Choosing the right Wordpress hosting
Your choice of hosting is one of the most important factors that influences how fast your Wordpress site performs. There are a lot of things you can do to fix a slow Wordpress site. Most problems are caused by hosting issues or bad quality hosting. This article will look at the different types of webhosting, and how that can affect the performance of your Wordpress site.
Shared hosting
Price range: Free - $10/mo
Shared hosting is what you typically get when you see Wordpress hosting sold for $5 (or less) per month. A provider will take a large server, and host tens or hundreds of sites belonging to different customers on it. As most blogs (especially by people just getting started) are usually pretty low traffic, so they do not require much resources. So for a lot of sites this may appear to work fine.
As the market for cheap hosting is pretty saturated, providers try to cram as many sites on their servers as possible. This works fine if all your neighbours on your server have low traffic. But if one receives a spike in traffic, it's going to adversely affect the performance of every other site on that server, including yours. At best your site will just load slowly, but at worst your site will be completely unreachable to potential customers.
Some of the big providers known to use shared hosting are:
- DreamHost
- GoDaddy
- Ionos
- HostGator
- BlueHost
It's a waste of all your SEO and marketing efforts if visitors can't even reach your site. With hosting you really do get what you pay for.
Managed hosting
Price range: $15 - $50/mo
Next up the ladder is often what is touted as managed hosting. Although this is usually still on a shared server, you will have a dedicated allocation of the server's resources. The first thing you may spot when comparing this against shared hosting is "unlimited" is usually gone from the price plans - that's a good sign!
If you don't expect too much traffic, this is usually a good place to start hosting your Wordpress site. If you want to install any plugins (like WooCommerce) you may still need to do this yourself though. The provider will usually handle backups and upgrades of Wordpress for you. They may throw in extras such as a free staging site for you to test any changes.
Some providers of managed hosting are:
- Flywheel
- SiteGround
- MediaTemple
- WpEngine
Premium hosting
Price range: $50 - $1,000s/mo
Premium hosting is when you need the best of the best. Premium hosts have tools that allow you to easily install plugins. They will handle upgrades of Wordpress and plugins for you. They will compress assets and serve them from a CDN, meaning your site loads faster for visitors. If you don't know how to or don't want to deal with managing a Wordpress installation this is what you want.
Premium hosts usually provide dedicated servers or at least VPS. This means that your Wordpress site is completely isolated from other sites the company may host. Even if another customer hits the jackpot and reaches #1 on ProductHunt or Reddit, your site will still be accessible.
Some providers of premium hosting are:
- Kinsta
- PressLabs
- Pagely
- LiquidWeb
How WatchSumo can help
If your site is hosted on a low quality web host, you may see something like this in the history section of WatchSumo. You'll also receive a handful of email and Slack notifications:
The first graph shows the response time over the last few days. The second second shows the history of events.
What this says, is that the response time of the website has greatly increased over the last few days. It now takes more than 8 seconds to load. On occasion it even took more than 10 seconds, triggering the alerts. Even though it did load eventually, this is a very long time to wait for a webpage to load. Most of your website visitors will close the tab and go to a competitor instead.
When your business depends on customers being able to access your Wordpress site, don't skimp out on the hosting. WatchSumo can make sure your web host is as good as they say they are.