Grow your online business on a rock-solid foundation
#1 – The Hosting
The first layer of a rock-solid foundation is a web hosting optimized for your application – i.e., WordPress.
Great WordPress hosting should be:
- high-performance
- high-scalability
- high-availability
- secure
- reliable (multi-layered backups)
- and have expert support
Unfortunately, such web hosting solutions are usually targeted to enterprise and can be pretty pricey.
We’re working to bring enterprise WordPress hosting to the everyone (coming soon) and until it’s ready, we can help you by hosting your WordPress website on dedicated cloud servers, fully managed by us.
Features:
- free migrations
- free SSL
- 99,9% uptime
- daily backups
- performance optimization & monitoring
- security monitoring
- expert WordPress support
#2 – The code
The second layer of a rock-solid foundation is the code.
The strength of this foundation is given by the quality of the PHP code in WordPress themes and plugins. Bad code can sabotage your success and you might not even know it.
WordPress Themes
Personally, I am a fan of Genesis Framework made by StudioPress.com.
From my experience with shared hosting customers, those who used the Genesis Framework were able to sustain higher levels of traffic before reaching their account limits.
I use Genesis on all of my websites, I highly recommend it to everyone who wants a better foundation for their website and I also have made some child themes for it.
The themes are free to download, use them and modify them as you wish, no restrictions.
WordPress Plugins
Most performance issues I’ve encountered were caused by WordPress plugins.
Just like themes, the plugins must have good, clean code. Each plugin you activate in your WordPress install will add extra MB to memory usage. Some plugins more, some less.
But you only need one bad plugin to slow down your site big time. So you need to be careful with what plugins you use.
There are tens of thousands of plugins, free or premium, and many of them are not built responsibly. Being so many, it’s impossible for a site owner to know them all.
To help you, we’ve published a list of recommended plugins. These are tested by us or are successfully used by our customers. I’ve also listed those that are not recommended, due to performance issues.
#3 – The Tweaks
By improving the speed and scalability of your website, you accelerate the growth of your online business, whatever it may be (company website, blog, affiliate site, web magazine or newspaper).
You will not lose money because your website is not loading fast enough or breaks on the first traffic spike.
1. Test & identify problems
To improve your website’s loading speed, you must first test thoroughly and identify what is causing the problem. There are several tools to test, follow our tutorial to learn more.
2. Install & setup a cache plugin
If you’re on shared hosting one of the easiest ways to improve WordPress speed and scalability is to implement a cache. There are many caching plugins for the job, follow our tutorial to see what we recommend.
3. Optimize your images for the web
One of the factors that might slow down your website is using big photos that unoptimized for the web. Follow our tutorial to learn more about how to optimize your images.
4. Clean up your WordPress database
A slim database is crucial for your WordPress performance. From our experience, cleaning the database is one of the most useful improvements you can do.
Keep in mind, our objective for writing these tutorials is real performance, not just better grades on popular testing tools.
5. Keep Monitoring
In this technical field, things are constantly evolving.
The WordPress core receives updates several times a year, WordPress themes and plugins also get updates as many times as their developer thinks they need it. Updates resolve functionality issues or security vulnerabilities.
A WordPress site should also be managed technically, not just in terms of content. Although we can not provide maintenance services because we want to focus on hosting, we have included in our hosting plans some monitoring services that can help you.
More resources
We have a vast section of resources available to all WordPress site owners who want to learn.
We have published various technical tutorials, including video tutorials for beginners who want to learn WordPress, case studies, a list of WordPress experts that can help with various services (programming, design, ads), online entrepreneurship information and more.
Keep in mind, we’re not content marketers, we just write honestly from our own experience, so our blog posts might not be as polished as others.