Building a successful WordPress website requires you to piece together different plugins, theme elements, and great content.
You may also incorporate a little unique coding to customize your site. However, many WP users overlook a crucial aspect of a dynamic website:reliable web hosting.
Just because all web hosts are capable of hosting site does not meantheydo their jobwell.Not all can keep up with the demands of a growing website, which hugely impactsuser experience and your success as site owner.
Let’s take a closer look at how web hosting impacts your WordPress website:
Speed
User experience directly relates to a WP site’s success. You must ensure everything runs and delivers information to your audience smoothly and quickly. You only have a couple of seconds to capture your visitors’ attention. Wait more than 3 seconds and you lose roughly half your audience.
Page-loading speed also factorsinto your site’s SEO, due mainly to the increased bounce rate on sluggish sites. Additionally, “dwell time” or the time that an average user spends on your web pages is a ranking factor in SERPs. It is also a measure of the engagement that your audience gains from your content.
In addition to optimizing your WordPress site, you can also increase your page loading speed by picking a reliable web host with capable hardware. An efficientweb host should provide consistent speeds even with a shared hosting plan. However, always be open to upgrading to a VPS or dedicated hosting plan to meet a growing site’s changing demands.
Uptime
Another way to ensure positive user experience is to always be available when your audience needs you. This is why you need to pick a web host that delivers maximum uptime. Although no hosting company can guarantee a 24x7x365 uptime, exclusively choose popular web hosts that have 99.9% uptime guarantees (with customer reviews that back up their claims).
There are several causes of website downtimes. The most common is hardware failure on the server-side, invariably happens on shared hosting plans since you’re sharing server resources with a number of other websites. Another cause of downtimes is DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks due to the intentional flooding of servers.
When picking a web host, look for companies that offer scalable hosting packages (dedicated, VPS, cloud, etc.) and integrated security solutions to prevent such attacks. This leads to the next reason why web hosting is critical for any WordPress site.
Security
WordPress is packed with security and backup plugins that can protect and preserve the integrity of your site. However, this won’t protect you from security threats that target your web hosting company.
Keep in mind that the internet is teeming with threats, such as identity thieves, botnets, hackers, and dirty competitors. This is why you need to develop a proactive approach to your site security. Seek outweb hosts that implement up-to-date security measures, such as DDoS protection, custom firewall, and other server protection protocols that avert all forms of attack. As a failsafe, a web host should also offer offsite backup and recovery tools to counter security breaches and other causes of data loss.
Note that there are hosting companies that provide automated backup features to keep your site protected, allowing you to focus on other things, such as content development and design. This feature is commonly included in “Managed WordPress Hosting” plans that are meant specifically for WordPress users.
Using Managed WordPress Hosting
In a managed WordPress hosting, the hosting company optimizes the server solely for WordPress use. Usually, it comes with additional features, including automatic backups, automatic updates, and 24/7 customer service that specializes in WordPress-related concerns. The hosting company may also help with choosing secure plugins that maximize performance and stability for your WordPress website.
Hosting companies that offer managed WordPress hosting often leverage dedicated servers or CDNs to increase speed. This significantly affectsthe overall cost, so check and weigh your options carefully.
Conclusion
When it comes to building a WordPress site, every small decision may result ina huge difference long term. This starts with choosing a web hosting company that you trust. Consider the factors highlighted in this article to make the best decision for your WordPress site.
I don’t think it’s audience gains, it should be: “It is also a measure of your audience engagement from your content.” Yes?
On the site, formatting should make the entire phrase underlined, including spaces, not just words.
When I started my blogging journey then my first question was, Why I should choose WordPress and not other CMS softwares.
I searched a lot about it on Google at that time and I found that everybody is recommending to use WordPress and I started doing the same.
Now today I know that why people should choose WordPress. Because WordPress is an independent and easy to use content management system.
The best thing about it is, We can bring any feature in our website with just using a single plugin. That’s really good. 😀
I am using WordPress since last 3 years and I loved it. 😀
Nice write up.
I agree that the web host impacts your WordPress website. I have pretty big WordPress site and it was loading very slow on my old host. I signed up with RoseHosting few weeks ago and the difference is enormous. My recommendation is to stay always from those ‘cheap’ or ‘unlimited’ web hosts.