5 Criteria for Choosing the Best WordPress Hosting Provider for Your Business
Last update:
Joan Vega
Are you a professional tasked with choosing the perfect WordPress Hosting provider for your clients?
If you are an agency or freelance, knowing how to choose a good hosting service for WordPress websites is crucial. As professionals, web hosting becomes part of our tools, and we must choose correctly if we want to maintain the client’s trust. Web hosting is a service that is difficult to understand due to its high complexity. Our work can be questioned by the client if we do not choose wisely.
In this article, we’ll explore the top five factors to consider when choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress websites:
Performance, Security, Support, Project Development, and Scalability.
Compare WordPress Hosting Providers Based on These 5 Criteria
To Compare and choose hosting providers for your WordPress is a huge task, and a difficult one, as each Hosting provider chooses what to say and what not. We hope to shed some light and help you in your choice by following these steps:
1- Speed and performance
We should consider speed as an essential requirement in choosing a hosting environment for your WordPress website.
When it comes to choosing a WordPress hosting, you’ll want to look for a provider that offers high-performance servers optimized for the WordPress platform, meaning you should look out for:
PHP-fmp+Nginx feature
NVMe Storage
Testing the speed with the TTFB Test
Testing the TTFB on the Admin page
Keep reading to have all details:
PHP-fpm + Nginx
This is the best combination of server environment if you want to squeeze the processing capacity of the server. PHP-FPM and Nginx are known for their high-performance capabilities.
When combined, PHP-FPM and Nginx create a powerful server environment that can handle a significant amount of traffic while maintaining fast processing speeds. It is an ideal choice for websites that require high-performance capabilities and need to maximize the processing capacity of their servers.
While installing a cache plugin can help speed up the website, it doesn’t benefit the management of the WordPress site itself. This is where an NVMe Storage and a fast CPU comes in.
NVMe is superior to SSD due to its faster read and write speeds, making it an ideal choice for high-performance wordPress sites.
When searching for a WordPress hosting provider, it’s important to consider an NVMe Storage-based hosting, as it guarantees speedy access to your website.
Storage will help but, as we know, WordPress is expensive in computation. If you ever experienced a WordPress site with high complexity, lets say with non efficient themes and lots of heavy plugins, a fast storage is not enough! We need CPU power.
It’s important to note that adding more CPU cores or PHP workers to your server doesn’t necessarily result in faster page load times. This is because PHP, is designed to use only one CPU core at a time, is a single-threaded architecture. Therefore, even if you have multiple cores, WordPress won’t be able to take advantage of them for faster page built times.
Make the TTFB Test
In order to evaluate if you are in front of a good NVMe Storage and a fast CPU, the TTFB test is perfect!
TTFB “Time To First Byte” helps us measure the time that we use in contacting the server (network latency), plus the page building (Web Application) plus the time networking takes sending us the first “block” or byte.
If you have the option, when comparing times, take a site that you know is demanding in the use of resources. This way you will be able to contrast the differences of TTFB with a good margin of tolerance. Example:
5.6 seconds of TTFB on a slow hosting
You can inspect the TTFB on the developer tools of your browser
219.13 milliseconds of TTFB on a fast hosting
This TTFB shows a 25x speed gain
Remember to use the same browser and same Internet connection to compare the TTFB.
Measuring the TTFB on the homepage of our WordPress serves as a comparison yardstick. The TTFB combines the construction time and the time it takes to get the first byte to our browser.
Attention, it would not be so exciting to look at the TTFB of an already prefabricated resource, e.g. a gif image. In this case, the process time is not very relevant; the image does not need to consult the database or use php.
TTFB Test on the Admin page.
As a professional who manages intricate WordPress websites, you likely know the exasperation of navigating the backend of an e-commerce, multilingual, or plugin-heavy site. Don’t forget to measure in this case the back end of WordPress, the wp-admin
A TTFB of less than 200ms is optimal for a wp-admin on a fresh WordPress install.
TIP: When measuring the TTFB of a site page disable the browser cache and reload the page a couple of times
2- Security and resource isolation
Get a dedicated server.
Opting for a dedicated server is the first option that comes to mind when we’ve had a bad experience sharing resources with other website. Our recommendation is to opt for a dedicated server as long it meets the following rules:
The dedicated server includes administration and security. This is what we call a Managed Hosting. You should look out for this unless there is a sysadmin in your team with time dedicated to manage the server.
One WordPress site per server. Nowadays its affordable to manage Virtual Servers with robotized maintenance services at affordable prices. Look for a provider with modern infrastructure.
At Wetopi, we put your WordPress in a managed server, for the money you pay a Shared Hosting.
If we can not afford one WordPress site per server, the alternative would be a good system which has the features of isolation of accounts and resources: i.e. CloudLinux, CageFS,
Firewall or Reverse Proxy capable of filtering traffic.
According to anincapsule report, 27.7% of internet traffic is malicious bots!
It is advisable to free your WordPress site from unwanted traffic. With this, you will reduce the consumption of resources and free yourself from potential attacks.
To protect your WordPress from malicious traffic we have two options:
The first is to add a security layer to our WordPress by installing a security plugin.
The second, a more efficient method, is to have an external security layer. A reverse proxy that acts as a WAF, Web Applications Firewall.
In Wetopi firewalls, we use precise dynamic filtering rules for WordPress. These firewalls learn from the traffic directed to every WordPress and share that knowledge globally, freeing the entire internal network of non-legitimate traffic.
Look for the latest HTTP Protocols: HTTP/2 Or HTTP/3
When selecting a hosting provider, it is important to consider which HTTP protocols they support, as this can have an impact on your website’s speed and performance.
A hosting provider that supports the latest HTTP protocols, such as HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, can provide faster page load times, improved website performance, and better security.
How to check the HTTP protocol version?
With your browser developer tools. With Google Chrome, you first need to enable it: open the DevTools by right-clicking any page and choosing “Inspect Element”. Go to the network tab, right-click the columns in the and enable the “Protocol” column.
Once enabled, refresh the page, and it’ll show you what protocols each resource are using.
In the column corresponding to the protocol, we should read h2, http2 or quick.
A quick reminder;
HTTP/1.1: Widely used (94.4% of all websites) and supported by all servers and clients. HTTP/2: Faster and more efficient than HTTP/1.1 (31.5% of all websites). HTTP/3: Even faster and more secure than HTTP/2, uses QUIC (6.4% of all websites). SPDY: Deprecated in favor of HTTP/2 (less than 0.1% of all websites)
Abbreviations: H2-14: H2 stands for “HTTP/2”, the 14 will refer to “draft 14” H2C-14: H2C stands for “HTTP 2 Cleartext”, the HTTP/2 protocol over a non-encrypted channel
According to w3techs.com, as of February 2023
Look for Servers with compression protocols like Brotli
It is generally better to use server-side compression like Brotli, Gzip or Deflate, rather than compressing files using a WordPress plugin.
Server-side compression can compress files more efficiently than plugin-based compression, leading to faster page load times and improved website performance.
Brotli is a compression algorithm developed by Google in 2015. It is designed to provide higher compression ratios and faster compression and decompression speeds compared to other compression algorithms like Gzip and Deflate.
Therefore, if you have the option to choose a hosting provider that supports Brotli compression, this would likely be the better choice for improving your website’s performance.
3- Support
When there is a problem, it rarely has to do with incidents such as the loss of service and uptime. Rather, there are far more several common problems that can waste a lot of time for WordPress users, such as infinite redirection, blank pages, slow response times, intrusions, malware, data corruption, and plugin incompatibility.
It’s important to have reliable hosting and maintenance services in place to address them quickly and efficiently
Follow this Criteria:
Choose a service with Specialized WordPress support.
It is not economically feasible for hosting providers to have a support specialised in each of the applications hosted on a web server:i.e. Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Prestashop, WordPress. That’s when working with a Hosting provider devoted 100% to WordPress makes total sense.
Specialisation is key. Keep in mind that, as professionals, your level of WordPress knowledge will probably surpass that of most of the staff in a generic hosting service’s call center.
Plus, as a professional, support must be swift, meaning dealing directly with the person that will solve your problem. A support without the typical “ticket” system is ideal.
4- Effective web project development
Time, is our scarcest resource. We must manage our time wisely during our Project development. The following features will make your WordPress Workflow more efficient:
Leap and develop the projects online.
Sometimes, the localhost development make us more efficient, but better sooner than later we will have to expose our development to the client. Developing online also allows you to collaborate with other developers or team members more easily. You can work on the same site simultaneously, make changes in real-time, and provide feedback to each other.
Work with a hosting ready for online WordPress development.
IMPORTANT: when a Hosting offers free servers, make sure they perform like the paid ones.
If you still develop in localhost, and speed is the reason, consider trying out our Wetopi Free development servers.
Any task, whether it’s deploying a backup, testing a new plugin in a clone, validating compatibility of an update, etc., must be possible to carry out in a staging environment that allows us to turn it into production if needed.
Other Time-saver features when developing:
Single Sign On. Unified access from the panel to the administration to all our WordPress.
Automated WordPress Updates.
Project transfer. Sporadic tasks such as transferring billing or migrating projects between accounts should be easy to do.
Automated backups.
Restoration of backup in Staging server.
Installation and management of HTTPS Certificates and simplification of link rewriting.
Collaboration: a Hosting that allows collaborators to join the development of a website. For example, to be able to invite external developers without having to create access accounts ftp, mysql, WordPress.
5- Scalability
Finally, choose a WordPress Hosting where the infrastructure supports the process of upgrading the resources for a growing website. Make the following questions:
How easy is it to scale my server?
Can I upgrade the resource requirement on demand for a specific period?
Can I grow progressively without migrations or interruptions?
How much would the upgrade cost?
Do we lose the investment by interrupting the period of the service to which we are subscribed?
Conclusion
If we had to summarize all features into the 3 most important when it come to choosing a WordPress Hosting, it would be:
Speed and Performance: test the TTFB
Piroritize a Managed Hosting.
Choose those who offer Resource Isolation.
As a final tip, a dedicated WordPress hosting provider focuses solely on hosting WordPress sites and must deliver top-notch performance to remain competitive. Additionally, their support team is highly knowledgeable.
We are techies passionate about WordPress. With wetopi, a Managed WordPress Hosting, we want to minimize the friction that every professional faces when working and hosting WordPress projects.
