The Official Guide on How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting in 2020

Mastering SEO is a difficult task in 2020. There are a million guides out there of how to improve your SEO, but when you are signing up for a new blog, it can be hard to figure out where to start.

If you want to achieve the best SEO rankings from your new website, the first place you need to look at is your WordPress hosting. The very best WordPress hosting options out there help to amplify your brand and improve your reach.

Improving your websites SEO can open up your business to massive levels of traffic. Google receives over 63,000 searches a second on any particular day.

Not only that but Google accounts for over 79% of all global desktop search traffic. To help you master your site's SEO we've put together this guide.

It'll guide you through how to choose the best WordPress hosting so you can master your website's SEO.

Keep reading to learn more!

What Is SEO?

Before we dive into WordPress hosting, first you need to understand why thinking about your website's SEO is so important.

But first, what is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of getting traffic from Google search results on search engines, in a free, organic and natural way. In other words, without paying for ads.

All of the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and  Bing, have search results displaying websites, videos, and local listings. They show these results based on rankings on what the search engine considers to be the most relevant information.

For a complete guide explaining SEO, take a look at:
What is SEO?

Why Is SEO Important?

It's important to think about SEO when you are selecting your WordPress host for a number of reasons. First of all, your WordPress host is going to be supporting your whole site.

If your primary goal is to get more traffic to your site, then picking your host based on what is going to give you the best results is a natural step.

Secondly, when picking hosting, the right company can amplify your results massively in the SERPs (search engine results pages). This means more traffic, more results and more money for your company.

Finally, by choosing the wrong host for your WordPress site, you can see all sorts of issues. This can include:

• Slow website speed
• Downtime
• Security Flaws

And much more. It's important when selecting your host to think about your website's SEO results.

Why Do I Need a WordPress Host?

When you look at all of the hosting options available to you, there are a ton of choices. There are hosting companies from all over the world, which isn't surprising considering the size of the industry, it's expected to hit some 18 billion US dollars worldwide in 2018.

You'll find there are over a billion internet hosts on the DNS, which is more than double from just a decade ago.

With so many companies to choose from, it's easy to get overwhelmed and make the wrong decision. It's important when selecting your hosting to pick a hosting which is an expert in your field.

That means picking a WordPress host over a regular host. Hosting companies can offer all sorts of services like technology and server space for lease.

They can also sell the same services to clients permanently. In that regard, a website host is a lot like a landlord.

A landlord's apartment that you rent would be the same as the server space you'd rent from a hosting company. Just like you need a place to lay your head at night, your website needs a server (and a website host) to exist.

When you decide to run a WordPress site though, your resources and usage will be different from a traditional website. You'll need more resources and be able to increase those resources when your site starts to get high levels of traffic.

You'll find that you can install WordPress on almost any type of host and they will all claim that it's fine to do so. But you'll find out pretty fast that there is a dramatic difference between installing WordPress on a server compared to it performing well under intense traffic.

Managed WordPress Hosting or Traditional Hosts?

If you want those high levels of traffic — which you should — you'll want to be dealing with a hosting company that specializes in hosting WordPress.

These Managed WordPress hosting options are a lot better option than the more traditional hosts.

Your traditional website hosting will give you some server space and a basic level of support. You'll need to be in charge of everything including:

• Configuring access to your server
• Setting up WordPress and migrating from your old site onto WordPress
• Keeping up to date with the WordPress core updates and plugins
• Keeping up regular backups of your WordPress
• Handling any security flaws or breaches
• Handling the traffic load when you have a boost in website hits

That all on top of creating your site, the content and promoting it. It's a heavy workload.

Managed WordPress hosts understand what it takes to run a successful WordPress site and make the whole process a lot easier for you. They will handle all of the bullet points above for you, and make the entire sign-up and setup process as simple as possible for you.

This free's your time up to focus on the most critical aspect of your website, producing the content.

Which is The Best WordPress Hosting Option?

Your needs are your own when it comes to hosting. Everybody needs something different.

To decide on which managed WordPress hosting option is best you'll need to consider a variety of different features we call the five S's including:

• Support
• Scale
• Setup
• Security
• Speed

All of these points will vary depending on your business's needs and can make a big difference in which hosting provider you decide to go with.

You might think, I need all of those things. But what you'll need to consider is that different WordPress hosts will specialize in different areas.

Depending on what is the most important aspect for you, will depend on which host you go for. For example, if you want a website that has all-out speed, you might find they are a little more challenging to get set up with as a brand new user.

If you want a simple setup, you might find you are compromising on the support level. Remember, that hosting isn't permanent.

If you find over time your hosting needs change, you can always adjust and opt for a different provider. But considering all of these aspects can help you choose the best WordPress hosting for your business upfront.

Support

One of the most important aspects of picking the best WordPress hosting for your business is support.

Put yourself in this situation. You've launched your business and website, you've paid thousands of dollars for marketing your blog, then right as your launch sale goes live, your website crashes.

Too much traffic leaves your website crumbling. You try to reach out to your service provider, but they're closed from 3 pm Friday until Monday at 10 am. All of that money spent on advertising, down the drain.

By the time Monday rolls around you've missed your window of opportunity, and your business may not recover. It's moments like this that spending that extra $10 per month can make a big difference to your WordPress hosting.

When shopping for your WordPress hosting consider support not based on the price you are paying, but how much money you could potentially lose if things go south.

For most businesses, when you consider that, it's an easy decision. Having a WordPress host that both understands the system, can log into your WordPress dashboard to inspect for issues and can see traffic spikes and understand how to resolve it can be invaluable.

Support is about more than helping you get set up. Think about how equipped the hosting company will be to assist you in a crisis.

Having an option to be able to pick up the phone and ask somebody to help you, and explain to them on the phone can be invaluable.

Scale

One of the most significant problems people encounter with WordPress hosting is that typically when it comes to growing, it happens in leaps and bounds. One of your traffic devices like SEO suddenly takes off and overnight you're getting thousands of visitors to your web pages.

When this happens, it's important to know that your WordPress hosting company can scale with you. If tomorrow you suddenly were getting a million hits to your website, can your hosting company scale to that level?

Having that flexibility there is an important aspect. Many WordPress hosting companies have a tiered approach.

If a hosting company can improve your hosting needs on a scale, you'll find you can gradually move up the scale as your website grows in size. This can minimize costs and also at the same time support your website for massive growth in the future.

Setup

When you're looking at setting up your first WordPress site or even your second or third WordPress site, it's important to know how to set it up correctly. Having an effective and straightforward setup procedure with a new WordPress host is so important.

It's even more important if you are migrating your WordPress site over from a previous host. The last thing you want to do is have to manually input 200 blog posts or pages on a new blog.

The workload would be insane. Luckily, most of the best WordPress hosting 2019 options come equipped with simple setup procedures.

A lot of the WordPress hosts even assign somebody to support you during the transition process manually. These engineers will log in to your WordPress dashboard and migrate everything across onto the new host.

This includes everything from the design of your site, to the posts, pages, and even your email. This support of the setup process can be reassuring when transitioning or starting a new site.

A host that does this process well can often be a reassuring provider. If they do the setup well, you can be confident they'll do other aspects of support well too.

That's why a simple setup and support go hand in hand with most WordPress hosts.

Security

Security of any site is paramount. Not only because your site is processing customers data, but also for the reliability and profits of your business and website.

If your website gets taken down due to malicious attacks, depending on the downtime levels can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales or leads. A WordPress host that not only has inbuilt security but support to tackle security can be a godsend when disaster strikes.

You'll also find in these situations hosts who provide a backup option will be worth their weight in gold. After all, who wants to have to build up their site again from scratch when their site gets taken down?

Security features vary from different WordPress hosts so make sure to consider which option would be the best for your business.

For more info on being sure your site is secure, check out:
WP Engine Review: The Pros and Cons of WordPress Hosting

Speed

Speed is a huge factor when considering your WordPress hosting. A fast website means more than just improved user experience.

A website that loads fast performs better in search engine results. That means you will improve your SEO and you'll get more organic traffic coming to your site.

Google recommends that website should load in 0.5 seconds. It's also suggested that after 3 seconds you can begin to lose as many as 53% of your website visitors if your site hasn't loaded.

Sadly, most websites don't even get close to that with averages coming in at way higher than the recommended 3 seconds or lower.

As WordPress hosts are experts in WordPress sites, they understand how to get the best performance out of your page.

To learn more about your websites page speed, check out:
WP Engine Review: The Pros and Cons of WordPress Hosting

Which WordPress Host Will You Choose?

With such a wide array of website hosts online, choosing the best WordPress hosting option can be overwhelming. Using this guide, you should be able to easily narrow down which host gives you the tools and features you're looking for on your site.

For more support in improving your website's SEO, get in touch today.