I want to bring my content fast and reliable to my readers, and although WordPress is a great Content Management System these days, it can be a bit sluggish if you don’t use a decent webhost with caching.
I have built many websites over the years and got in touch with many web hosting parties, one of them was standing out for me and I never left them.
Selecting a good webhost for WordPress
My number one pick at the moment is Siteground . What I love about them is that they offer great values for money (plans starting from $ 3,95/month), but even better, some great tools to optimize your WordPress site:
- SuperCacher plugin – a 3 level based cacher that helps serving your website lightning fast.
- WordPress Auto-updater – WordPress has some security issues sometimes, so keeping up-to-date is really important. With this plugin it’s set and forget. It will take care of all the important updates for you. A real must have.
- WordPress Transfer – They will transfer your website free to their hosting for you.
Besides all the cool stuff, they also offer great 24/7 support (and specialised WordPress Support). What do you want more? I would recommend to go for the GrowBig plan if you are having (or planning) to host more than one website.
A nice addition with this plan is that it comes with a special cacher for WordPress to optimize to database queries and 30 restore backup points.
Another good and popular option is WPEngine, they offer good and reliable WordPress hosting. They are a a bit more expensive than Siteground, with plans starting from $ 29,- /month, but they are a WordPress only hoster. So they offer great security, performance and scalability for WordPress sites.
Why is speed so important?
You might think, why is all this import? Well let me give you some insight there:
- Fast loading websites gets a better ranking in Google. Higher ranking equals more visitors!
- Nobody likes to wait, so the faster your page load the lower the bounce rate.
- Slow loading websites lose potential email subscribers and ambassadors.
Not only the hosting is important for a fast and good performing of your WordPress site, a badly designed and coded theme can be devastating for you blog.
Finding nice looking themes for you WordPress blog
There are plenty free themes to download, even if you install you will get a few free themes to start with. But you don’t want a websites that looks like thousands of other sites around there.
So coded your own to create some unique and tailor made for you blog or I suggest to take a look at ThemeForest where you can find dozens of themes for a small price.
