious WordPress site owners.
Many people treat website hosting as a commodity, shopping around to get the cheapest price and using price as the main factor when deciding between different options. A hosting company is simply providing somewhere that you can store the files that make up your website and from where those files can be accessed. It doesn’t sound so complicated, so is your best option indeed to simply shop around until you find the smallest hosting fee and sign-up? It is often not that simple, because there can be more to hosting than simply providing a place for the files to live. Specialist WordPress hosting companies can offer a range of additional services which can make your life, as the website owner, substantially easier. Broadly, these can be grouped into three categories.
“Hosting plus” WordPress hosting packages
The next level up from simply hosting the files and doing nothing else could be thought of as a “hosting plus” tier. Companies offering packages like this will bundle in some of the most useful additional features to help make it easier for you to manage your site. For example, a hosting plus package might include access to a staging environment. This is essentially a copy of your live WordPress site that you can use to test out changes whilst avoiding the risk of making those changes directly onto your live site. Examples might include new page layouts or designs, new settings for the site, any modifications needed to your code, installing a new plug-in or a new theme. Having a staging environment avoids the risk of making changes directly in your live system without first seeing how well they work in your staging system.
A second issue that a hosting plus package can help you with is managing fluctuating demand on your site. For many businesses the demand on their WordPress site is not constant. Sometimes traffic is low, at others it’s much higher. There can also be surges of demand, for example if you send out an email campaign and all the respondents click through to your site at the same time. If this isn’t managed properly it can cause your site to run much more slowly when people try and access it, or users may not be able to access the site at all.
Many businesses could benefit from extra processing power in a periods of high usage so it’s really worth asking the question whether your IT systems could cope with sudden surges in usage and not struggle when there’s a noticeable increase in traffic, order volumes or registrations? If your site is mission critical for your business, for example if you’re running an ecommerce store, then it’s vital to make sure that the hosting is robust enough to ensure that the site stays live during periods of sudden high demand. Some hosting companies allow you to automatically receive the necessary extra processing capability when needed, letting you have the extra horsepower when you need it.
Finally, ‘hosting plus’ packages would generally include some kind of provision for backing up your site regularly. Taking a regular backup of your website is an important safety precautions just in case anything happens where your data may be affected. Backups give you the option of returning back to the point before the issue arose, knowing that you have not lost any content or orders from customers or other things that might have changed. So, you should check whether your hosting package includes backups and, if so, how often your site is being backed up. How regularly the site needs to be backed up will depend on the nature of your site, how frequently it changes and the types of changes that are made. You can of course install plugins that will enable you to take backups yourself, but most people feel more secure knowing that someone else is taking care of the backups automatically and will be on hand to help restore from a backup should that be needed.
WordPress hosting packages that include provision for site maintenance
The next level up from a ‘hosting plus’ package would be a package that includes everything in hosting plus, with the addition of some kind of provision for site maintenance.
This is important because a website is not a static thing. You can’t just build it and forget about it. It needs to be maintained. That’s particularly true of WordPress sites. At the very least you need to make sure that you’re running the latest version of WordPress, of your theme and of all the plugins that you use on the site as failure to do that is one of the most common ways that WordPress sites end up getting hacked. Failure to renew SSL certificates on time can lead to the site being flagged as insecure by search engines and browsers.
Most hosting companies who also provide a maintenance service will regularly check your site to make sure that everything is working correctly and will look after important considerations like SSL certificate renewals, WordPress core updates, theme and plugin updates on your behalf. This will allow your system to manage the change smoothly and continue working as planned without any unnecessary interruptions.
Another part of a maintenance service like this is ensuring that the speed of your site is optimised and that there are no issues which are causing the overall speed to be less than it should be. This is important for two reasons. One is because Google uses page speed as one of the factors in its ranking algorithm. The second is that slow pages provide a very poor visitor experience, and visitors will not hang around waiting for slow pages to load. These checks should be carried out on an ongoing basis to protect the operations of your business. In some cases, the hosting company may also make further suggestions to you that certain adjustments and changes be considered which would improve the performance of your site.
WordPress hosting packages including support
It is this third area of service provided by some WordPress hosting companies that can prove to be the most significant. Low cost hosting will not include any provision for maintenance or for ongoing support, or any support that’s available will be via email only with no possibility of actually talking to anyone.
From time to time issues can arise relating to your WordPress site and you will need support to get them sorted as quickly as possible. Perhaps you have installed a new plugin and it’s causing a problem on the site. Perhaps you’ve added some custom code which has ended up having some unintended consequences. Maybe a contact form that used to work perfectly well is not working anymore for some reason. Maybe your latest theme update has messed up the design on some of the pages of your site.
If you don’t have any allowance for support in your hosting package then you will either have to go back to your developers with questions like these, or attempt to answer them yourself. Most people will probably admit that referring to published manuals or documentation as a means of issue resolution is not the favoured approach, so would prefer to know that they can turn to their hosting company in the event of a problem arising!
There are different levels of support, generally directly related to the cost of the package. Cheaper hosting packages might offer email-only support where issues are logged, a ticket number provided with the issue resolved in a set amount of time. Cheaper packages may also restrict the support offering to certain hours of the day or days of the week, and may have longer response times. If you are prepared to pay a little more then you can get the comfort of telephone support, quicker response times and more accessible support, perhaps even on a 24 x 7 basis. This can be important if your site is mission critical to your business and if you have visitors and customers from anywhere in the world.
Some WordPress hosting companies will also offer help with making changes to the content of your site. They may be able to make selected frequent, small changes to the content of your WordPress site to reflect on-going changes in your business. This could be things like telephone number changes, email address changes, new images, small copy changes and would be included within your support package. Many site owners do not have the time or the inclination to make such changes themselves, or are not sufficiently confident navigating around in WordPress to be able to make them. Always going back to your developer whenever you want to make a change can get very expensive very quickly, and such requests are often low down on your developer’s priority list so can take a long time to get done. Including a provision for such changes in your hosting package can be a very cost effective way of managing this process.
Don’t select a WordPress hosting provider based purely on price
So, what is the take-away from all of the above? The services that some 3rd party hosting companies provide can go way beyond pure hosting of your WordPress system on their server. You should not expect to receive some of these services covering maintenance and support if the fee you wish to pay will only cover the pure hosting fees. You must decide which aspects of the three broad services described above you feel your business needs and then shop around to find a hosting company that provides them. Don’t use price as the only factor when considering which hosting company to use – think about all the additional ways that a hosting company can add value and select the best option for your business’s needs.
About Web-Care
Robert Campbell is director of Web-Care – our trusted partner for taking care of WordPress sites across the UK and Ireland.
