Is Managed WordPress Hosting necessary for your business?
All websites need a web developer 24/7, especially if the owner plans to expand the website to have more functions or receive more traffic. If you manage a site on WordPress and do not have a WordPress expert on your staff, the best possible solution is to get a managed WordPress hosting provider.
Here are some of the many benefits you would enjoy if you opted for managed WordPress hosting:
Managed WordPress Hosting has high availability and low chances for downtime
The website’s uptime is critical for positive impressions, continuously acquiring sales, and managing customer expectations. Failing to stay available, even just for a few minutes, could lead to lost revenue and a damaged reputation.
Your web host should ensure that your website stays up with minimal problems. If any issues indeed occur, they need to address them promptly to mitigate the damage.
For a WordPress website, it could be challenging since WordPress offers a lot of dynamic functionality. Its system can be prone to strain. However, this should not be a problem for a hosting provider specifically meant for WordPress sites. Their system is robust and has intelligent features to guarantee that the website stays as responsive as possible.
Continued Improvement
WordPress is a platform that people choose because of its high functionality, and it is constantly improving as a platform. The same goes for web hosts. They should understand the features of WordPress and make sure the experience is optimal for their clients.
Managed hosting works exclusively with WordPress, so they can tailor all of their servers — from the operating system and file system to command-line tools — for optimal performance. A great example of this type of optimization is website caching — something that can be made to work much more effectively at a server-side level than it can by simply using front-end WordPress plugins.
Heightened Security
We’ve already covered some basic aspects of security. Auto updates, better support, and (usually) daily backups all contribute to security, but there’s actually a lot more going on behind the scenes with managed hosting. For example, Strict WordPress-level policies.
Let’s assume that a popular plugin announces it has a security leak. A general host can’t do anything about this — more likely, they won’t even know about it! Managed WordPress Hosting continually monitors such news and may ban the plugin from being installed immediately. If it’s a particularly nasty security issue, they may even deactivate all of these plugins straightaway (in which case, they’d contact site owners ASAP). While this may cause some website owners to grumble, it’s much better than websites being compromised and/or crashing (and most hosts will only do this in direst situations).
In short, when it comes to WordPress-related security issues, WordPress-specific hosts can monitor things more easily and react more quickly and efficiently than their counterparts.
Managed WordPress Hosting provides Easy-to-Use Tools
If you opt for a managed WordPress hosting service, you could get friendly tools to help you understand your server’s performance. Some of these tools include:
- SSH
- staging
- GIT
- WP-CLI
- Support for customer PHP extensions
This type of control is essential, especially for those who want to test possible changes to a clone website before launching.
Conclusion
Assuming you’re running only WordPress, you should almost definitely go for managed WordPress hosting as opposed to shared, VPS, or bare metal.
In fact, for the performance boost alone it will likely make financial sense to do so for the majority of WordPress business sites — after all, how many more conversions would your site make if it loaded a second or two faster (think customer satisfaction, SEO benefits and so on).