Understanding Managed WordPress Hosting

For the next day or two, we have a challenge for you. Each time you visit a new website on your computer, click on a Facebook link, or something shared on Twitter, watch how long it takes the page to load. If you actually pay attention, you’ll notice that some websites load fast while others load slowly. What you’re unlikely to notice, however, is how your own feelings change based on each page’s load speed. But trust us, that change is being felt.

Fast pages delight visitors and provide that (near) instant gratification they seek. Slow pages? Frustration, impatience and even clicking the back button to go visit someone else’s digital property.

The list of things you need to do to maintain peak performance and good visibility keeps expanding. The days when entrepreneurs could tackle tasks like site backups, malware scanning, and software updates alone or with some help from amateur developers are gone. Site development, maintenance, and server management are now full-time jobs that are crucial to growing enterprises.

Since the fight for attention on the internet is so fierce, it is critical that your entire infrastructure is managed by someone focused on maintaining a speedy platform. You need to rely on a knowledgeable team member or engage an expert professional. When it comes to hosting, we highly recommend managed WordPress hosting to those that use the world’s most popular CMS.

What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

In short, Managed WordPress hosting is a web hosting service. This advanced service includes WordPress performance optimization, security, and infrastructure management to reduce the amount of work you need to do to optimize. The sheer practicality of getting server space and site management as a package deal is one of the most compelling arguments for using managed WordPress hosting.

With unmanaged hosting, you must take ownership of maintenance, updates, server patches, security, and other essential matters that keep your site running. A managed WordPress hosting plan offloads these tasks to dedicated specialists. You receive additional support and other services so you can spend less time worrying about your website’s safety and performance and focus on running your business instead.

The Biggest Benefits of Managed WordPress Hosting

There’s a number of reasons why a change to managed WordPress hosting will take your digital presence to new heights and it’s easy to see if you consider the common problems you may face.

We all want fast, feature-rich websites, but between security and future-proofing, there are many confusing hurdles to overcome.

1. Simplify Your Life with Managed WordPress Hosting

Above all, managed WordPress hosting makes all aspects of hosting your website much easier. This applies to almost every level and throughout each step of the process. Moreover, the transition to a managed solution is easy as the support team will move everything over and set you up on the new server.

Whether you’re just getting started or have a long-running and fleshed-out website, it won’t take much work on your end. In fact, you can even run several websites this way and operate them from a single hub.

Once the site is up and running in this managed environment, you’ll have a team of experts steering the ship for you. With these highly qualified engineers, you’ll most certainly get better results for a cost considerably lower than assembling your own team. Plus, all backups and technical challenges are in the hands of dedicated specialists.

You can focus on running your business instead of your server. 

2. Better Support

Let’s be real, the modern Internet is a mess. Unless you’re a seasoned systems administrator or have one on your team, server management is going to be a frustrating and confusing endeavor.

If your site goes down or starts acting up badly, you’ll typically have to cross your fingers and hope that your host will solve any underlying issue fast. Despite the errors that you’re seeing, they’ll often state that everything’s fine and you’re left to identify and solve those issues on your own.

With a managed WordPress hosting plan, you’ll have a team of experts looking into such problems. Proficiency in WordPress, servers, MySQL, and PHP allows your host to troubleshoot problems on all levels efficiently. 

So, not only do you not have to handle all the complex management yourself, but the support is also personal and specialized for your setup. Whereas support for unmanaged websites usually consists of light assistance to help you manage your site yourself, managed WordPress hosting exists to take this burden off your shoulders.

If you’d rather have help than tackle everything yourself, a managed WordPress solution is an excellent choice.

3. Improve Site Speed

It’s simple, fast sites lead to better results. The speed of your site influences your rank on search engines. Plus, fast sites make visitors happy while slow ones push them away. Additionally, visitors are much more likely to explore your website if pages load faster.

Therefore, good speed is an important element all the way from outreach to sales funnels.

Building your own sites with WordPress can lead to slow performance in the long run. Sure, you can learn how to make sites faster, but it can be a lot of work. Plus, it’s likely to be an ongoing process because the internet is always changing.

Instead, you could get an optimized infrastructure that lets your site operate fast even with complex features and heavy traffic to your site. This is among the greatest benefits of managed WordPress hosting. Speedy servers, thorough monitoring, and proper optimization result in fast and consistent performance. Managed hosts can also scale your environment up or down depending on your needs without a significant capital expenditure by your company.

4. Strengthen Security with Managed WordPress Hosting

The web is full of botnets and hackers. Attacks happen every 39 seconds on average. Intruders can break in through plugins and themes you thought were safe and meddle for ages without you ever even noticing.

Small enterprises aren’t exempt from cyber attacks. On the contrary, they’re prime targets. Even if you don’t have any sensitive data, the bad guys can make great use of your site. For example, it can serve as a host for bots that spread spam and malware.

While there are many things you can do to improve security on WordPress sites, you won’t always be able to stop hackers or recover a compromised site.

Don’t you want a better line of defense?

With managed WordPress hosting, your site is in much better hands. Most managed WordPress hosts offer web-application firewalls (WAF), malware scanning, and even malware removal.

5. Improve Your Enterprise Scalability

While growth is the goal of most every business, it leads to additional challenges. Never has this been truer than it is right now as more users are using more devices to access more of the web.

Increases in traffic are often sudden. Your SEO work pays off and you get more traffic, people spread the word, you get reviews and mentions on influential sites, and suddenly your site overflows with new visitors.

This often results in slower page speeds, an overwhelmed customer support team, and developers scrambling to upgrade the capacity and keep the site up. That’s if your site doesn’t get pushed offline completely. 

Fortunately, managed WordPress hosting makes it easier to scale your site, which can be essential to success. The right managed host can help monitor traffic spikes and quickly react so that your site continues to perform well even if you’re getting record levels of traffic.

6. Take Updates and Backups off Your Mind

Most website owners probably know the importance of updating and backing up their site, but not how to do it correctly. There are a number of great plugins available for backups but many of them rely on the user having their own server space to store the files or even coding experience to make sure everything is working properly. Again, that’s a lot of responsibility for such an important part of your web infrastructure!

Meanwhile, those who use managed WordPress hosting don’t have to worry about proper backups. With most managed hosts you’ll get daily backups at convenient times. These backups are most often stored on a different server or in a different environment entirely, giving you peace of mind AND ease of use. If you need to revert to a backup, it only takes a few clicks at most on your end.

Speak to an Expert on Managed WordPress Hosting

Here at Pixel Jar, WordPress is our passion and specialty. We have over 14 years of experience in custom website development and we’re WP Engine premium WordPress hosting partners. We offer a wide range of services ranging from consultation to development and design. Whether you have an existing site that needs improved hosting or you’re embarking on a new digital project, we’d love to lend a hand.

Contact us today for more information.

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