How to Choose a Managed WordPress Hosting: 7 Most Important Features

If you’re considering a managed WordPress hosting, you've probably wondered what features you should be looking for. While there is plenty of information online on what features you should look for in a web hosting provider, there’s not much information available on what features you should look for in a managed WordPress hosting. What are the most important features of a managed WordPress service?

When you create your website on WordPress, the managed WordPress hosting offers a pre-built WordPress installation instead of just an empty space on a server. Since WordPress is arguably the most popular content management platform, these managed WordPress services offer convenience over convention. When you only plan on running a WordPress website, they can seem quite handy and attractive.

However, not all managed WordPress hosting is the same. Some services are quite poorly setup in comparison to what you could do yourself. Others are very restrictive to prevent you from moving away from their platform.

Here are the top seven most important features of a managed WordPress hosting:

Uptime

Your first concern should be how good of an uptime the managed WordPress service has. You don’t want your website to go down when search engines are crawling it or while visitors are trying to access it. This can result in bad SEO and a loss of visitors to your site. A managed WordPress service should have a 99% uptime.

WordPress hosting uptime report

The best feature to look for is a guarantee to go with that 99% uptime. Uptime guarantees give you credit or a refund should your website be down more often than the guarantee specifies. Of course, it can’t make up for the loss of SEO or visitors, but knowing a managed WordPress service guarantees their uptime is a good hint that they stay well above that uptime on a regular basis, or else they stand to lose money.

Speed

Of course, you want your website to be fast, as well. Speed also impacts SEO, and visitors don't want to go to a site where they have to wait for slow pages to load. What does the managed WordPress hosting say about their speed, if anything? A speedy web host will tell you that they use Nginx architecture, NVMe drives, the latest version of PHP, LXD containers, and a fast database like MariaDB. Look for bonus features that help improve speed as well, like free SSL certificates and CDN setups.

Of course, the speed also depends on your WordPress theme and plugins. You should choose a fast and optimized WordPress theme for your site. All our themes are optimized for the best performance. Image optimization in website WordPress is also an important part.

Security

Managed WordPress hosting should be secured

Any form of shared hosting - managed WordPress hosting included - should have top-notch security standards and policies in place to keep malicious websites and software out of their servers. Having neighbors that serve up phishing websites and/or spam emails, or a malware infected website, can negatively impact your SEO heavily and drive visitors away. A managed WordPress service should be open about their security protocols. Look for features like DDoS detection, hardware firewalls, 24/7 uptime monitoring, and regular malware scans.

Updates

Since you’re using a managed WordPress hosting, updates won’t always be as straightforward as they are on self-managed WordPress. So it is important that the managed WordPress service keeps WordPress and all other related software updated regularly for you. Look for mention of automatic updating procedures on their website. If they don’t update the software for you, move on to a different managed WordPress service provider. You don’t need outdated software lowering your SEO score and inviting hackers and malware into your domain.

Backups and Migration

Backups also aren’t as easy to perform with a managed WordPress service as they are with self-hosted. Make sure the managed WordPress service provides regular daily or weekly backups of your website. This will prevent you the headache of figuring out how to backup your WordPress via a web of plugins or having to purchase WordPress in order to get access to their automatic backups. Also, check to see if the managed WordPress service offers any migration tools if you are moving your already existing WordPress site to their servers. This also will save you a headache in figuring out how to migrate your site.

You can also take a look at the list of best WordPress backup and migration plugins.

Support

You may still need customer support with your WordPress site, so make sure that there is 24/7 support available if you need it. Support should be friendly and knowledgeable, with a minimal wait time to get in contact with someone via chat or phone. You can test support out yourself by doing a test call to see what they’re all about. Also, make sure that the managed WordPress service has a large and helpful knowledge base available for helping you to learn how to do various things in WordPress, so you won’t have to call support just to figure out how to do what you want to do with your WordPress installation.

How good managed WordPress hosting support is?

Extra Features

Some managed WordPress services offer extra features as part of their service. This may come in the form of professional themes, helpful plugins, free SSL certificates, FTP access, and more. Many of these features help make the service you’re using unique and different from all the others. However, if you make use of their WordPress specific features like themes or plugins, keep in mind that you may be locking yourself into that managed WordPress service. While the extra features add an element of fun and uniqueness to manage WordPress services, it pays to be cautious about putting all those features to full use.

Managed WordPress Hosting Can Be Your Key To More Convenient Websites

In conclusion, remember to look out for vendor lock-in, like special WordPress features and use these as sparingly as possible, and do not forget to make sure your site is being backed up regularly and that you have access to the backups. Don't forget to make sure that customer support is top notch, as well. As long as you play it cautious, you can find a managed WordPress hosting with stellar features that work perfectly for you.

Managed WordPress hosting can very well be a fun way to deal with WordPress. They are a great way to make WordPress more convenient and accessible without having to do all the work. With these seven features in place, you are sure to have a smooth, happy experience with your chosen managed WordPress hosting.