With nearly 31% of the market share, WordPress is a favorite website for most businesses, large and small. Its ease of use and low cost are major factors that have endeared many to use it. In fact, it’s free at the entry-level.
Typically, getting a cheap WordPress hosting company for your site is not difficult, but getting a reliable WordPress hosting company for your website is another matter. Regardless of the price, your choice of hosting company should be dictated by specific aspects. It is your foundation from which you can build and evolve your website, so you need to get it right.
Bear in mind that although you could choose any hosting company, finding one that specializes in WordPress and its various nuances will ensure expert advice and optimal website performance. And with that comes peace of mind, enhanced SEO and SERPs, and more potential to generate leads and sales!
Here are four vital ingredients you need when weighing up your options for WordPress hosting.
Fast Page Load
We are living in a fast-paced world where nobody accepts waiting—especially visitors to a website who expect fast-loading websites. So, if your site takes forever to load, your visitors will go elsewhere. The result is a high bounce rate which eventually results in a drop in your SEO rankings. The knock-on effect of a slow website is lower visitor and sales numbers.
So how does web hosting affect your load time? When browsing, you are simply accessing some remote files archived in web servers. The speed of your remote computer determines the time you take to access the desired pages. Hence, your web hosting company plays a significant role in facilitating the process.
If you have a content management-based website, retrieving the required webpage content can entail searching through several databases. In this scenario, WordPress may take more than 150 queries to display only one page! So, a web host not capable of dealing with this will slow down your load time.
Security
If your hosting company is not optimized for WordPress, then you risk being susceptible to malware, being hacked, or having your site slowed down by suffering from a DoS or DDoS attack.
Sure, you can use various security plug-ins on your site, but they can slow your site down, so you need a provider that provides high levels of security, while also having the expertise and experience to advise what plug-ins work best for your site’s requirements and their hosting, without compromising the performance of your site.
Additionally, always ensure that your website host undertakes daily monitoring for any malware. Never hire or retain a website host who does not carry out daily monitoring since this may compromise the security of your website.
24×7 Availability
After creating your WordPress website, you need to ensure that it is running 24/7. Though it is not easy to get 100% uptime for any website, the uptime for your site should at least be 99.94%. Remember that downtime diminishes trust in your company, you lose clients, and SEO rankings will also drop. Ultimately, you lose customers, sales, business, and revenue.
Reliable Customer Service
If you experience some problems with your WordPress website, how will your host help you sort out the problem? The level of customer support you will get is the first consideration. However, be sure to research your options – having live chat and 24×7 support is great, but only if there are WordPress specialists or technical experts available to help you.
Be sure to check their case studies and reviews, as well as their own site, to see if they provide WordPress support. And don’t be afraid to ask them if you’re unsure – ask for examples of their expertise, or to send you some information on how they support WordPress hosting.
Wrap up
Be sure to check that your hosting provider meets the minimum requirements that WordPress.org themselves recommends:
PHP version 7.2 or higher.
MySQL version 5.6 or higher OR MariaDB version 10.0 or higher.
HTTPS support
As much as WordPress is free, easily customized, and easy to use, never forget that its efficacy is highly dependent on its hosting. Therefore, you should take ample time to find the best web hosting service that will not let you down. Remember, cheap is expensive in the long run!