WordPress is the world’s leading content-management platform for websites. It is built to give you maximum freedom and control over your small business’s website. However, many small business owners are not IT professionals. And they may not have the resources to fully develop a WordPress website from scratch. Or even hire an IT pro to manage your website’s backend on a day-to-day basis.
If you fall into these categories, you’ve probably considered a managed WordPress hosting platform. The hosting service will take over the daily tasks of backend services, updates, security, performance, and maintenance. This will not only free you up to focus on your core business but will also give you an edge when it comes to making your website useful and competitive.
In this article, we’ll take a look at five of the benefits of choosing managed WordPress hosting over going it alone as a small business owner. Here are the five best reasons to choose managed WordPress hosting:
How Can Small Businesses Benefit from Managed WordPress Hosting?
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WordPress Hosting for Small Businesses: Enhanced Security
Because WordPress is the most popular content management system and is used on most websites worldwide. It’s also a major target for hackers and unscrupulous actors. This doesn’t mean that you should avoid WordPress, but it does mean that any WordPress vulnerabilities can be quickly exploited and can be a risk to your business. Managing security and ensuring the security of your site becomes a major, ongoing challenge for any business owner.
Managed WordPress hosting takes some of that burden off you by shifting the responsibility for many security features to the hosting provider. Managed hosting providers typically provide enhanced security features beyond what you would get from basic WordPress. Examples of these security features include scans for malware, firewalls, automated backups, and security patches. With a managed hosting service, the hosting service takes the initiative to implement security patches. This is rather than having to be aware of, seek out, and implement each patch.
As a small business, this level of service is essential for helping you protect your website. Particularly when you do not have your own IT department or the resources to handle security tasks on your own.
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Automatic Updates and Maintenance
One of the downsides of complete customization is that you become responsible for the maintenance and updating of your site. Therefore, you must be constantly on alert for patches, fixes, and security updates. When you use a managed hosting provider, your provider will handle the core WordPress updates for you.
You can focus on your core business rather than spend your time on IT. A managed hosting provider will work behind the scenes to push plugin updates. It keeps the server maintained so you don’t have to. As a small business owner, it’s beneficial to have someone else worry about the technical details of keeping your website up-to-date. This is especially true if you are not an IT expert.
Offloading the technical side of your site maintenance to dedicated experts ensures that you won’t have to be a master of information systems to keep your site up and running. Therefore, you won’t experience compatibility issues when updates come through.
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WordPress Hosting for Small Businesses: Optimized Performance
As a small business, you probably rely on your website to communicate key information to your customers. Also, to provide them with e-commerce options to help build your customer base beyond those who walk in your door.
As a result, you need your website to move fast, maintain reliability, and perform as well or better than your bigger competitors’ sites. A managed WordPress hosting service can help you optimize your site. It ensures your customers or clients have a positive experience visiting your online storefront or information pages.
Managed WordPress hosting services provide excellent optimization. This is because they are specifically tailored for WordPress. Thus, they know the best way to handle any and every WordPress challenge.
With many managed hosting services, you will receive performance optimization services such as caching and content delivery networks, as well as optimizing server configurations for speed. Such services help to ensure that your website will load quickly. And this doesn’t just make for happier customers; it also improves your search engine rankings, which helps your customers find you online.
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Expert Support
When you use WordPress on your own and run into difficulty, it can be hard to find the answers you need. Wading through reams of online discussions and self-help guides can be a challenge. Sometimes you just need an expert to tell you what to do or to do it for you. When you use a managed WordPress hosting service, most will offer specialized support services. These allow you to talk with experts who know their way around WordPress.
While these services often handle most backend issues without your knowledge, you might run into trouble with front-end services or unexpected emergencies. When this occurs, you want to be secure in the knowledge that you will be able to reach a reliable and professional WordPress expert who can fix your problems quickly. Especially when they threaten to knock you off line or prevent customers from placing orders.
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WordPress Hosting for Small Businesses: Scalability
Most small businesses hope to become bigger businesses. So, you will need hosting solutions that can grow along with your business. Even if you were to develop a great WordPress site on your own today, would you still be able to handle all of its complexity when your business is 50% larger? And your website is three times more complex? When you use managed WordPress hosting, you will have a service that will scale along with your business.
That way, when you get bigger, you can upgrade your key resources, like bandwidth, storage, and processing power, in time with your business growth. This is all without having to undergo a complex migration process. No one wants to be caught flat-footed when a surge of new business causes your website to slow down and crawl because it can’t handle the traffic. You want a hosting service that can keep pace with your resource demands as your business expands.
Conclusion
When you consider the five key benefits that managed WordPress hosting provides and compare a managed hosting service’s cost to the cost of hiring one or more full-time IT professionals to perform all of these services for you, you will likely find that managed WordPress hosting is a valuable contributor to your small business’s bottom line. In short, if you don’t have in-house IT or expert knowledge of WordPress. Choosing a managed WordPress hosting provider can give you a professional website experience on a budget and free you up to do what you do best: run your business.
