Who you choose to host your website really does make a difference, and I’m going to explain why your site host matters in today’s blog post.
First off…and I admit it, I’m an unabashed fanboy of WP Engine. At the time of this writing, Dogwood has more than 100 sites hosted by them. Their support for our sites is incomparable to anything else I have found.
Here are 5 reasons why your site host matters:
1. Site Backups
WP Engine provides daily automatic WordPress backups so you don’t have to worry about doing it yourself.
2. Staging/Development Environments
Say you want to test a theme, plugin or custom code on your site. It would be unwise to make these changes directly to the live site — the possibilities are endless to who your site will react. Possibly even crashing it.
Before deploying changes to the live site, the best practice that WP Engine includes is to use a staging environment to test any changes before going public.
In one click, you copy your live site to a staging environment, run your tests, make changes as needed. With a second click, you copy your site from the staging environment back to the live site.
While we develop your new site, we can keep the current one live because of the development environment.
The staging and development environments are separate but very much similar in how they function.
3. Utilizing CDN
WP Engine offers the ability to put all of your static content on a CDN with little to no configuration required.
Here’s how this works straight from WP Engine:
A CDN is a collection of servers located all around the world. When a browser loads static content, the request is automatically routed to the server geographically closest to the browser. This helps the content load much more quickly. In addition, because your content is loaded from many servers in separate locations, bursts of traffic are less likely to cause issues, because the burst is spread out over hundreds of servers, rather than just one.
For daily use, you don’t know this is even happening in the background. All Dogwood sites come with this activated automatically. CDN is included at no extra charge for the Professional and Business plans and can be added for Personal plan clients for a small monthly fee if you host directly with WP Engine.
4. Securing Your Site
If you have ever visited a site and noticed the address was https:// versus http://…it’s been secured. Your browser may even have the words “secure” beside the site along with the image of a lock.
HTTPS safeguards your site visitors by creating encrypted connections between your visitors and your site, protecting your visitors’ privacy and the data they share with you over the internet.
Also, you can also expect better Google search engine rankings, since HTTPS is used as a ranking signal.
5. Built for WordPress
You want your site host provider to be tailored to WordPress. When looking for a hosting provider, be sure that they offer services for caching, uptime, security, amazing customer support, and more. WP Engine’s premium WordPress hosting platform is built and optimized for WordPress.
Conclusion
Dogwood Media Solutions, LLC offers site host plans through WP Engine that can save you money and we would be happy to host your site. Get in contact with us to get that conversation started!
WPEngine also offers the easiest way to transfer your site. Learn more about WP Engine’s Migration Plugin. It’s a life changer when it comes to transferring your site to a new host!
Items in this blog post may contain direct quotes from WP Engine marketing resources available at WP Engine.
Originally posted March 26, 2017. Updated November 10, 2019.
