The four S’s of managed WordPress hosting Person working on a WordPress post
You’ve got a business to run. Whether you’re an individual blogger or a global enterprise, your website is where you showcase your brand. It could be an ecommerce store, a popular sneaker blog, a go-to spot for gadget reviews, or a music festival site.
Managing and hosting a website is complicated, time consuming, and takes your focus away from the business at hand. Think about it: what do you do if your site is hacked and Google blacklists it?
What if a plugin update breaks your WordPress site, and there’s nothing you can do about it? Or what if sluggish performance results in massive SEO penalties and no one can find your site through search? A managed WordPress hosting provider helps you overcome all of those challenges and more.
WordPress hosting
WordPress has become the content management system (CMS) of choice for businesses of all sizes—individuals, SMBs, agencies, and enterprises. It now powers 30 percent of the web, making it the most popular CMS by a wide berth. But you’re a business owner, not a WordPress expert. A managed WordPress hosting provider takes responsibility for the technical ins and outs of your site’s day-to-day operation and the infrastructure that powers it.
With a managed hosting provider you get the added value of having a partner who can protect your site from threats, help you increase pageviews due to improved speed, and ultimately drive more people to your site while giving them a better experience. This, in turn, frees you up to build and run your business and your brand. That’s the power of managed WordPress hosting.
In this article, we’ll highlight the benefits of having a trusted partner manage and host your WordPress sites to ensure they’re secure, scalable, and speedy, and to provide the service and support to keep them that way.
A managed WordPress hosting provider handles all of that for you. Think of it this way: some consultants are just advisors, some hosting providers just provide servers, but managed WordPress hosting marries both.
Security
The web is awash with security threats and vulnerabilities, and no matter who you are or the size of your site, you could be a target. Even if you feel your site isn’t important or visible enough to be in the crosshairs, hackers could be trying to take control of your site for nefarious reasons, like to send spam or attack another site using your server as a pawn. Your site is at risk.
Do you have a strategy for what happens if your site is hacked? What would downtime due to an attack cost you? How about if Google listed your site as unsafe, causing new and existing customers to fear visiting it? And what about the social media backlash that could follow? Do you want to go through all of that to save a few dollars a month?
With managed WordPress, you have no reason to fret. A managed WordPress hosting provider will monitor your site to ensure the looming security threats are blocked. And, in the event that something goes wrong, a managed WordPress hosting provider will fix your site for you and get you back online, saving you the inflated consulting fees and collateral damage of a security incident. And, a secure site performs better, since bogus traffic requests won’t eat up your resources.
It’s a win-win. A managed hosting provider has knowledge of the WordPress ecosystem and can perform necessary core updates for you to ensure your site is secure. With managed WordPress hosting, you can rest easy knowing that your site is on lockdown and that the bad guys are kept at bay.
Scalability
You want your site to be successful. Don’t let that success be your downfall. A high-traffic event—think a link up on Reddit, a tweet from a celebrity that kicks off something that goes viral for several hours, or a PR hit on a popular media site—could shoot your traffic to the moon.
That could be great for business. But without the right infrastructure, it could be a disaster. If your site can’t withstand a massive traffic spike, or if it crashes at the first sign of a surge, that means reduced engagement, reputation damage and, ultimately, lost revenue.
With managed WordPress hosting, your site can scale to ensure success. Anticipating a major influx of traffic? A managed WordPress hosting provider can work with you to put the right safeguards in place, turning a potentially site-slaughtering spike into a smashing success. And they know WordPress inside out which means they know exactly which aspect should be fleshed out and monitored to ensure maximum availability.
Speed
On the web, every second counts. Did you know that 40 percent of people will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load?
Studies have also shown that a one-second delay in page load times results in 7 percent fewer conversions. That’s revenue walking out the door due to a sluggish site.
A managed WordPress hosting provider gives you the framework for a high-speed site and can help you kick it back into gear should it become sluggish. That’s because managed WordPress hosts ensure that their environment is optimized to work with WordPress. They’ll install the extra plugins and tune them to make sure you don’t spend the time and energy into achieving the same and can instead focus on building your online presence.
Service
Nothing in life is 100 percent. Technology is no different. Even Gmail goes down a few times a year, and Google is the best in the business. There are myriad things that can cause hiccups with your site: a down server, a DNS glitch, or a misfiring piece of code.
With managed WordPress hosting, you get proactive service and support that notifies you when something goes awry so you know it’s under control and will be fixed as fast as possible.
Usually, managed WordPress hosting providers only deal with the WordPress platform. This means that their support teams tend to be experts with it and will be able to resolve your queries faster than tech support teams that deal with multiple systems.
Conclusion
Having a partner that can take care of your website issues makes everything run more smoothly. A managed host helps make sure your content is excellent so you don’t have to worry about hackers and website crashes that threaten your hard work.
Partnering with a managed WordPress host gives you the peace of mind you need to sell more products, get more readers, and attract more customers, while the four Ss are being taken care of.
You’ve got a business to run. Whether you’re an individual blogger or a global enterprise, your website is where you showcase your brand. It could be an ecommerce store, a popular sneaker blog, a go-to spot for gadget reviews, or a music festival site. Managing and hosting a website is…
