The State Of WordPress Hosting Today For Agencies

Bulletproof Backups for Your WordPress Website

Fortify your business continuity with foolproof WordPress backups. No data loss, no downtime — just secure, seamless operation.

WordPress is a big deal: W3Techs reports it is used by 37.8% of all websites, up from 34.3% one year ago and 23.3% five years ago — and it’s still growing!

Powering 63.5% of all websites, the technology has changed a lot since founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little back in 2003. But not enough.

For such a large stake of the Internet, the WordPress economy has yet to fulfill its innovative potential.

I’ll bet that every web development agency still has to explain that WordPress is more than just a blogging platform to some of their new clients. This demonstrates a common disconnect between WordPress as a technology and the perspective from outside the WordPress community.

But perhaps that’s not all.

Could this also highlight that, despite the growth of WordPress, our industry is not moving forward in the way it should be?

WordPress Is Lacking Innovation

What we need from the future of WordPress is fearless ambition with solutions to the major problems faced by agencies. This ranges from reliable hosting to scalability, personalization, speed, and security.

Let’s say your client’s digital marketing campaign skyrockets with an Instagram post that goes viral. Their brand has reached a huge audience in a short space of time, driving major traffic to their site. Yet, by opening the floodgates, the host can’t cope and the site goes down. 

Protecting websites from disasters is BlogVault’s forte, with its all-in-one back-up and restore features. This particular problem is also being tackled by web hosts like Convesio, a platform-as-a-service for WordPress. This an area I hope will spark further innovation across the WordPress ecosystem in the future.

Another opportunity for improvement is the lack of customizability and personalization within WordPress. The person visiting your client’s website wants to feel like they are reading something relevant to them. Without it, there’s poor user experience. Although UX can be improved with enhancements like speed, slow sites also generate common complaints. This is typically caused by poor hosting and slow plugins.

An even more critical area for WordPress is security, which has a major impact on client trust. If you choose to build your client’s website with WordPress, the security of that website your responsibility. 

MalCare, is a great example of a WordPress malware scan and clean plugin that handles much of the security burden. While doing so, it also considers other important aspects of maintaining a successful website. It has a super-fast 1-click malware cleaner and doesn’t add any load to your site, keeping you in Google’s good books.

Within the WordPress economy, we know the most common problems facing agencies and we understand why they happen. Some WordPress products, such as MalCare, are thinking creatively about how to solve these problems. However, we still aren’t seeing a significant drive for innovation in these areas.

malcare syncing

 

From my perspective, this is because of a resistance to change and lack of support for building up the ecosystem. This needs to be acknowledged and overcome at an industry-wide level.

Resolving WordPress Problems By Embracing Change

Cast your minds back to the introduction of Gutenberg, which was rolled out with WordPress 5.0. The block editor was introduced in late 2018, a change driven by Automattic which stirred (and divided) the WordPress community.

Since then, there’s been increasing praise for the intuitive full-site editing that Gutenberg brings, and the improved experience for the WordPress user base. Instead of a developer-focused change, this was user-focused. The new editor makes it easier for web design newbies to customize their WordPress sites with Gutenberg.

The divisive response to Gutenberg seemed to be less about the technology and more about who makes the decisions about WordPress. 

But there’s another important factor at play – Familiarity. 

Whether it’s the Classic editor or anything else, familiarity is reassuring. Change, on the other hand, is scary. Resistance to change stifles innovation within WordPress and in the wider digital ecosystem.

The problem is that change is necessary for innovation, but doing things differently brings you into unfamiliar territory. This requires trust (and for clients, blind faith) in new technology.

Building Trust For Your Agency With Reliable Hosting

Any WordPress agency owner will know that a catastrophic moment when hosting goes down. If anxiety about this has caused you sleepless nights, you are not alone.

With most existing cloud options, WordPress and all of its components are running inside one container: a self-encapsulated instance of WordPress. 

A single VPS runs your database, PHP runtime, your file system, your security scanning, and your backups. Shared hosts often put many sites on one server, so there are multiple instances of WordPress running on one VPS.

Other sites on your shared server could bring down the whole server. Explaining this problem to a client isn’t straightforward, especially if the cause has nothing to do with their site.

No matter how great an agency you are, if your website hosting is bad, it reflects poorly on everything else you’re doing. This is not just about communicating problems or even fixing them, it’s about trust. 

Your clients need to have complete trust that you can keep their websites live, working fast, and converting web visitors into customers. If you lose that trust, you could lose the client.

WordPress tools can alleviate some of these pressures.

Take WP Remote, which offers incremental encrypted offsite backups and a 100% restore rate, boasting 50% faster updates than any other solution. Providing enterprise-grade safety, WP Remote is so intuitive it could be used by anyone. This enables you to manage every aspect of your clients’ websites using a single plugin and maintain that all-important client trust. 

More WordPress products need to work on how they impact servers. BlogVault has zero-load incremental syncs and stores backups on their own servers. This is important because it means BlogVault’s back-ups will never overload your server or slow your site. It will even continue backing-up if you have hosting issues like an overloaded server that causes your site to go down.

blogvault wordpress dashboard

Poor hosting can make your agency look unreliable, even when it’s not your fault. Typically, clients see agencies as technical gatekeepers. They want your assurance that problems will be avoided or fixed quickly if they happen. 

The scenario of sites going down because they can’t cope when a post goes viral puts a spotlight on the problem with unreliable hosting. On top of this, it also highlights unreliable scalability.

Most WordPress hosts scale up, but that’s not the only option for scalability. Using Convesio for example enables you to do things differently. By separating all of the individual components into layers, instead of scaling up, Convesio scales out. There’s a load balancer, which scales elastically, and layers for PHP runtime and your database that scale independently. 

This technique solves a difficult challenge, giving you more memory and capacity.

convesio increase page loading time

Scaling website networks and systems efficiently is an area that I would like to see developed further within the WordPress economy. There’s wide commercial potential, not only for the entrepreneurs building solutions. It also brings benefits to every single website that can make use of them, and the agencies behind those websites.

The Future Of WordPress Is An Opportunity To Be Disruptive

It’s not easy to do things differently, but the value of being disruptive can create long-term benefits for entire industries.

To truly be disruptive through technology, you must consider the bigger picture. Web development is more than Javascript, PHP, or the REST API, it’s also about business. By stepping back and doing things differently, you can build or use technical solutions that create real business value for customers and agencies alike.

When I picture the future of WordPress, I think of automated monitoring using trustworthy systems that provide fast interventions if something needs to be fixed. 

By delivering everything you need to automate site management, BlogVault does exactly that, with an all-in-one solution for complete website management. What’s more, it is constantly evolving, which signals a promising future for WordPress, and not one that is resistant to change.

malcare scanning

A crucial way to move WordPress forward as a technical platform is to lean towards innovation. Support the companies investing in research and development, and pushing the limits on WordPress hosting.

So many products in the WordPress economy are available for free, but this overlooks the value that investing in the community can provide. Core contributions are not the only way to give back. The WordPress community can also choose to spend their money on pioneering solutions within the ecosystem.

Lack of money also stifles innovation, and when you choose the lowest cost provider, you can do collateral damage to the industry. Investing in businesses that are modernizing WordPress creates a stronger future. 

By doing this, you help build an environment where your agency can thrive. You’ll have confidence that your client’s websites will be secure, reliable and fast. Your clients will have complete trust in your agency. It’s good for business, for everyone.

WordPress Hosting Predictions: What The Future Looks Like

As hosting becomes an increasingly competitive space, I expect that more customizable products and services will be made available. It will no longer be enough to offer the hosting alone. Rather, hosting providers will have to offer a truly unique service in unexpected niches if they want to thrive.

Hosting Providers With Truly Unique Offerings

I once went looking for a hosting ‘unicorn’ with all of the things you would want from an ideal host for clients. I realized that there was nothing out there at a suitable cost for a small to medium business. 

That’s why we built Convesio, prioritizing the value that hosting has for an agency, and solving the single points of failure in WordPress.

If PHP crashes, usually your website goes down. With Convesio, if your PHP instance dies, another one is spun up instantly and there’s no downtime at all. Imagine your PHP is the frame of a chair you’re sitting on. If that frame breaks down, you’ll fall. Convesio lifts you onto another chair before that happens, keeping you up the entire time. It’s our way of offering proactive support to reduce technical headaches and fix the issue before you notice. 

Successful WordPress hosting of the future needs a focus on customer service, scalability, and fully managed services with easy add-ons and complete customizability. 

convesio home page

Optimizing For The Best Possible User Experience


Many WordPress sites still do not take advantage of insights and analytics, despite this being an excellent way to get to know customers. 

Some companies don’t offer customer service or even understand who their customers really are. Insights like these can be used to improve UX with personalization. It creates a good user experience with a personal touch at every level of contact with a business. Yet, in WordPress, this area is still very under-developed.

I expect to see improved versions of Gutenberg making it easier for site owners who are less technical. This will help them to build sites without support from a web designer. The block editor can help create increasingly usable, intuitive user interfaces for web visitors.

Fast websites also benefit businesses by improving user experience and better SEO. Combined, this creates fast, user-friendly websites converting visitors into paying customers and thereby generating commercial success.

Speed should no longer be considered a high priority, but a necessity. Speed (or lack of) is one of the biggest complaints with WordPress sites that use poor hosting and slow plugins. Site owners who fail to optimize on the back-end will fall behind.

WP Rocket is a WordPress product company with powerful caching plugins for speeding up your website and requiring minimal configuration. These successful optimization plugins were born out of frustration.


lazy load

When it comes to innovation for optimization, MalCare’s Bot Protection feature for Cloudways is a smart way to protect your site. Bot Protection identifies traffic surges and blocks malicious traffic. All the while, it reduces server resource usage and wraps all of the details up into a report in Cloudways.

Achieving Unparalleled Security

In terms of the active changes we need to make to the WordPress industry, a critical issue is a security. MalCare is a great example of a WordPress security product achieving what other plugins aren’t. 

It’s the only WordPress malware scanner that will never overload your server and promises to secure your website with 360-degree protection. The product finds hacks that other plugins miss but never slows down your site.

MalCare’s one-click clean-ups offer a fully automated malware removal that gives you complete control of your site. This happens without any delays or external support. Plus, with integrated, secure backups and a powerful site management dashboard, the plugin is designed to make agency life easier.

Streamlined And Customized Services

Fully customizable hosting can produce highly efficient WordPress sites. With your host taking care of small tasks for you, your sites are much easier to maintain.

Some hosts offer features beyond simply hosting your site, like one-click installs, SSL certificates, and staging environments. Others will offer site migrations and backups, or the ability to choose your server location. Some offer a free CDN for caching and image optimizations.

Convesio’s features remove daily hassles for agencies, like managing plugins, themes, core files, and updates. We show Google Page Speed scores on the dashboard along with tools to improve this. We’ll even launch sites and handle all of the small tasks that threaten to take agency resources away from where they add value the most.

The features we have built into our platform are designed to help improve profit margins for agencies. I hope to see more examples of this collaborative approach to commercial success across the industry.

The Next Steps For WordPress

WordPress is historically slow to change. 

It took 15 years for the new editor to be introduced, but waiting around for another 15 years isn’t an option. Not when problems with the reliability of hosting, scalability, customizability, security, and speed can be resolved with a new way of thinking. 

These problems aren’t going to go away unless we challenge ourselves to break the mold and pave a new future for WordPress.

Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to change the industry and show the value of this to end-users. Adaptability is not just vital in tech, but also in business. 

It’s hard to move an entire industry to a new way of thinking, but how WordPress will look next year is in all of our hands. We need to move forward with innovation, even when this goes against the status quo.

Guest post for BlogVault by Tom Fanelli, Convesio

Tags:

You may also like


How to Limit Form Submissions with Droip in WordPress
How to Limit Form Submissions with Droip in WordPress

Forms are an indispensable part of any website because of their versatility, letting you collect information for various purposes! However, people with ill intentions often attempt to exploit these forms…

Manage Multiple WordPress Sites
How To Manage Multiple WordPress sites

Management tools help agencies become well-oiled machines. Each task is completed with the least amount of effort and highest rate of  accuracy.  For people managing multiple WordPress sites, the daily…

PHP 8.3 Support Added to Staging Feature
PHP 8.3 Support Added to Staging Feature

We’ve introduced PHP version 8.3 to our staging sites. Test out new features, code changes, and updates on the latest PHP version without affecting your live website. Update PHP confidently…

How do you update and backup your website?

Creating Backup and Updating website can be time consuming and error-prone. BlogVault will save you hours everyday while providing you complete peace of mind.

Updating Everything Manually?

But it’s too time consuming, complicated and stops you from achieving your full potential. You don’t want to put your business at risk with inefficient management.

Backup Your WordPress Site

Install the plugin on your website, let it sync and you’re done. Get automated, scheduled backups for your critical site data, and make sure your website never experiences downtime again.