Is your host helping or hurting your WordPress website speed?
Alternative title: The best WordPress hosting plans for maximum WooCommerce performance
Did you know that your WordPress/WooCommerce website hosting plan and provider both play a large and important role in your website speed? With hosting, you really get what you pay for. This is not an area where you want to cut back. When we talk with our users about the hosting plan they’ve chosen, we’ve found we can almost always immediately say that if you are paying less than $10 per month, you are paying too little and need to upgrade.
The type of hosting plan is also important. A large percentage of websites are on “shared hosting” because it is the lowest-priced option… but it’s important to know what shared hosting is. To put it in the simplest terms, let’s compare website hosting to cars and parking. Your website host is like a parking spot for your website files. A shared hosting plan will provide one parking spot for multiple websites. If you have a car, you might think: sharing a parking space is annoying. You can’t always have it when you want it, and sometimes you have to wait. No one likes to wait, right? Well think about your website visitor – if they want to visit your website, they have to deal with slow resources that are shared among all the other websites that share that “parking spot”.
Shared resources and slow load times are inconvenient, but there are bigger concerns. When you share a parking spot with someone else, you have to share the repercussions of damage or vandalism on that parking spot. Similarly with shared hosting, you all share the same “reputation score”. If another website owner creates questionable actions or your shared IP address, it will affect your website’s reputation.
The next concern is your email. Ever wondered why some emails go to spam, while others go to your inbox? It’s because your email provider analyzes the sender, its score and its reputation. If someone you share a parking spot with uses their email for spam, your parking spot will get flagged and the emails you send might also start getting flagged as spam.
The one upside a of a shared hosting plan is that the costs for that parking spot are divided across more users, so of course, it is more affordable.
In conclusion, one easy way to improve your website speed is to upgrade to a private server, VPS or cloud hosting. Your web developer is a key part of this decision, and should be involved in any discussions around this topic!
WordPress Hosting
Did you know that there are different types of hosting plans? If not, read on.
Continuing with the car analogy – we can think of different types of websites as different types of cars. Websites, like cars, are built in different ways. You probably have a WordPress website, but there are also Magento, Shopify, Squarespace, custom websites and more. As we know with cars, some run on gasoline, some on diesel, and some are electric. Each car needs a specific type of power.
Your WordPress/WooCommerce site can “function” on most types of hosts, but it might not “thrive” on all of them.
WordPress or WooCommerce hosting plans are optimized specifically for WordPress websites, and they usually contain special tools that specifically help your WordPress site thrive! These plans give you the most optimized fuel (server configurations) to run WordPress. Most of these companies also offer automatic backups, automatic WordPress updates, knowledgeable support, and more advanced security configurations to protect your website!
A few excellent WordPress/WooCommerce hosting providers we’ve come across, and found our users loving include:
WP Engine
SiteGround
Kinsta
Flywheel
If your website is slow or you aren’t happy with your existing hosting provider, it might be worth considering either upgrading your hosting plan or considering alternative hosting providers. Before making changes, be sure to speak to a professional and evaluating all systems that would be affected by a change in your hosting plan or provider.
