Whether you are a beginner or seasoned blogger, you might be juggling all sorts of things in the digital world to grow your online business with the goal of a thriving income stream. From day-to-day management of your website, maintaining your online presence to building strategies around your content – these tasks are all part of a normal routine. However, as you build your business, it can become chaotic if you don’t have the knowledge and tools to get the most from the platform you are building your website on. So, today, I want to talk about five benefits of managed WordPress hosting and the key things you can get by making the switch.
So, there are two main types of web hosting for WordPress: unmanaged and managed WordPress hosting services.
The unmanaged WordPress web hosting option is the one which is the most commonly used because it doesn’t cost much. While managed WordPress hosting is typically not as popular it is the better option for most online business owners and professionals who do not have expertise in managing and securing a server. The latter, managed WordPress hosting, is often more expensive but if you aren’t comfortable dealing with the nitty-gritty of server administration, I highly recommend using a managed WordPress hosting service, especially to help you get a leg up on your competition, and help you to stay on top of security-related issues, software updates, and recovering your website in the event something goes wrong. Go through until the end of this article to understand what are the benefits you’ll potentially enjoy should you choose to go with a managed WordPress hosting option.
What Is Managed WordPress Hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting could be considered a concierge for your web server that takes care of all the technical aspects of running a WordPress website. Just about everything is managed by the host, with some providing more management than others. Things that might be taken care of for you include speed optimisation, security, server software updates, scalability, WordPress core, plugin and theme updates, the uptime of the website, backups and potentially much more. At AutoPilot, we also provide installation and configuration services for your plugins and themes as well as technical support for anything related to WordPress, your theme or any of your plugins.
Typically, it works best for digital nomads and online professionals including freelancers, service-based agencies and companies looking for a specialised WordPress host who will look after many of the back end maintenance and optimisation functions so that you can get the best performance from their website. Opting for managed WordPress hosting gives you an all-in-one hosting solution that can help to save you money on potential extra time and money on loading speeds and website security. Managed hosts will typically also be much more helpful when something breaks or is hacked.
What Are The Key Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting?
1. Save Time From Day To Day Website Maintenance
Keeping a website up and running is more than just publishing new content and dealing with the enquiries from your daily visitors. There’s a need to spend time to make sure that your plugins are running correctly, themes are up to date, backups are available in case of errors and abnormalities, and that security monitoring is actively checking for malware and malicious intrusions. The simplest solution is to use a managed WordPress hosting service. Some of these managed WordPress hosting services, like WP Engine, offer a service to manage updates to your plugins called “Smart Plugin Manager“. This tool will update your plugins for you and runs visual testing to determine if there are any problems. If there are, WP Engine support can help you to resolve them.
2. You Get Access to Expert Level WordPress Support
If you are a business owner, digital nomad or a freelancer who does not want to deal with the technical side of running your website, a managed WordPress hosting service is the best way to make sure you still get the most from your website. Most managed WordPress hosts only host WordPress websites and so have extensive expertise on the platform. As they deal with more WordPress websites than anyone else, their teams have some of the best WordPress support experts you can find for resolving all your WordPress website issues, and many of them include at least some general support in their hosting prices. Kinsta and WP Engine are brilliant at this.
3. Get Faster Load Time And Improved Performance
If you want to succeed, speed and performance are key. Google considers the loading speed of your website when weighing up your search rankings, both for organic AND paid search results. Besides the search implications, mobile users and younger users are less likely to wait for a slow-loading website. On mobile, most customers will leave if the site isn’t usable within 3 seconds, and yes, most websites still take more than 15 seconds to load.
WordPress is by far the most popular Content Management System (CMS) available. WordPress has become so popular in part due to the ability to extend its functionality through plugins and themes. However, with all these plugins and themes comes the risk that your website can become bloated and slow, especially when there is a lot of traffic. With managed WordPress website hosting, you get fine-tuned environments to ensure your WordPress site runs at its best. Many managed hosts don’t permit plugins that put excessive load on the server, and have built-in optimisations to improve your site loading times. We’ve tested many of the major managed hosting companies, and they really do outperform non-managed hosts. Have a look at our speed tests for Kinsta, Flywheel, WP Engine and Cloudways to get some idea of how they perform.
4. Able To Handle A Large Amount Of Traffic
If you have been blogging or using WordPress as the basis for your business for a while, chances are you started your journey with cheap entry-level shared hosting, just like most others who are new to WordPress. There is nothing wrong with using a shared web host and good ones, like Hostgator, represent brilliant value for getting started. However, as your blog grows, it’s pretty common that shared servers start struggling to keep up when faced with serious traffic. Your host might have even suspended your site for putting too much load on the server (we hear this a lot from growing businesses and bloggers).
What is the best way to resolve this issue? First, a blog spring clean to make sure you aren’t running outdated plugins and your server isn’t running older, slower versions of PHP and MySQL. Second, dialling in your website performance. There are two parts to this. The first is optimising every aspect of your website, and the second is optimising every aspect of the server. It is possible to do a lot of this yourself if you really want to. However, shared hosting does typically limit how much optimisation you can do on the server itself. So, to simplify the job for yourself, and to ensure you are getting the best performance from the server, I recommend looking for a quality, managed WordPress host. Managed hosts can ensure your blog can handle the growth that you are likely anticipating and scale with you.
Managed hosts like WP Engine use a shared cloud VPS container model on their entry-level plans that provides a lot more capability than a traditional shared hosting model. The best choices though, are those like Kinsta that give you a dedicated cloud VPS container. This means that no other website is using the same processing power as yours. Kinsta also has some awesome auto-scaling tech behind the scenes to handle traffic spikes. I can’t recommend them enough!
As a quick example, most managed hosts can get between double and triple the amount of traffic on their managed WordPress cloud servers with similar specifications as shared hosts. This is purely because of how much more optimised they are, and having fewer websites per server. We’ve tested with popular shared hosting providers like HostGator, A2 Hosting, Crazy Domains and GoDaddy and have seen their platforms start to error out or suspend websites with far less traffic than a managed WordPress host. On top of this, managed hosts are willing to help you to optimise your WordPress website.
Many managed WordPress hosts throw in a content-delivery network to help as well.
5. Website Security Is Taken Seriously
Building up an online store, portfolio, or blog can be very rewarding, and if you are anything like me, you will probably also find it a lot of fun. However, dealing with security and cleaning up after security breaches is a skill you will need to learn. WordPress is a brilliant platform that now powers around 30% of the websites on the internet. The downside of this popularity is that WordPress sites are also a target for botnets and malware. Why? Because so many WordPress websites are running outdated versions of the core files, plugins and themes. Security patches are released frequently to patch up detected vulnerabilities, and malicious attackers take advantage of those sites that are not patched.
When you’re setting up a new website, it’s so important to make sure it’s secured. So, you can either you do it yourself, which will require much of your time and probably a lot of learning do so, or, reach out to someone who is more capable of protecting your website in an as efficient way as possible. Managed WordPress hosts are very security-focused. They secure the servers specifically for WordPress vulnerabilities and many actively monitor WordPress installation for possible breaches. If anything is detected they will often help you to clean the malware, which can come in very handy.
Check Out Our Managed WordPress Hosting Solution
Are you ready to enjoy all the benefits of managed WordPress hosting? I recommend Kinsta for the best-managed WordPress hosting solution, but other great choices (in order of my preference) are:
- Kinsta – Best performance and scalability but most expensive
- Flywheel – Great support and second fastest after Kinsta.
- Cloudways – Best prices and fast, but a bit more complex to use and scale than others.
- WP Engine – Slowest of the four but still extremely fast compared to shared hosting. Best range of value-added services (eg Smart Plugin Manager).
Do you have any questions about managed WordPress hosting, feel free to share with us in the comment box below. Already hosting your site with a managed WordPress host or have another one to recommend? Please share your experience with us.
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