With its flexible and robust platform, there’s no doubt WordPress is a fantastic content management system. When you combine its simplicity with its wide adoption and support, the popularity of WordPress and its dominance of the CMS landscape is no surprise.
But while WordPress is a great tool to help you manage your website, it’s important to note that where you host it has a huge impact on its performance and reliability.
The good news is that hosting costs continue to drop. The bad news is the features offered by many hosting companies haven’t necessarily expanded. Yet in the last few years, because of the widespread use of WordPress, web hosts have dedicated significant time and resources to ensure a robust set of offerings that are affordable and great for business results.
So if you want to get even more out of what WordPress can do for your website, look for a host with the most, starting with providing these 10 basic features:
Caching
When a visitor lands on your site, the CMS queries a database and then displays the content in your template theme. Those queries require server resources. If you have thousands of sites hosted on a server, or thousands of visitors hitting your site at the same time, it may become slow or even unresponsive altogether.
Unfortunately, most companies don’t realize they have a problem until it’s too late — when they’ve become popular or an article they shared goes viral.
And that’s where caching comes in handy. It’s a method where the server temporarily saves a copy of your page. So if a thousand visitors hit your site, the first one queries the database but the rest are served a cached page instantaneously.
Uptime
Hosting companies have been around since Al Gore invented the Internet (ahem), but they just haven’t kept pace with the hardware, technology and infrastructure. While hosting technology infrastructure has advanced to blazing speeds and reliable uptimes, many hosts are still hosting new customers on unstable platforms.
Speed
Fast sites perform well — not just with your visitors but also with search engines. And we all know sites that perform well keep visitors from getting frustrated, angry and turned off. A website that purrs along smoothly will help drive your visitors through to a desired conversion faster since they’ll enjoy the experience.
Plus speed has become a factor in Google’s ranking algorithms. If you’re hosting on a slow site, you’re not reaching customers and giving up business.
Malware scanning
With the hundreds of thousands of themes and plugins available, businesses often install a theme or plugin that might make them vulnerable to viruses.
Security
Whenever any platform grows in popularity, it often becomes the target of hackers. WordPress is no different. Default configurations of WordPress can make it susceptible to brute force attacks. And if you’re connecting to your site via an FTP rather than SFTP authentication, you’re also leaving yourself susceptible. Hosting platforms also often find themselves under DDoS attacks.
Scalability
Online marketing requires momentum. Over time, your site can go from dozens, to hundreds, to thousands of readers on a daily basis. Typical hosting companies come with bandwidth or traffic limitations that require you migrate your servers when you reach certain thresholds. Or they increase costs dramatically when you surpass those thresholds. Having a host that can scale with your growth is essential.
Multiple sites
It’s not uncommon for companies to want to roll out multiple sites — perhaps for specific campaigns or microsites used for events. Sometimes they wish to have a brochure site on one domain but their blog on a subdomain. Having a host that’s flexible and allows you to host multiple instances of WordPress is great. It keeps costs down and allows you to manage multiple sites through a central interface.
Migration
Moving your WordPress site off of a bad host over to a new host can be quite difficult since WordPress sites are composed of themes, plugins, uploaded files and the database. Having a migration tool to make it simple is awesome to reduce the risk of downtime and move to a reliable host quickly!
Backups
Beware that just because you have a host it doesn’t mean your site is backed up automatically! Your site should have simple nightly backups that you can access and restore when needed. This is often necessary if you have problems with your theme or install a bad plugin. Losing all of your content is just a nightmare for businesses. Don’t risk it.
Affordability
WordPress premiere hosting providers are popping up all over the Internet, but they can be costly. Make sure that you understand the multitude of hosting packaging available, any capacity constraints like visitor limits or storage, and the level of hosting support available to you.
If your site is the lifeblood of your business, saving a few dollars a month on hosting but not having the support to quickly get your site back up and running if a problem occurs could mean real revenue loss.
The big picture
So there you have it, WordPress people. If your host can tick all those boxes, you’ll have the freedom and peace of mind to focus on the big picture of using WordPress at its maximum potential creating an amazing website instead of worrying about the daily drudgery of managing it. And that means an enhanced, positive experience for your visitors — which helps more traffic, leads and even conversions.
WordPress sites can offer that opportunity but not as a single solution. It works best and will give you the most when combined with secure, reliable and high performance hosting. Care to see how GoDaddy’s hosting packages stack up?
Features
godaddy managed wordpress
Caching
GoDaddy has developed a superior caching infrastructure that won’t let businesses down.
Uptime
GoDaddy provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Speed
GoDaddy has one of the fastest response times and throughput rates. See the most recent results from Cloud Spectator.
Malware scanning
GoDaddy’s WordPress hosting offers SiteLock Professional malware scans. (Additional fees may apply.) GoDaddy Managed WordPress also includes automatic WordPress core updates to remove the risk of getting your site hacked.
Security
GoDaddy’s hosting monitors your site for suspicious activity, offers SFTP access, and protects it from brute force and DDoS attacks.
Scalability
GoDaddy’s hosting packages are designed to scale at the speed of your business. Check out current Managed WordPress hosting options.
Multiple sites
With GoDaddy’s Ultimate & Developer Hosting Options, you can get the multi-site support you desire.
Migration
Check out the GoDaddy Support Site for more information on migrating your WordPress site to us.
Backups
GoDaddy has daily backups and 1-click restore.
Affordability
Check out our Managed WordPress Hosting Options and learn why GoDaddy has one of the best values in the industry.
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