Specialized WordPress plans for hosting is a boon for WordPress website owners! Gone are the days when you had to make do with traditional Hosting types like shared hosting for your WordPress site. Your WordPress site has specific needs that the traditional hosting may fail to satisfy. WordPress Hosting plans are designed specifically to overcome certain challenges that normal hosting falls short of; such as OS compatibility, WordPress installation & maintenance and smarter security to tackle threats common for WordPress specific sites.
If you planning to build a WordPress website, you should definitely look for good WordPress plans for hosting and this post is aimed towards understanding a few critical features that your WordPress hosting plan should include. Let’s break them down and have a detailed understanding of these features.
- Optimization of WordPress Database: All your WordPress content like blog posts, pages, comments, form entries, portfolio items etc. is stored in your WordPress Database. It also stores important system setting such as website settings, theme settings and plugin settings. It is very essential that the WordPress database is optimized for size, speed and hygiene. The growth of this database is directly proportional to the growth of your website. But as the WordPress database grows, there is a chance that your website performance is adversely affected. This is because it takes that much longer for the server to retrieve information from heavy database tables. There are ways to optimize the WordPress Database for faster performance such as removing WordPress Database overhead buffer, purging deleted rows, re-sequencing, compressing, managing index paths, defragmenting etc. All this of course, can be taken up by the Webmaster, but including this in your WordPress hosting plan will make it easier and save you and your in-house team a lot of time.
- Automatic Backup: Disasters can happen anytime. It could happen from a new plugin that you installed, or a new theme that you integrated or even a hardware failure. Whatever the case, website continuity should not be jeopardized. It is always a good practice to have very regular backups of the complete WordPress Website so that you can always go back to a stable restore point. It is highly recommended that regular and comprehensive backups are taken locally, but it is also a great way to have an extra backup taken up by the WordPress Hosting provider. When you are comparing WordPress plans for hosting, check for the frequency of backups, size of backup and the type of backup system. It would be best of backups are cloud based as they are redundant and robust.
- Strong Security: WordPress being an open source platform, has a lot of 3rd party plugins and themes which become an integral part of the website. Since all these aspects are not centralized, there are high chances of hackers leveraging vulnerabilities to attack WordPress websites. Not only is there a threat of losing sensitive data, but also losing control of the website. Along with your own security measures, it is essential that your WordPress Hosting provider gives you strong protection at multiple levels. There are renowned WordPress plans by providers which offer protection at code level with their services such as CodeGuard which monitors your website/database regularly and if any changes are detected, it notifies you so that you can take necessary action. They also have SiteLock which constantly works in the background and it not only checks your website, email and applications, but also search engine blacklists and spam filters. SiteLock not only identifies threats, but also fixes them for you automatically. Be sure to look for WordPress Plans that include such security services.
Apart from these options, be sure to get a deeper understanding of how much traffic can be handled by the WordPress plan, number of sites that can run and basics like automatic WordPress updates. Information is king and if you take all these aspects under consideration you will be sure to get a WordPress Hosting plan that is ideal for your website and makes your life a hell of a lot easier. I really hope this helps and please be sure to share your questions and feedback on the comments section below!