The first thing those just starting out in hosting WordPress sites will often ask themselves is “Well, where do I start?” Before you really dive into hosting WordPress sites, everything can look a little intimidating, so I wanted to answer a few frequently asked and common questions to clear up hosting WordPress sites a little bit for you.
Is WordPress Hosting Necessary?
If you want to build a website or start a blog, you’ll want your efforts to be visible, and for this WordPress hosting is absolutely necessary. Your hosting provider is who will handle everything on the technical side of your website, as well as hosting all of your files, and they’ll make you visible to others searching for relevant content on the World Wide Web. In your search for providers hosting WordPress sites, you’ll see quite a lot of offers, so it’s best to know which are worth investing in and which you should probably skip over.
One of the first things you’ll probably notice is that you’ll see a lot of “free” hosting WordPress sites, and these offers will seem pretty tempting for beginners in particular. You may not be sure if your blogging or web building efforts will be successful, so a free service gives you the ability to put your content online without having to make a monetary investment, right? Well, sort of. While you’re not putting in a monetary investment, you will be acting as an advertisement for the provider, so the “free” label isn’t truly accurate.
These free hosting providers will also typically have overloaded servers, and this slows down your website speed significantly. Studies have shown that the vast majority of visitors to a webpage will simply leave if the page takes longer than 7 seconds to load, and it makes sense they would do so. The web has a plethora of information available at the touch of your fingertips, and on any topic imaginable, so visitors don’t want to wait when they don’t have to. What you’ll find is that you may have some visitors, but they won’t be sticking around or coming back. For affiliate marketing blogs, this means your visitors won’t be translating into clicks on the products you’re promoting.
With free services, you’re also at the mercy of the provider’s terms of service, and the consequences of this may vary. Some providers may even reserve the right to shut down or remove your website at will, and with all of the content, you’ve worked hard on along with it.
So, not only is finding a provider hosting WordPress sites necessary, but it’s also smart to make the investment in only the best providers for your content. WP Engine is one provider that works wonderfully for beginners and can take you all the way from your earliest stages to peak popularity.
What About My Domain Name?
For most providers hosting WordPress sites, your domain name is included in your subscription. Unlike the free hosting providers that include their own name in your domain name, these will allow you to choose a short, sweet, and relevant domain that’s easy to search and easy to remember. It’s also possible to have your domain and your WordPress hosting through different providers, but this may complicate things unnecessarily for you, particularly if your domain comes with your hosting in your hosting WordPress sites package.
What About For My E-Commerce?
Providers hosting WordPress sites aren’t just for bloggers, even if they’re very popular in the affiliate marketing and sponsored blogging communities. The top WordPress hosting providers like WP Engine offer SSL certificates necessary for hosting e-commerce sites safely and securely, some of which even including them in certain e-commerce tailored packages. This can be a simple way to build a working e-commerce website that is easily searchable for your potential customers.
Do I Need To Install WordPress?
Today’s modern hosting WordPress sites make installing WordPress incredibly simple. You don’t have to have WordPress pre-installed before finding your chosen hosting provider, and star WordPress hosting providers like WP Engine offer a simple 1-click install that puts WordPress onto your hosting service with just one click of the mouse. Hosting WordPress sites like this make beginning in WordPress an incredibly easy venture that anyone can do with confidence.
What If I Want To Switch?
If you’ve begun with a particular WordPress hosting provider, but you’ve found one that has better suited your needs, you can absolutely switch your hosting WordPress sites as you see fit. Most great WordPress hosting sites, like WP Engine, offer a free migration service that migrates your website or blog and all of its files over to your new hosting provider easily. Usually, with only a couple of clicks, you can have all of your relevant files back where you need them.
Another disadvantage of free WordPress hosting sites is that these typically do not offer migration services, and you may not even be able to migrate your content over after you’ve invested in a paid site. Depending on the terms of service of a particular free WordPress hosting service, switching to another host may mean that all of your previous content is lost.
Do I Go Monthly Or Longer?
What beginners will notice when they are searching for hosting WordPress sites is that subscriptions can vary widely. Some will be simple, some more complex, and you can opt for monthly rates or pay for as long as 3 years. If you’re just beginning, you may want to really consider the length of your subscription, and just what you want to do with your blog or website. A popular option for many is to start out with some of the shorter plans, like a month-to-month, 3 month, or 6 month plan, and to see how things pan out before opting for something with a little more commitment. Typically, however, you will receive some sort of a price breakdown when opting for some of the longer plans.
