What if I told you half your website problems could be coming from your hosting provider?
Behind every successful website is great hosting. WordPress sites are no exception! If you want your website to have blazing-speeds, solid security, and minimum fuss, you need to move it to a managed WordPress host.
The majority of our websites are bespoke WordPress Builds, and we use dedicated WordPress Hosting.
You might not know what this means, and even if you do, you may not care, but there’s a ton of reasons why managed WordPress hosting is the bomb for your WordPress Website.
There are cheap hosting options everywhere, but the majority of them just don’t cut it. You get what you pay for, and if you pay £5 for hosting you get £5 worth of hosting. With managed WordPress hosting, you have a hassle-free solution that’s managed for you.
We have been hosting websites for years, and have worked with quite a few hosts. For our premium hosting, we currently use Flywheels hosting for agencies and here are eleven reasons why we think its the best managed wordpress hosting around.
Most WordPress Developers aren't IT geeks & we don't spend our time keeping servers up and running. Quite frankly it can be a hassle & we would rather put our time into building and maintaining awesome websites, not worrying about the server they are on.
That’s what managed WordPress hosting allows you to do.
Managed WordPress Hosting focusses on WordPress sites, as you may have worked out from the name. This means the companies that offer it are experts in WordPress and Optimise their servers for WordPress websites. Using this kind of solution will ensure that your site is running on the best possible platform.
Managed WordPress hosting also offers a whole host of additional features that make managing your site so much easier. We will go into this in the next section, but suffice it to say, they are the ideal type of hosting provider for anyone using WordPress to front their business online.
So, without further ado, let's dive into the reasons why Managed WordPress Hosting is the best option for your business' website.
Managed WordPress hosts have their entire technology stack tailored to the WordPress platform. This alone means your business website is likely to have way better uptime, faster load time speeds out of the box, and just work the way it's supposed to.
The Flywheel Cloud Platform uses a custom caching engine. This handles and optimises the most common wordpress themes and plugins automatically, with no work for the user. Many other hosts use caching tools, but managed WordPress hosting specifically optimises their servers for WordPress websites, themes and plugins.
Managed WordPress hosting providers also offer performance enhancements like a CDN service (content delivery network), server locations around the world, and even instant-scaling (if you choose a provider powered by the Google Cloud Platform, like our Flywheel cloud platform).
The best part of it is, you don't need to configure anything. We take care of it for you, safe in the knowledge that your WordPress website is in safe hands with Flywheel, backed up and protected. It just lets you get on with what you do best, which is managing your business.
When you host your sites with a managed WordPress hosting company, everything is all in one space and easy to organise. If you manage multiple WordPress sites, everything is managed in one hub, making for a really easy user experience.
With the Flywheel platform, you don't have to worry about core or php updates, so you know your site's code base is always in tip top condition. Working with a managed WordPress hosting provider means a hassle-free setup.
Flywheel has a super easy control panel, where from the outset you can start with 1 click wordpress installation, configure SSL certificates, set up automatic WordPress updates, version control and more. Unlike other web hosting providers, the easy to use dashboard only gives you the tools you need to manage your site and doesn't bombard you with all the typical features you might find on a cpanel.
Preventing hacks should always be at the forefront of every website owners mind. Using a managed WordPress hosting service isn't just a fool-proof solution, it does come with many built in security enhancing features. For example, most managed WordPress hosting providers offer daily backups. With the flywheel platform, you can restore or manually backup your WordPress site with 1 click, and daily backups are automatic.
In addition to the back up and one click restore options, most managed hosts will optimise their servers for WordPress security, meaning that you don't have to worry about installing and configuring a security plugin on your WordPress site.
Flywheel also have the ability to remove malware. In the unfortunate instance that your website gets hacked (and no site is completely bullet proof) then with our hosting packages, the team can help clean it up. With Flywheel, this service is included in the cost of the hosting package, which is why we think they are one of the best managed WordPress providers out there!
Although plenty of people do it, you should never really edit your live production site. All it takes is a bad plugin, or a bit of errant code and your website can break completely. any changes to your WordPress site should always be done in a staging environment or a test site.
A staging environment is simply a carbon copy of your website, on a different url. Even if you aren't a web developer, but you like to tinker, or add new pages and plugins, then having a staging environment available is really handy. Flywheel managed WordPress Hosting offers one click staging, meaning as you may have guessed, you can create a carbon copy of your site with 1 click, make and test any changes, and deploy them back to your main site with 1 click.
You also have the benefit of using the flywheel local app, meaning you can do those changes on your own machine, locally (Not online) and push back to your site with one click. This is an ideal workflow both for developers and even people who don't code but manage much of their own website and its content, staging sites are ideal.
We personally hate configuring pesky security plugins, and one false move can have you locked out of your own website, like getting your password wrong. When you choose managed WordPress hosting with flywheel, all basic security optimisations are taken care of for you, meaning goodbye security plugins, and better performance overall.
Plugins by themselves aren't an issue, and there really isn't a golden number to have on your site, but the one rule of thumb we like to use, is only have plugins if it's absolutely necessary. We've seen clunky plugins slowing down websites where all that was required was a line of code.
If you use a managed WordPress hosting provider, you can get rid of the following types of plugins. the hosting plans include features that take care of all these things for you.
Of course when you have your website with us, we provide support, run all your plugin and security updates, and so as a hosting solution, you don't need to think about much. But it gives us peace of mind as a digital agency, that our clients websites are managed by WordPress experts.
This means if something does break, the team who support us can tell us whether the issue is the theme, a plugin or something on the server, and they always have answers to our WordPress related questions. Because the whole team are focussed on one CMS, it's unlikely they have never encountered your specific problem before.
Our hosting providers offer real time web chat suport and are available 24 7. You don't get that with most hosting companies but having a good support system allows you to focus on your business.
Managed WordPress hosting offers so much more than hosting itself. There are a variety of workflow tools, and educational resources, helping you to run and maintain a website. The best managed WordPress hosting providers will be able to help with:
The best managed WordPress hosts will have features to help you:
All websites now must be secure, with https enabled, or they face a penalty from Google. Some website hosts charge for the privilege, but managed WordPress hosting providers like Flywheel have a simple free SSL setup with Let’s Encrypt and is included in the cost of your hosting. The whole process is done in a couple of clicks and your site is secure and Google friendly.
You really shouldn't be paying for SSL in this day and age, so if your host wants to charge for it, and you have a WordPress website, then now is a good time to switch to a managed WordPress host that offers free an SSL certificate
Sometimes our clients manage their own sites, and we support them in their own development tasks. This is where fully managed WordPress hosting makes common developer tools easy to access right from inside the hosting package.
You can see your error logs with ease, or perform other tasks like flush the cache, easily view your database tables and more. For any enthusiastic developer or site managers reading this article, our managed WordPress Hosting offers the following developer toolset.
This is in addition to the staging sites and local development environments that you get with wordpress hosting managed by WordPress experts.
The biggest benefit of managed hosting for WordPress is that we handle all the hassle for you and you can just focus on the stuff you actually enjoy doing. The entire purpose of managed hosting WordPress providers is to simplify the process of hosting WordPress sites, so you can just home in on what you're great at instead of worrying about the technical elements of your business.
With a great set of tools and brilliant workflow, hosting is the very last thing you need to worry about. thats why we think flywheel is one of the best managed WordPress hosting solutions for your business.
So that's the benefits of having great hosting plans for your WordPress website. But if you've read this article and wonder if or why you would need it, then keep reading. Chances are you don't think much about hosting, it's just one of those things you get a bill for.
