If you want to build a website or start a blog, you’ve probably discovered by now that you’re going to need some form of hosting.

You might have even checked out a few companies to see what you can expect, at least regarding costs.

And you might be very confused. Don’t worry, though, because you’re not the only one. Even experienced developers can have a tough time figuring out hosting at times because there are so many variables involved.

In this article, we’re going to look at the various types of web hosting services available, and even give you a few pointers so you can more easily figure out what the best option is for your needs.

Understanding How Hosting Works

To better understand types of hosting, it’s essential first to understand how hosting works in general.

When you check out a website online, what you are actually looking at is a bunch of code that your computer, via the browser, translates into something visual. It’s like when someone uses sheet music to play a song. The sheet music is the code, the player is the browser, and the song is the website you actually see.

Now, all the code that makes up a website is stored in a number of different files, and those files need to be kept somewhere people can access them. That’s where hosting comes in.

Hosting, essentially, means that a website’s files are being stored on a server that is connected to the internet so people can access, download, convert, and read those files via their browser. A server is the same thing as a computer, but much more powerful, thereby allowing lots and lots of people to access the same data at the same time.

If we’re going to get really pedantic, a host is the company providing you with access to the server on which you store your website’s files. Alongside access to the hardware, they also often provide additional services such as server management, backups, website building, malware scanning, and more.

Types of Web Hosting Services

Before we take a look at the different types of hosting available, it’s important to understand how types of hosting can be categorized. One way of categorizing hosting is based on how the servers are set up and the amount of access you have to those servers. Thus, the result is the following types of hosting:

1. Free web hosting
2. Shared hosting
3. VPS hosting
4. Dedicated hosting
5. Cloud hosting
6. Colocation hosting
7. Self-service hosting

Another way to categorize types of hosting is according to the level of management the hosting company provides. Like any computer, a server needs to be maintained and upgraded. Though most hosts offer managed hosting, you can find hosting companies that offer unmanaged packages. This means you’ll be doing all the maintenance and upgrading yourself, but you’ll have more flexibility. Of course, you can find packages that offer different management services, so it’s not really an either/or situation.

Hosting types can also be categorized according to the additional services provided. Some of the additional services include backups, malware scanning, SSL certificates, degree of support, site creation, and so on.

To take a very basic approach, these are three elements that make up a hosting plan. For example, you can have a shared hosting plan with full server management, SSL certificates, backups, and other additional services. Of course, the more services, the more expensive the plan will be.

So, now let’s take a look at the different web hosting options

1) Free Web Hosting

There’s no such thing as a free ride, and though you think you are getting free hosting with these services, this is not actually the case. With a free web hosting service, you are not technically creating your own website, but creating one or more pages on someone else’s website.

For example, WordPress allows you to create a free site or blog on their wordpress.com website. However, you’ll find that your website is actually a subdomain of their domain. In other words, instead of www.yourwebsite.com, the URL will be www.yourwebsite.wordpress.com. They do give you the option to drop the WordPress bit, but you have to pay for the privilege. In other words, it’s free only as long as you don’t mind having WordPress in your URL, or ads splashed across the page.

When to Use Free Web Hosting

If you’re only interested in hosting just because you want to start your own blog to express your personal thoughts, then free web hosting is probably more than enough for your needs. There are quite a few great options available, and they make things as easy as possible. They offer all the tools you need to get your site up and running quickly, including free templates, community support, and some level of customization (not too much though).

However, if you’re looking for a website for a business or for professional services, then free web hosting will make you look unprofessional. You can find hosting for as little as a few bucks per month, plus the annual cost of the domain, which is rarely much more than $10. If you opt for free web hosting, you’ll be telling everyone that your business is in such dire straits that you can’t afford to spend $100 per year to make a good impression.

2) Shared Hosting

Shared hosting is the cheapest option you can find where you get your own domain. It’s generally best suited for small websites without much traffic. To understand why you need to understand how this type of hosting works.

When you sign up for a shared hosting plan, your website will be sharing space on a server with other websites. To make things more efficient and so they can offer cheap hosting options, hosting companies put multiple users on the same server. Some servers can have over 1,000 users. When you take into account that every user can have multiple sites, depending on the plan they signed up for, you’ll quickly realize that one server can have as many as 5,000 sites.

As you recall, a server is like a computer, but more powerful. Even so, it still has limited resources, such as RAM, CPU speed, and hard drive space. And in a shared hosting environment, those 5,000 sites are using the same limited resources.

Then there’s the traffic. For every visit, the server has to “work” to send all the data being requested by each visitor to the site. The amount of data varies based on how the site is set up, and whether that person is a first-time visitor or not. However, if you take an average of even just three visitors per day, that’s 15,000 requests, which then have to be multiplied by the number of files being downloaded. Yes, those available resources can get eaten up pretty quickly.

There are also other issues to consider.

For example, one site might get massive amounts of visitors, which means it will end up hogging a large portion of the server’s resources, thereby slowing your own site down.

Or one site might have problematic code, which could lead to it using up 60% to 70% of the server’s RAM, leaving the other 4,999 sites to work with only 30% to 40% of the server’s resources.

So, you might find your site is running at a snail’s pace. Worse is that you won’t even be able to tell what the problem is because you don’t have access to the server to check what’s going on.

Now, in all fairness, most hosting companies try to keep things running smoothly by identifying problematic sites, or those with high traffic, and either working with the owner to fix the issue or temporarily disabling the site. Unfortunately, though, these options rarely work over the long-term, and though it’s not the fault of the company, it still won’t help your website load properly and at a decent speed.

If you do find that your website is running slowly and have eliminated all other potential causes, you can always ask your host to move your site to another server. Some might help you, some might not. But it’s worth a try.

Remember, though, that with a shared hosting plan, you’re probably paying between $5 and $25 per month at the most, depending on the plan you chose. Do you really think it’s feasible for a company to have their customer support team spend hours fixing a problem for someone who’s only paying them $5 per month? If you said no, then you’re quite right.

When to Use Shared Hosting

While shared hosting does have problems, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good option. If you want a website to host a personal diary, or are a business just starting out, then shared hosting is a good option until you start getting a constant stream of steady traffic. Likewise, shared hosting is also good if you want to test a website, or as a base for your website while it’s still in development.

Of course, shared hosting is also a good option if you’re on a shoestring budget. Not everyone can afford a VPS or a dedicated server, and shared hosting allows businesses to expand their client bases on a global level at an affordable cost.

Some good options for shared hosting plans are provided by SiteGround and Bluehost.

3) Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

Virtual Private Server hosting is the next step up from shared hosting. It’s quite a popular option for website owners looking for an upgrade from traditional shared hosting because it is quite balanced from all points of view, including cost.

A VPS server still requires you to share space with other users on the same physical server, but the way this is achieved is entirely different to traditional shared hosting.

Firstly, with a VPS server, you are rarely going to have more than 20 users. The advantage, of course, is that there’s less overall stress on the machine from the get go. The real benefit with a VPS, though, comes in the form of a virtual machine monitor or hypervisor.

A hypervisor is a piece of software that allows you to create and operate multiple virtual machines (also known as guest machines) on a single computer (also known as the host machine). It’s like having multiple virtual computers on the same server, each with their own amount of dedicated CPU speed, RAM, and HDD space.

With VPS hosting, what happens is that a guest machine is created for every user. So, if there are 10 users on a server, that server will be split into 10 guest machines, with each machine getting an equivalent amount of RAM, CPU speed and HDD space. If the server has 32GB of RAM and 1TB of hard drive space, for example, each user will get 3.2GB of RAM and 100GB of hard drive space.

The advantage to this is that a user cannot hog more than the amount of resources they’ve been allocated, thereby ensuring the other websites don’t suffer. So, if another user’s website hits their resource limit, their site might go down, but it won’t affect yours in any way.

Virtual private servers are also much more flexible, allowing you to configure your own environment. You can’t do the same thing with traditional shared hosting because any changes you’d make to the server would change everyone else’s environment as well. However, with a VPS, you have your own virtual machine, meaning that you can configure many more things without affecting anyone else, which is something developers are sure to appreciate.

Another benefit of VPS hosting is that it’s easy to scale up. Your site is being hosted by a virtual machine, which only uses a percentage of the server’s resources. If you need more resources, it takes a few minutes, at most, for the provider to modify the settings and grant you the resources you need. This is excellent for any business owner who wants to make sure their site thrives without any embarrassing downtime that could affect their potential.

When to Use Traditional VPS Hosting

If you do a little research, you’ll find that some low-end VPS packages are as cheap as shared hosting, as they start at $10/month. However, a decent enough plan will set you back around $25 per month, whereas the average is $50 per month.

As you can imagine, the difference in price is based on additional services but mainly by the amount of resources you are allocated.

You can go as high as $150 per month, but if you need that much space and computing power, it’s likely your site is doing so well that the cost will be more than worth keeping your site running smoothly.

So, if your budget allows you to spend $15 or more per month on hosting, then it’s advisable to go with a VPS-based plan over traditional shared hosting.

Even on the other end of the scale, you might find that a high-end VPS plan will be a better option than a low-end dedicated server. However, we’ll discuss this a little more in the next section.

Some good VPS package providers include HostGator and Bluehost.

4) Dedicated Server Hosting

With a dedicated server hosting plan, any faulty coding or problematic websites are no one’s fault but your own because you are completely alone on the server. So, right off the bat, one benefit of dedicated hosting is that you don’t have to worry about other people’s sites hogging up your resources, just like with a VPS plan.

When you’re on a dedicated plan, quite a few providers are more than happy to let you customize the server to a certain degree. You might be able to choose how much and what type of RAM to equip the server with, as well as other hardware, and you could also decide on which operating system that server will run on. In other words, you’ll be able to make any changes you need, which could come in handy if you plan on running special software on the server.

If you server technology isn’t your thing and the aforementioned flexibility scares the life out of you, you can opt for a managed plan, but you’ll still have to do quite a few things on your own.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s unmanaged dedicated hosting, where you have to do everything yourself, including installing the operating systems and all the tools necessary for the operation of a server, security, and more. While this might seem wonderful to some, for others it can be a pain.

So, if you really want to go the dedicated route, then your best bet is to hire a server admin to handle all the behind-the-scenes stuff. Even if you are proficient with server technology, hiring someone might still be a good idea because maintaining a server could take valuable time that could be better funneled into activities centered on further increasing the success of your site.

With a server admin on board, though, you’ll find that the degree of flexibility and level of control provided by a dedicated server can be quite beneficial. For example, you can set up your applications and software to run as efficiently as possible, or you can install a wide range of tools dedicated to speeding up your website.

However, there is one more aspect you need to consider, and that is hardware issues. With a Virtual Private Server, if a RAM module fails, another module will pick up the slack, or the defective hardware is quickly replaced by the hosting company automatically. However, with a dedicated server, the wait time might be longer, especially if you are completely responsible for monitoring the health of the server.

When to Use a Dedicated Server

So, the question is whether dedicated hosting is ever a good idea. To be honest, nowadays, with cloud VPS systems gaining ground, even a massive site wouldn’t really need a dedicated server. While a dedicated server can be better than traditional VPS, it still can’t beat out cloud VPS regarding scalability.

A dedicated server is only really necessary if you have extremely specialized hardware requirements, or you need to have a massive amount of control over data privacy. When you’re on a dedicated server, you are separate from everyone else, which isn’t always a good thing but is unbeatable from a security point of view.

Some good options regarding dedicated hosting plans include SiteGround and HostGator.

5) Cloud Hosting

In essence, cloud hosting is similar to having a Virtual Private Server, but to understand how it works, we need to take a quick look at how cloud computing works.

The difference between traditional computing and cloud computing is a bit like the difference between using your laptop on battery and plugging it in. When you’re running your laptop just off the battery, you can use it until the battery runs out of power. If your laptop usage is light, say only browsing a website or two, or using the word processor, then the battery power will last longer. If you’re playing a graphics-heavy, resource-intensive game, the power will run out faster.

Once you plug it in, though, you can use your laptop as much as you like because it’s pulling power from the main grid. So, no matter how heavy your usage is, your laptop will keep on running for as long as you want it to because it’s receiving power from a huge network.

Cloud-based computing is similar in the sense that you gain access to a massive network of servers, and can use those resources based on your needs with no interruption to service. In other words, with cloud hosting, you are never going to find yourself running out of resources, regardless of how gigantic your site gets.

While a traditional Virtual Private Server can be scaled up, there is a limit. The maximum resources you can get with a VPS are the equivalent of what the server is equipped with.

So, if the server has 32GB of RAM and 4TB of hard drive space, you are never going to be able to get 64GB of RAM and 6TB of space. You won’t be able to even get 33GB of RAM (yes, we know it’s not possible, but we’re just making a point) and 4.01TB of space because it doesn’t physically exist.

However, with a cloud-based VPS, you don’t have the same restrictions. It’s a bit like the reverse of a traditional VPS system. Where the latter cuts up a physical server into multiple virtual machines, cloud-based hosting takes a bunch of servers, combines them into one massive virtual machine, and then turns it into a VPS-like system but splitting up that massive virtual machine into multiple small ones.

Besides scalability, another great advantage a cloud-based hosting system has is that it is more efficient at protecting your site against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. With a DDoS attack, a massive influx of requests is made to the server hosting the site, thereby overwhelming and crashing it, which means a DDoS attack is not a security issue in the strictest sense. This type of attack is used to bring a website down for various, often malicious, reasons.

At the moment, the best defense against these attacks is a combination of blocking as many requests as possible and spreading the remainder throughout a big network. With a cloud-based system, the network is at your fingertips and will be better able to face up to a large attack than a system using a single physical server.

When to Use Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a great option for anyone looking for a scalable option that goes beyond traditional options.

However, it should be noted that a lot of hosts are switching their traditional VPS systems to cloud-based ones anyway because of the benefits they derive as well, including easier maintenance and less work.

So, even if you are shopping around for a regular VPS, you might still find yourself with cloud-based VPS hosting because so many companies are making the switch, with the majority imitating Google and Amazon’s cloud-based architectures.

If you’re looking for some good cloud-based hosting packages, then check out Linode, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.

6) Colocation Hosting

With colocation hosting, you buy your own server, rent space in a data center’s rack and use their bandwidth. It requires you physically taking the server to the colocation provider and installing it, though some providers offer managed services and can handle the installation and maintenance. You then use the bandwidth, IP, and power given to you by the provider.

Colocation hosting is similar to having a dedicated server, except that you own the hardware. So, the advantages and disadvantages are similar, except that since it’s your own server, you can do whatever you like without restriction, including upgrading the hardware.

On the flip side, if hardware fails, you will be the one responsible for the replacement, at least regarding cost.

Colocation can be more expensive than other forms of web hosting, especially once you factor in the investment in hardware. It should also be noted that the cost can fluctuate wildly as it is generally connected with the amount of data traffic. So, one month you could have a reasonable bill, while another it can be sky high.

You might also have difficulty physically accessing the server, depending on where it is located. If something happens on Christmas day, for example, you’re probably going to take a little while to find someone to go to the server and fix the issue, whereas, with a regular web host, they’ll have a backup plan to ensure nothing goes wrong.

When to Use Colocation

If you want a simple blog or a relatively small website, then colocation is not worth the hassle. This is also true for any individual or business who doesn’t have the expertise to set up and maintain the server, despite the managed services available.

On the other hand, it is a good option for small to mid-size businesses who want to have a large web presence but don’t want to deal with the hassle of a regular web host.

Also, if you need a more robust solution than is available from a web host, colocation might be a good idea for you.

However, it’s still a good idea to at least look into cloud hosting before you opt for colocation, especially since the cost of a decent server can be quite high.

7) Self-Service Web Hosting

As the name implies, this is a completely DIY form of hosting. You buy the servers, install and configure all the software, ensure backups are made, provide cooling to keep the servers from melting down, and so on and so forth. Depending on your needs, you’re essentially building a mini data center, which will require space, hardware, and staff to operate.

It’s pretty much like having your own dedicated server, expect that the sky’s the limit regarding resources. Or, your bank account is at least. You can buy as many servers as you like, building your own cloud architecture, like Amazon or Google.

When to Use Self-Service Web Hosting

If you have a massive site that generates a lot of revenue and very deep pockets, then self-service web hosting is definitely an option. This is especially the case if the huge amount of revenue you generate is dependent on your site running smoothly and never having downtime. With your own network in place, there’s no one else to blame except yourself if something goes wrong.

However, it’s expensive and only really worth it for large companies, especially when you also take into account the number of things that can go wrong.

Again, consider looking into cloud-hosting if you really want to scale up your website, and come back to the idea of self-service hosting once your website is so big it rivals Amazon. At that point, it might be worth investing in your own data center.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress hosting isn’t technically a type of hosting, but more of a combination of hosting type with additional services. In essence, it’s a type of hosting package, but WordPress has become so popular that it’s worth mentioning, especially for those of you who aren’t all that technically proficient.

So, managed WordPress hosting is a service where the hosting company manages all the techy stuff related to keeping your WordPress site up and running smoothly, including handling things such as speed improvement, security, updates, scalability, and daily backups.

The idea is to make life as simple and easy as possible for you, allowing you to focus on your business, rather than tinkering with WordPress every other hour.

You also get great support with managed WordPress hosting, generally from experts who have plenty of experience with this content management system, instead of having to deal with someone who is reading to you from a manual.

Another benefit hosting is that the servers are set up specifically to run this CMS, which means they tend to be really fast, even if your site gets massive amounts of traffic.

Security is also much better because the security is very tight, and your site is constantly being scanned for malicious code, while also ensuring that all hacking attempts are blocked. So, while no system is completely hacker-proof, you are getting as close to being hacker-proof as possible when you opt for managed WordPress hosting.

Backups are made every day, and the CMS is updated automatically. In other words, you’ll never face having to restore your site from a backup that is a year old because you forgot to make regular backups. You also won’t be giving hackers a way into your site but not installing essential updates.

Like with any hosting package, there are drawbacks too.

Managed WordPress hosting is still shared hosting, in the sense that your website is sharing server space with a bunch of other websites and users, yet the price is a fair bit higher. Shared hosting can be as cheap as $1 per month if you find a good deal, but even when there aren’t sales going on, you can still get shared hosting for $3 – $4 per month. With Managed WordPress hosting, prices tend to start at $20 and go up.

You’re also pretty limited. First, the servers are set up to run WordPress-based websites, so if you want to try anything else, you’re out of luck.

Now, let’s assume that’s why you would opt for this type of package in the first place – because you want a WordPress website – so this wouldn’t be an issue. However, there is another limitation, and that is that not all plugins will work on these servers. The host will block any plugin that slows your site loading speed, which won’t necessarily be a disadvantage all the time, but it can become an issue.

Of course, you also have less control than with even shared hosting. You have very little say in what is changed and what isn’t, which can be irritating, especially if you know at least a little about WordPress.

You might say that you would go for a managed WordPress hosting package precisely because you don’t want to tinker behind the scenes, but there are times when you might not want to make certain changes.

For example, you might be using a great SEO plugin that hasn’t been updated to the new WordPress version yet, though it’s in the pipeline. With a managed package, WordPress would be updated immediately, and you’d be stuck without your valuable plugin (which you might even be paying for) until the update comes out.

When to Use Managed WordPress Hosting

If you’re creating a personal blog because you want to share your thoughts and recipes with the world, then managed WordPress hosting is definitely not for you. You can opt for free hosting or for a small shared hosting plan.

However, if you are a freelancer or own a small business and your site gets quite a bit of traffic, but you aren’t technically savvy or simply would rather not fiddle with the behind-the-scenes stuff, then managed WordPress hosting is a great option for you.

You don’t have to deal with security issues, updates, speed problems, uptime issues and so on. So, if you’re looking for a hassle-free experience with great support and don’t mind the limited flexibility or the cost, then managed WordPress hosting is definitely for you.

Conclusion

Choosing a hosting plan can be complicated, especially when you start looking at all of the additional services available. The first step is deciding on the type of hosting you require, namely the ones we’ve covered in this article, which we hope has made your decision easier.

Once you’ve decided on the type of hosting that’s best for your needs, you can start looking into what additional services you really need. There are all sorts of options, but it’s unlikely you’ll need everything, especially at first.

If you’re a beginner, we advise going with a shared hosting package. It’s the most cost-effective option, looks more professional than a free web host, and still provides what you need at the start of your journey.

When you’ve figured out what you need, research the various web hosts to find the one best suited for you. We recommend checking out our reviews and recommended hosts to find the best deal for your needs. Don’t forget to check out the resources and services they offer and not just the prices.

Once you’ve narrowed it down to a few companies, it will come down to your personal preference. One way you can determine which you prefer is to give each a bit of a trial run. It might require a small investment of money and time, but it’s the best way to see whether a host is a good fit for your needs.

Have your traffic numbers started to dip?

Are your sales declining?

Does it seem like no matter what you do, you can’t get your conversion rate up?

If you’ve tried everything else under the sun, have you checked your website’s loading speed?

A website’s speed will impact traffic, pages views, conversion rates, sales and much more. The slower your pages are to load, the harder it will be for you to draw in visitors and keep them on your site.

Studies reveal that 47 percent of internet users expect a site to take less than 2 seconds to load, while 40 percent of them will leave if it takes longer than 3 seconds. Furthermore, a delay of a mere second in the load time of your page can cause your conversion rate to decline by 7 percent.

In other words, you need to find out how fast (or slow) your website loads and get to optimizing its performance as quickly as possible. To that end, we’re providing a step-by-step guide for you to follow that will lead to significant improvements in your site’s loading speed.

Also Read: HostGator Vs Bluehost Web hosting comparison 2017

How to Test the Current Speed of Your Website

The first step to improving the speed of your website is knowing where it is at the moment. After all, without something to compare to, there’s no way you can tell whether you’ve made improvements or not.

Testing the loading speed of your website isn’t difficult at all. It certainly doesn’t involve you sitting there timing your pages’ load times with a stopwatch, if that’s what you were thinking. Instead, you’ll be using a number of tools that make it quite easy. Some of them will even provide recommendations on what you can do to improve.

Google has given us the PageSpeed Insights tool to measure the performance of our websites. The advantage is that it’s simple to use, seeing as you only have to enter the URL of your site and the tool will get to work. It will return a score and even provide suggestions as to what you can do to improve the speed of your site.

Test your website speed using Google PageSpeed here.

The problem with PageSpeed Insights, though, is that it only measures the speed of the homepage of your website (or the page you entered the URL for), and it doesn’t actually tell you the precise time it takes to load the page, instead providing a score that also takes into account best practices. Another problem is that some of the recommendations simply aren’t feasible – you just need certain elements and can’t just do away with them for the sake of speed.

Better options include Pingdom and WebPagetest, which provide a breakdown of page load time, time to first byte and start render time.

Test your website speed using Pingdom.

Pingdom is especially useful as it allows you to test the speed of your website from different locations all over the world, which is important if you have an international audience. It also provides suggestions on what can be improved but also a breakdown of load times by content type and more. It’s certainly one of the best tools out there for measuring site speed, especially for non-techies.

Test your website speed using Gmetrix.

So, plug your website’s URL into Pingdom and save the results. Now that you have a “control” test against which you can measure the changes you make, it’s time to get started cleaning up your site.

Important! Before you make any changes to your website, make sure to back everything up just in case something goes wrong.

Also read , 15 mistakes that slow down your site speed and what to do about them?

Step #1: Change Your Host or Hosting Plan

When first creating a website, most people opt for the cheapest host and the cheapest hosting plan, which usually means they are using shared hosting. It’s only natural to do this, but the problem is that many forget hosting has a lot to do with the speed of their site, and as their site grows, it gets slower and slower because they are still using hosting that’s inadequate for their site’s needs.

If your website has outgrown your hosting, then one of the quickest and simplest ways to improve the speed of your website is to change hosts or to switch to a better hosting plan, if one is available.

So, if you’re still using shared hosting, you need to consider a dedicated server or VPS, either of which will lead to a major improvement in load time. The option you choose will depend on the needs of your business, which is why you should take the time to study both options in-depth.

However, our recommendation is to go with VPS or Virtual Private Servers hosting because multiple servers are used to distribute the content. It’s also scalable and generally the best option for small to medium businesses.

With a dedicated server, you do have a lot more control and aren’t sharing anything with anyone else, including CPU, RAM or bandwidth, but there is also less flexibility because it is usually only the one server. Also, it tends to be much more expensive than the VPS option.

If you’re reticent to switch hosts because you’re not sure what you have to do to migrate your site, there’s no need to worry. Most hosting companies will either provide you with full instructions on how to do it or will have a technician available to help you, especially if you are opting for a VPS or dedicate server hosting plan.

Here’s a comparison of server response time of low level and higher level plans of SiteGround web hosting. It can be clearly stated that being in a high level plan improves our website performance significantly.

Lower level plans

Higher level plan 

Step #2: Optimize Your Images

Images are the biggest elements on a webpage, after videos. The larger the image, the longer it takes to load. And when an image hasn’t been properly optimized, load times drop even more.

The problem is that if you want to draw traffic to your site, you need images. It also doesn’t help that those images have to be large and excellent quality because new screens demand it.

So, what can you do to optimize images and increase the speed of your website?

Eliminate Superfluous Images

The first thing you need to do is comb through your website and decide whether or not you really need all those images to achieve the effect you are after. Yes, images attract visitors, but you also have to remember that a simple design is often the best, both from an aesthetic viewpoint but also in terms of performance.

It is true that a good image is worth a thousand words, though, so it’s up to you to find the right balance.

Replace Images with CSS or JavaScript

Try to use CSS and JavaScript instead of images as much as possible. Code, if done properly, will always transfer faster than actual images, which is why you need to replace as many image files as possible. Effects such as gradients and shadows, as well as animations can be replaced with CSS, for example.

Eliminate Any Text Encoded as an Image

If you have any images that are nothing more than text, you should replace these with a web font. You can find all sorts of beautiful typefaces to complement your design while improving the load speed of your site as well as the user experience. Remember, when text is delivered as an image, it cannot be selected, searched, zoomed in or accessed. Thus, it’s always good practice to ensure all text is offered as a web font.

Replace Raster with Vector Where Possible

Lines, polygons and points are used to build an image in vector graphics, whereas a raster image shows a picture by encoding the value of every pixel and displaying them in a rectangular grid. Thus, when you zoom in all the way on a vector image, there will be no loss of quality, but if you do the same on a raster image, you will eventually only see a bunch of different colored rectangles.

The vector format is ideal for pictures that include lots of geometric shapes, such as logos and icons, whereas raster images are best for pictures with lots of detail.

The advantage of vector formats is that they can be converted to the SVG or Scalable Vector Graphics format, which is an XML-based type of image for 2D graphics that all modern browsers support. This image format presents as code, which is much faster than a raster format.

However, please note than when exporting to SVG, the code can contain a lot of metadata that is often not necessary and can slow things down. That is why it’s a good idea to minify your SVG files by using a tool like svgo, which can reduce the files size by as much as 58%. To further reduce the file size, GZIP compression can be used, which requires you to ensure that your server has been configured for SVG compression.

Check out this post, Difference between Vector and Raster Images.

Choose the Right Image Format

Depending on what you need, you have three image formats to choose from, namely PNG, JPEG and GIF.

GIF should only be used when you need animation because it has a limited color palette of 256 colors, which means it’s not the best choice for the majority of image.

If you need to keep the highest resolution possible and preserve fine detail at the same time, then PNG is your best bet. This is because It produces the highest quality image as lossy compression isn’t applied beyond choosing the color palette. Unfortunately, this means the file sizes can be much larger than you’d expect.

In most case, though, you can get away with using JPEG files. With JPEG, a combination of lossy and lossless compression is used, allowing for a smaller file size while still maintaining decent quality.

Check out this post, What is the difference between GIF, PNG AND JPEG image format?

Scale Your Raster Images Before Uploading

Never upload an oversize image and use html (or WordPress) to resize it. This is because the image will only appear smaller, but the browser will actually load the full-size image. In other words, if your image container is 240px wide, don’t upload an image that’s 2000px wide and set the width parameter to 240px as this is a surefire way to slow your page down. Instead, use an image editing tool to scale and/or crop the image to the right size before uploading it to your site.

Reduce the Color Depth of Raster Images

Depending on the image, you might be able to reduce its bit-depth and reduce the file size by as much as 50%. To do this, simply change the images bit depth from 8 bits per channel, which results in over 16 million colors, to a color palette consisting in 256 colors in total.

Keep in mind that this works best with images that use only a few colors. Images that are more complex and feature gradual color transitions can end up looking pixelated if you lower the bit depth too much. However, it is a matter of trial and error, so keep testing until you find the perfect balance between visual appeal and file size.

Loading time for images before optimisation

Loading time for images after optimisation

As the above test results shows, having your image optimised can significantly reduce its load time.

For WordPress Sites

If you have a WordPress site, you can use either WP Smush or EWWW Image Optimizer to reduce the file size of your images without overly affecting the quality of the image.

Step #3: Clean Up Your Plugins and Add-ons

If you have too many plugins and add-ons, you might find your website slowing down to a crawl. Paying attention to these is especially important if your site is based on WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.

Some users have found that by cleaning up their plugins, they can increase the speed of their website by as much as 300%. You should also consider that it’s not just the number of plugins you have – there are plenty of sites with dozens of plugins that run fast – but also their quality. For example, a website with 80 plugins can load a lot faster than one with a mere 10 plugins if the latter is chock full of poor quality plugins.

Yes, plugins are a necessity to a certain degree as the improve the functionality of your website, but it’s also imperative to only use plugins when they are absolutely necessary.

Plugins affect the load times of your pages by issuing more requests and calls to the server than the core WordPress files already demand. What happens is this. When someone navigates to a WordPress page, the server and browser communicate, with the latter making requests that the former responds to. The core files of your site have already set out a series of actions, but plugins can change these actions by inserting additional code. The result is more calls and responses, ergo more time to load the page.

Thus, the number of plugins, having poorly configured or optimized plugins, having inefficient plugins or out-of-date ones can all significantly slow down your website.

So, how can we fix this problem?

Remove Plugins You Don’t Need

The first step is to manually go through all your plugins and delete the ones you don’t need and/or aren’t using. Simply deactivating them might work to a certain degree, but it still means there’s code hanging around that shouldn’t be there and it could still affect the speed of your site. It’s best to completely delete all these plugins. So, comb through and delete as follows:

• Plugins you aren’t using;
• Plugins you don’t need;
• Plugins that haven’t been updated in a gazillion years.

You want to remove plugins that haven’t been updated because you can be sure that they don’t function as seamlessly as they should with the most updated version of your CMS. Plus, if a plugin hasn’t been updated in two years, you can be pretty sure it’s no longer supported and won’t get fixed. In some cases, these old plugins can really do a number on your site and the situation gets worse and worse until your site has a meltdown. So, get rid of these old plugins and, if absolutely necessary, replace them with an alternative that has support.

Update Your Existing Plugins

After you’ve culled the herd, you will have to update all your existing plugins. Every new update comes with improvements and security fixes, which means you could be exposing your site to major issues if you don’t update regularly. Plus, if all your plugins aren’t updated, they could be performing poorly because of it. So, when you start checking which plugins are causing the problems, you could end up eliminating a plugin that would have worked fine if it had been up to date.

It’s true that plugins should update automatically, but this doesn’t always happen and it’s best to manually check every plugin.

Discover the Plugins That Are Causing Problems

There are two ways to determine which plugins are causing problems on your site. One is slightly more time-consuming and one is simpler but we’ll present both here.

For the first method, you will need to use a site speed test tool, like Pingdom, GTmetrix or Uptrends. The first step is to take a baseline measurement of your site’s load speed with all plugins activated. Check every major top-level page, especially those pages with forms on them. Make a note of the speeds.

Now, start deactivating those plugins that you suspect are causing problems – big packages like bbPress or Jetpack can be problematic and are worth testing. Deactivate one of these plugins, then check the speed again. Deactivate another and so on and so forth. Make sure to make a note of the load time after each test.

Once you’ve gone through all your plugins, you will have a good idea of which ones are causing problems and should be replaced with faster alternatives.

The simpler alternative is to use Query Monitor. It has a bit of a learning curve but it will analyze your plugins and show you which ones are causing the most trouble.

Important Note: GoDaddy developed P3 or Plugin Performance Profiler a while ago and many sites still recommend it. It was a great tool – simple to use and gave you all the information you needed on your plugin performance – but it hasn’t been updated in 2 years. It tends to cause problems now, with some users reporting horror stories of their entire sites returning fatal errors, ergo we recommend you steer clear of this plugin.

Note that it’s a good idea to check your plugins regularly as some can start acting weird over time. If you monitor them, you can quickly change the problematic ones before they start seriously affecting your site and traffic.

Step #4: Enable Gzip Compression

If you’ve ever compressed a file on your computer, you’ve seen how much smaller in size it is after you’re done. With compression, you can turn a 60mb file into a 5mb one, which is a significant reduction in size. And that’s precisely what you want to do with your website, i.e. make it as small as possible.

Compression works on websites in a similar way, except we’ll be using a different tool known as Gzip. What it does is to compress your site’s files, turning them into zip files, which significantly reduces their size and massively increases the speed of your website.

So, how do you enable Gzip compression?

How to Use Gzip Compression to Optimize Your Site

When a visitor opens up your website, their browser sends a request to the server hosting your website, asking for the files of the page it wants to open. The server receives the request, searches around for the files and sends back a response that it’s found the files in question and starts sending the files. The browser then starts to download the files and once fully downloaded, displays the content.

While this system works, it’s not very efficient, which is where Gzip comes in. Not only will compressing the file save time, it will also save on bandwidth.

With Gzip compression, what happens is as follows: the browser sends the request to the server, telling it that it wants the compressed version of the files if available. The server once again searches for the files, sends the response to the browser when it finds them, compresses the files and sends them. The browser then downloads the files, which goes much faster because they’re a lot smaller, and then unzips them to show the user.

To enable Gzip compression, you first have to figure out whether you are running an IIS server or an Apache server. For IIS servers, you have to enable the compression feature in the settings. You can find full instructions on how to do this on this page from Microsoft.

In Apache, you will have to add some code to your .htaccess file. But don’t worry as it’s quite simple. Just copy the below and paste it into the .htaccess file:

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:

<files *.html>

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

</files>

Once you’ve configured the server, it’s time to check that Gzip is actually working. You can either check online with this gzip test, or you can do so straight in your browser. In Chrome, go to Developer Tools -> Network Tab, then refresh the page and, in the network tab, click on the page. If you see a header saying “Content-encoding: gzip” that means it worked.

Load time before Gzip compression

Load time after Gzip compression

Step #5: Minify and Combine CSS and JavaScript Files

If your site has a lot of CSS and JavaScript files, the server is probably telling the browser to treat them as individual files, which means a new request and response for each one. That can really slow things down. The solution is to combine as many files as possible.

Another issue is that the code in these files is rarely as clean as it can be, with extra white spaces, comments and formatting that a computer doesn’t need but has to read. This delays things even more. So, the solution in this case is to minify the code. This basically means cleaning up the code by removing all characters that are not necessary for the code to run.

Below, you can see how minifying your javascript and CSS files can reduce your file size and therefore speeding up your website.

Manually Minify and Combine CSS and JavaScript Files

You can manually minify and combine these files either by hand or using special tools. We advise against doing it by hand, though. First off, you have to know what you can remove and what should stay. Secondly, when doing things by hand, it’s much easier to introduce errors than when you are using a special tool, such as the ones below.

CSS Minifier

This is a free online tool available from Dan’s Tools that will clean up your CSS code by removing spaces, indents, comments and new lines. This will help to speed up your website and ensure everything runs more smoothly. All you have to do is paste the code into the window and then click on Minify. Once it’s done, paste it back into your website.

JavaScripty Minify Tool

On the aforementioned website, you can also find the JavaScript Minify tool, which does the same thing as the CSS Minifier in the same way, except it does if for JavaScript.

Both these tools are very useful and simple to use as you don’t need to make any adjustments or fiddle with settings.

Smaller

Smaller is a paid app (though a 30-day trial is available) but it allows you to also combine more files into one. Note, though, that this one is only available for OS 10.7 and up users.

For WordPress: Use Plugins to Achieve the Same Thing

If you are using WordPress, the simplest approach is to use a plugin. This way, you won’t have to do anything manually. There are quite a few options available:

Better WordPress Minify

This is a free plugin that allows you to minify and combine your JavaScript and CSS files. It’s one of the best plugins to help you speed up your WordPress site as it offers a slew of adjustments in the control panel, uses WordPress’ enqueing system to improve compatibility, allows you to move the files that have been put in the que to any location you want, such as the footer and more.

Assets Minify

This is also a free plugin, but it comes with fewer settings, which can make it easier to use. You can even leave the settings on default without any problems. You also have the option of excluding various files and scripts if you want.

WP Super Minify

This is one of the simplest plugins available for compressing CSS, JavaScript and HTML in that it has the fewest settings. It does have a great feature where it will tell you what the size of the file was before minifying and after, allowing you to see the improvement you made.

Regardless of the approach you use, you have to be careful as you could kill the code. The easiest way around this is to have backups on hand and be careful when copying and pasting.

If you are worried about making a mistake or simply feel uncomfortable fiddling with code, you could always get a developer to do it for you.

Step #6: Improve Your JavaScript Files’ Speed

JavaScript can slow things down a lot more than CSS and it can slow things down even more as files get bigger and bigger. The problem is that these files are used to achieve seemingly simple things.

The problem with JavaScript is that most people aren’t developers, so they use various stand-alone plugins and libraries to get things done. The more things you need to get done, the more plugins you use and the heavier and slower things get. To speed things up, here’s what you should do:

Keep JavaScript in External Files

Though we’ve discussed minifying and combining files to minimize http requests, with JavaScript it pays to keep it in external files linked to HTML because external JavaScript files get cached. This means that when someone revisits your site, they don’t have to download the file again. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t combine multiple JavaScript files into one, thus reducing the loading time for both new and returning visitors.

Put JavaScript Files At the Bottom

A browser will start rendering the source code of a page from the top. The problem is that your JavaScript files can slow things down, and it stops the browser from completely rendering the HTML until those JS files are done. Typically, most JavaScript plugins and effects are used after the rest of the page has already loaded, which means that this isn’t the best situation.

Thus, you can improve the user experience and improve the page load speed by putting the link for the JavaScript external files at the bottom.

Test If Everything on Your Site Works without JavaScript

Turn JavaScript off and see if your site still operates properly. If important info disappears, or people can’t contact you or navigate around your site with JavaScript properly, you have to fix these issues because if someone doesn’t have JS enabled in their browser, your site will slow down to a crawl because part of it won’t work properly.

Step #7: Minimize Redirects

Redirects can lead to slower loading times because visitors are being taken to one page, which then sends them to another page. So, while it sometimes makes sense to have redirects, you need to remember that they can cause performance issue. Every redirect you remove will speed up your website just a little bit more.

You can find all your redirects with the redirect mapper tool. Once you’ve found them all, you can determine which ones you absolutely need and which ones you can do away with.

For example, Google recommends that you eliminate every redirect that is not mandatory and to never have more than one redirect to take users to the resources you provide.

So, the process for cleaning up your redirects should be to first find all of them, understand why each one exists, check how they impact or are impacted by other redirects, remove the ones you don’t need, and update any of the other redirects affected by the removal.

As you can see from the above image, redirection create additional results which will take around 0.7S to redirect to new webpage.

Step #8: Enable Caching

Caching can really improve the speed of your website significantly, both for returning users and for new users, depending on the type of caching that you’ve enabled. Client-side caching, or browser caching, involves the browser saving certain elements of your website on the visitor’s machine so that next time they visit your site, it doesn’t have to download those same files again.

Depending on the elements in question, you can set expiry times so that the browser knows when to check if the element has changed and download the new file. For example, for your logo, you might set the maximum expiry date of a year, because you know it won’t change quickly.

Server-side caching helps with new users as well as return visitors. This is because a copy of the page will be saved in the memory temporarily ensuring that if 50 users visit your site within an hour, the server doesn’t have to go hunting for those files repeatedly.

Regardless of which caching method you use, both will help improve load times significantly.

Enabling Browser Caching

To activate browser caching, you will have to include expiry times for various types of files in your HTTP headers.

You will also have to modify the .htacess file, which can be found in the root folder. You might be unable to see this file at first, as it’s usually hidden, but an FTP client like FileZilla will allow you to access it. To modify it, simply open the file in notepad.

Insert the following code to inform the browser what files it should cash and for how long. You can modify the times as you see fit.

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

<IfModule mod_expires.c>

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/jpg “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/jpeg “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresByType image/png “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresByType text/css “access plus 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/pdf “access plus 1 month”

ExpiresByType text/x-javascript “access plus 1 month”

ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash “access plus 1 month”

ExpiresByType image/x-icon “access plus 1 year”

ExpiresDefault “access plus 2 days”

</IfModule>

## EXPIRES CACHING ##

For things like CSS files, you might want to set shorter times as they tend to be updated more frequently. When you are done, save the file with the extension it already has and not as a text file.

Load time before caching

Load time after caching

For WordPress Users

If you are using WordPress, things are a lot easier. You can install a plugin to handle all your caching needs. A great free option is W3 Total Cache, which has a lot of functionality. One of the best plugins, and the most advanced, though, is WP Rocket, but you will have to buy it. However, the wide range of features and its functionality makes it more than worth the small investment.

Step #9: Constantly Optimize Your Databases

A powerful way to improve the speed of your website is to make sure your databases are optimized all the time, which is especially important for WordPress users.

WordPress, along with the plugins you’ve installed, save their data in your database, so the more you use them, the more data will be saved in the database. The more data there is, the longer it will take WordPress to find anything in that database, which will slow down your website. This is especially true of plugins that save logs, user data and stats, as well as having post revisions, pingbacks and trackbacks enabled.

So, you can improve the speed of your website significantly by cleaning up your database on a regular schedule. You can automate this process with a plugin known as WP-Optimize, or you can do things manually if you don’t use WordPress.

To manually optimize your database, open your MySQL database in PHPMyAdmin and select the tables you want to optimize. Open the drop-down menu and select Optimize table. After the process has completed, a confirmation message will appear on-screen.

Step #10: Test Your Website’s Speed Again

Once you’ve completed all the previous steps, run another test to see how fast your website is running. You should be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list of what you can do to improve the speed of your site, but we did pick the actions that would have the biggest impact.

Step #11: Repeat

Like with anything, you can’t just do all these things once and forget about it. Optimizing your images, for example, should be something you do every time you upload a new image. Likewise, many of the other steps can be repeated when new content is added, changes made or updates done, which will ensure that your site keeps going as fast as possible.

If you don’t keep things running smoothly and forget all this advice after you’ve done it once, your site will gradually slow down again and you’ll have to start all over again. So, it simply makes more sense for you to keep everything running smoothly from the get go.

Selecting the right host is a big deal. Whether you’re building a basic website for your small business or you have a brilliant idea for the next Facebook, an important first step is deciding which web hosting service works for you. There are dozens of web hosting companies on the market, and our official checklist will help you decide based on your particular business goals.

Are you a first time web blogger or hosting your website for the first time?

Are you hosting a website for the first time? I have done the research, you can simply choose any of the hosting companies from the list given below. These are the top 5 best web hosting companies for beginners, because of their easy to use Interface and quality of hosting.

Web Hosting	Features	Price	Ratings
	✔Free Website Transfer ✔Free Domain ✔30 Day Money Back Guarantee	3.95$	Read Review
	✔25000 Visits ✔FREE SSL Certificates ✔10 GB Storage	$29	Read Review
	✔1 Domain ✔ Unlimited Bandwidth ✔$200 Advertising credits	$3.95	Read Review
	✔Unlimited Domains ✔Free SSL/TLS certificates with Let's Encrypt ✔Free Domains	$7.95	Read Review
	✔FREE Domain ✔50 GB Disk Space ✔1 Website	$2.95	Read Review

What are your needs?

The dream of every business owner is to see thousands of people visiting their site every month. If the day finally comes where thousands of visitors view your website, don’t be caught off guard and have your website shut down. Choose the right host from the very beginning.

To begin with, finalise your needs for a hosting by answering following questions.

1. What is the required bandwidth for your website? and choosing the right service plan for your website.
2. What are the technology used in building your website ?
3. Do you need a SSL certificate for your website?
4. What type of sites are you creating? ( HTML or WordPress)

What to consider when Choosing a web Hosting company?

Now that you know your needs, its time to look at what should be the criteria to choose the best hosting company.

1. Dependability ( Uptime, Customer support)
2. Speed of the hosting company.
3. Price of the hosting plans.
4. Future Scalability of your Website

Following steps will help you choose the most dependable hosting for your website.

1) Determine bandwidth requirement and choose the right plan.

What is Bandwidth?

In short, bandwidth is the measurement of maximum data that is transferred at any given time on a web server. This data includes page loads, file loads and transfers, and amount of website traffic.

Bandwidth is almost always limited by web hosting companies. Simply put, the more money spent monthly on hosting, the more bandwidth your website will receive. It’s vital for every website to have enough available bandwidth to operate on a daily basis; those who don’t have enough bandwidth will experience website shut down.

Lets look at an example to understand bandwidth clearer. Consider a restaurant, where bandwidth is the number of available places in a restaurant, and the web traffic is the diners. The more available places, the more number of diners can be accommodated there.

If the restaurant is very busy, you need a very good management to satisfy every diners. Similarly, you need a very good hosting company to satisfy very high traffic to your website.

How much Bandwidth is Actually Needed?

If you own a relatively small website with little traffic and small data files, you’ll likely only need about 10 GB worth of bandwidth every month. The average website that receives 1,000 visitors per day will need roughly 9 GB worth of bandwidth or less.

If you already have a website and want to calculate how much bandwidth is required, you can use the following equation.

(Daily visitors x Daily page views x Average page size) + (Daily file downloads x Average file size(Only  if your website have downloadable content)) x 31(Number of days in a month) x Future tolerance number ( Depends on how much will you expect your website to grow, it can be 1.22 or 1.35 or 1 if you expect to receive stable visitors for next 1 year.)

Having room to grow is important. As you add more and more pages to your website, you’ll likely receive more page views, which means more bandwidth. If you regularly promote your website, you should also expect large traffic spikes, which could result in double or triple bandwidth amounts in a single month.

Preparing for spikes in traffic and eventual regular traffic increases by tripling your bandwidth amount in the beginning will help you avoid bandwidth overage charges and possible website shutdowns in the future.

Shared Hosting Plans

First time hosting a website? Shared hosting is the right place for your brand new website. Its safe, easy to use and cheap.

In shared hosting, physical server is shared with many other users. Not to worry, the users on the shared server cant access your data, instead they use shared resources such as disk space and RAM from same server as yours. Shared hosting start as low as $1/mo. Moreover, shared hosting plan from high quality hosting like SiteGround will cost you only $4.5/mo.

Here are the most popular shared hosting plans available.

Going with Virtual Private Servers (VPS) Plans

VPS hosting is the best solution for high traffic websites. On this type of hosting, your website is given server and bandwidth resources that are not shared by other websites, which allows you to accommodate more traffic.

Virtual Private Servers are offered by every web hosting company, and if you’re expecting large traffic increases in the near future, it’s best to sign up for one of these plans. You’ll gain access to better customer support and more reliable hosting overall. Look for hosting plans that offer at least 10 GB worth of dedicated bandwidth on a monthly basis; anything less will likely cause website limitations down the line.

Here are the most popular VPS hosting plan available.

Dedicated Hosting Service Plans

Dedicated hosting service is a single computer located within a network that serves the needs of that network. A user will rent the server, computer, software and dedicated bandwidth from the web hosting company.

This is the most expensive web hosting options, but is often necessary for companies who plan on expanding their websites and dedicating a significant financial amount to marketing and technology development in the near future. You’ll likely pay hundreds of dollars per month to rent a dedicated server for your website.

Here are the most popular Dedicated hosting plan available.

Read this comprehensive guide on choosing between Shared, VPS and Dedicated Hosting.

2) The technology used in building your website.

What type of code will you be using? Just the standard HTML and CSS or do you eventually need to add a back end database and advanced functionality? Some additional languages that your website might need in the future include:

• PHP
• Python
• Ruby on Rails
• Node.js

Your host must support various languages, frameworks and be able to support advanced versions of them. For example, if your web host only supports PHP v.4 and you need v.5, it might be best to look elsewhere.

If you happen to be a beginner, you are probably wondering what these languages and terms mean. Don’t worry, you can also build your website using one click CMS like WordPress.

Simply put, WordPress is a highly flexible website management system that enables you to build a fully fledged website without having any knowledge of coding or web designing skills. That means you can create your dream website with just few clicks using WordPress.

Additionally, WordPress is included free with 99% of hosting companies out there.

Here’s a comprehensive guide on How to build a website using WordPress for beginner.

3) Pick an operating system

Which operating should you choose for your web hosting servers? Should it be Windows OS or Linux OS? It depends on what you need and what you will use on the server. Here is a table which will help you to choose the best OS based on development tool used for building your website.

4) SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)

What is an SSL ?

SSL is a standard technology used to establish encrypted connection between a server and its client. This security can ensure safe transfer of data such as credit card information, phone number , address and other data that is entered through browsers.

The green colour in URL indicate that this site is secured with SSL certificate and any information sent to this site is secure and private. Moreover, sites with SSL certificate will have its url changed from http:// to https://.

Security certificates, also known as SSL certificates, are essential for those who want to sell online and for SEO purposes. On top of that, Google recently announced that having SSL certificate  is a ranking factor for your website.

Every web hosting service offers security certificates however, some certificates are better than others. If you only need SSL for SEO purposes and you don’t plan on selling online, consider a web host that offers free certificates. If you plan on selling online or need a member’s only section where customers must create usernames and passwords, find a host that offers SSL certificates with maximum protection.

Read this indepth article on SSL and its benefits for more information on SSL.

5) Decide between static HTML websites and CMS like WordPress

Static HTML websites come with very little technical requirements so most any web hosting company will do. If you plan on building a website using WordPress or another similar CMS platform, some web hosts will be better than others.

WP Engine is widely popular among those who develop WordPress websites because the company focuses solely on that platform. They offer daily website backups, malware protection, fast page load times and website speed reports.

Although Wp Engine is an expensive choice starting at 29$/mo, there are companies like SiteGround and Hostgator which are both excellent choices for HTML and WordPress sites with plans starting as low as $3.9/mo. They both offer website builders for the inexperienced web designer and one click WordPress install options starting with their cheapest plans.

6) Complicated Web Applications

Web applications that require a more sophisticated hosting solution should use a different type of web hosting service known as a Cloud Application Platform. Heroku is a widely popular web hosting company for complicated web applications because they offer application upgrades and patching that would normally have to be performed by third party web developers.

If your website or application is extremely data intensive or traffic heavy and you’ve got some extra money to invest, consider using a cloud application platform.

It seems you have figured out your requirement for your web hosting and its time to choose the best hosting for your needs. Here the the things to look out for.

7)Choose a dependable hosting

Dependability is determined by a number of things, including uptime percentages and customer support response. You’ll want your website to be live with little to no interruptions and, if something does go wrong, you’ll need customer support to assist you right away.

For those who are unfamiliar with the term “Uptime“, it is the amount of time your website is up and running. Uptime primarily depends on your web hosting company. Downtime can be caused by many factors such as hardware failure of your hosting server, malware attacks, scheduled maintenance and many similar factors.

How dependable is your chosen web host? Do they have a high uptime percentage? You’ll find that most web hosting companies will boast about a 99 percent uptime guarantee, so it’s best to check some reviews first.

Additionally, uptime of less than 99% means your website will be down as follows.

• Daily: 14m 32.6s
• Weekly: 1h 41m 48.5s
• Monthly: 7h 22m 40.4s
• Yearly: 3d 16h 32m 5.2s

Hosting companies with uptime of below 99% must be avoided as each second your website is down, you loose valuable revenue and trust from your visitors.

Here’s an uptime report of top web hosting companies tracked by Inlinehostblogger.com

When it comes to support, choose a hosting company with very fast live chat support. Live chat tend to be the most efficient way of reaching and solving the problems with a hosting company. Unlike any other sectors, problems related to a web hosting companies require sharing datas and links, which is why it is preferable to use live chat than phone support. Its better to check out the live chat waiting time of each hosting companies by reaching out to their Live chat team via their official websites before making a choice.

To make it easier for you, here’s a list of hosting companies and their live chat waiting time. Additionally I have also included a link to their live chat team so that you can check the response time yourself.

Also Read:  Absolutely Essential WordPress Plugins Your Site Can’t Live Without in 2017… And a Few Extras

8) Speed of the hosting company.

Speed is important, especially for websites that require large files and extra addons. Use a speed test tool to check the speed of your web host before signing up with them. 

Why Speed is so important?

According to a study, 50% will leave your site if it takes more than 3s to load. Another study states that, 1 second increase in page load time can cause 7% drop in conversions. Moreover, site speed is a major ranking factor in Google. All things considered, Site speed can be termed as the most important factor to consider when choosing a hosting company.

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are all backend heavy CMS platforms that might require specialised hosting in order to maximize the speed of your site.

To determine the speed of the hosting server, response time of a website should be calculated rather than the actual speed of the website. It is because, speed of the website is depended heavily on the content size and optimisation of the website than the server it is hosted.

Here’s a list of top hosting companies and average response time of similar test websites associated with their hosting companies.

Note: All the tests were conducted from USA.

1. SiteGround. Average Response time: 70ms

2. HostGator. Average Response time: 90ms

3. Inmotion Hosting. Average Response time: 129ms

4. WP Engine. Average Response time: 130ms

5. Bluehost. Average Response time: 156ms

The Price Matters

Web designers and business owners see cheap monthly web hosting deals on a daily basis. This doesn’t mean that you should choose the cheapest option available.

Prices for basic shared web hosting range from a few dollars a month to nearly $29 per month. The cheapest option won’t allow you to scale your website easily, while the more expensive option offers the ability to host unlimited domains up to the maximum allowable traffic bandwidth. Paying more money per month for higher bandwidth limits will allow you to scale the incoming traffic to your website without worrying about limitations or website shutdowns.

9) Initial Price vs Renewal Price

Please take note that what you pay initially is not what you pay after a year. There is significance difference in renewal price of a hosting company. Its something hosting company tends to hide initially.

For example, a hosting package with GoDaddy will initially cost you $12 for that year. Later, you will be surprised to see your credit card billed 112$ for the next year. Check out with Hosting company for their renewal price before choosing a hosting company.

Here’s a list of hosting company with their Initial and renewal price compared.

10) Future Scalability of your Website

Most websites will need a web hosting solution that allows for easy scalability for both the amount of traffic you expect and the sizes of files you’ll be storing on the server. The bigger the amount and size of the files you’ll have, the more bandwidth you’ll need.

It’s also important to remember that, even if you start out with little to no traffic, your web host should offer easy ways to upgrade your bandwidth amount to accommodate future needs.

Web Hosting Companies Worth a Second Look

While there are dozens of web hosting companies that offer their services, the following are the most recommended hosting companies by IHB.

Web Hosting	Features	Price	Ratings
	✔Free Website Transfer ✔Free Domain ✔30 Day Money Back Guarantee	3.95$	Read Review
	✔25000 Visits ✔FREE SSL Certificates ✔10 GB Storage	$29	Read Review
	✔1 Domain ✔ Unlimited Bandwidth ✔$200 Advertising credits	$3.95	Read Review
	✔Unlimited Domains ✔Free SSL/TLS certificates with Let's Encrypt ✔Free Domains	$7.95	Read Review
	✔FREE Domain ✔50 GB Disk Space ✔1 Website	$2.95	Read Review

Bluehost – Bluehost offers plans as low as $2.95 per month, but they require customers to prepay for an entire year. They offer unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth, along with around-the-clock technical support.

Dreamhost – Dreamhost is well known because they allow customers to host an unlimited amount of domains for around $7.0 per month. VPS and dedicated servers cost more but the service is well worth the price. Dreamhost is especially useful for those who wish to host high traffic WordPress websites.

SiteGround – For $3.95 per month, SiteGround offers up to 10GB of space and unlimited bandwidth. This means that your website can only contain files for a total of 10GB while allowing you to accept an unlimited amount of traffic. They offer 24/7 customer support, free domains, and an easy way to upgrade to dedicated server hosting in the future, if necessary.

Moreover, check out this post HostGator Vs Bluehost web hosting comparison to understand above depicted points on choosing a web hosting.

The Bottom Line

Choosing a web host is one of the most important business decisions you’ll make. Your web host acts as a foundation for your website, something which you must be able to build upon in the future as needs arise. Look for a hosting company that you can afford on a monthly basis while starting out with a shared hosting plan. This type of plan will allow you to plan ahead for major traffic spikes when you begin marketing your website.

Like any other aspect of your business, spend time researching multiple web hosting options and reading reviews. Your web host is the foundation of your online presence.

With over 50,000 plugins available just on the WordPress plugins website, along with the many others from independent parties, it’s no wonder most entrepreneurs struggle trying to determine which plugins their website needs, and which ones are the best option.

To make life easier for you, we’ve compiled a list of absolutely essential plugins for 2017, as well as a list of plugins that perform important tasks that you might find useful. We’ve not only checked every plugin to make sure it’s the best in its class and still has support in 2017, but where possible we’ve given both free and commercial alternatives.

Absolutely Essential Plugins All WordPress Sites Need

First, we’ll be covering the list of plugins your site absolutely needs. With these plugins, there’s no negotiating if you want your site to run well and be secure.

Also Read: SiteGround Vs Bluehost Web Hosting Comparison

Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

People aren’t all that patient nowadays and most expect your webpages to load in a maximum of 2 seconds. If they take 3 seconds to load, you’ll lose most of your traffic. The plugins mentioned below will all help speed up your site and make your visitors happy.

WP Rocket (Caching)

Caching is a great way to speed up your site for returning visitors as it saves pages and various other elements of your site on the visitor’s computer so that when they visit again, they don’t have to wait for the pages to download from your server as they’re already on their hard drive.

WP Rocket is one of the best plugins available for caching your site. It’s a commercial plugin and will cost you $40 for a site (though other license options are available) but it’s well worth the cost seeing as there is very little you need to configure. In fact, in most cases, it will do wonders for your site right out of the box. It’s also extremely easy to use, even when you decide to tinker a little with the settings, which is another major point in its favor.

W3 Total Cache (Caching)

W3 Total Cache is the best free plugin to cache and speed up page load times for your site. It’s been around for a while, and before WP Rocket became available, it was the best caching plugin available of all of them.

It’s still a very good substitute for WP Rocket, if you don’t have the budget for the latter. The only problem you might encounter is that it might take a bit of work to configure it to run properly. However, you’ll find that most of the essential settings have already been checked, meaning that you’ll likely need to do very little tweaking to get everything running smoothly. 

Also Read: How To Install & Configure W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin

Better WordPress Minify

We know W3 Total Cache has a minify feature, but it’s really not enough. Better WordPress Minify will whip your JavaScript and CSS files into shape, thereby increasing the speed with which your pages load. The fact is that there aren’t a lot of minification plugins that work properly. In fact, most of them will turn your site into a mess, whereas Better WordPress Minify actually does what you want it to do, including removing comments and blank spaces from the code, and combining the files so there aren’t as many HTTP requests.

Also Read: 15 Mistakes That Slow Down Your Site Speed And What to Do About Them

Async JavaScript

While sometimes unavoidable, the fact is that most JavaScript code is pretty slow to load. There is also the problem that everything else on the page stops rendering while waiting for your JS code to load, so if you JavaScript is placed anywhere above the fold, it can take a long while for your page to load, resulting in a terribly poor user experience.

The Async JavaScript plug-in uses deferred or asynchronous methods to remove any JS code that is present above the fold, which can significantly increase speed. Generally, it’s recommended that you use the asynchronous method, but testing is essential. In some cases, this plug-in can actually do the reverse and slow down your website, which is why you should test page loading speeds with it activated and with it deactivated, to see how you get the best results.

Far Future Expiration Header

When different file types are cached, they come with a line of code that tells the browser when it should check for new updates to the page. Take your home page, for example. When someone visits your site for the first time, if you have a caching plug-in activated, their browser will download and save a copy of your home page on their hard drive. The next time they visit, the browser will look for the home page on the visitor’s computer and load it, rather than waiting to download it from the server. It will do this for a set amount of time, after which it will once a game download the page from the server, to ensure the visitor is seeing the most up-to-date version.

Far Future Expiration Header is a plug-in that allows you to set the date yourself. For example, if you have a static homepage that never changes, you can set the plug-in to the maximum of 365 days, meaning that the browser will be told it only has to check for a new version of the homepage after one year. The plug-in also comes with a simple radio button that allows you to turn Gzip on and off, which is one of the simplest ways to activate this form of compression that will further speed up your site.

Hummingbird

The Hummingbird plug-in comes from the WPMU DEV team and is a premium plug-in. It can be used instead of WP Rocket/W3 Total Cache, Better WordPress Minify, Async JavaScript, and Far Future Expiration Header. It also offers a few extra features, including the ability to monitor your site in terms of performance, as well as providing an analysis of what you can do to speed up your website. It also optimizes images and can do much more.

It’s a great plug-in, however, it can get pretty expensive since it’s available only if you become a member of the WPMU DEV website, which will cost you $49 per month. It should be noted that you get access to a lot of plug-ins and themes for the same price, which is why will be covering other plug-ins from the same developer, just in case you decide to take this route.

The advantage of having a large number of plug-ins from a single developer is that it is less likely you will have compatibility issues. If you’re not sure of the best option, a 14-day free trial is available, so you can give it a whirl before you commit.

WP – Optimize

WordPress has a tendency to save every little thing, including every revision you make to post, every comment, even if you put it in spam, and so much more. Essentially, it saves everything you can possibly imagine, a lot of which you will never need again. This means it can get very complicated and bloated, which will of course affect the speed of your site.

WP – Optimize cleans up your WordPress database, removing all the data that is unnecessary. It has a manual and an automated setting, meaning that you can manually choose what to delete, or you can set it to run automatically so you never have to worry about database bloat again. All you have to do is go to the settings page, tell the plug-in how long it should save the backup information, and then tell it how frequently it should run.

How to Optimize Your WordPress Database with One Click

Akismet

Comment spam is still a major issue, and trying to handle it all manually is impossible. This is where Akismet comes in, as this plug-in has the ability to stop comments that appeared to be spam from being posted on your blog.

Don’t worry, because you’ll be able to review every comment the plug-in flagged or removed, and restore it if it made a mistake. No, Akismet is not infallible, but it does a very good job and will save you a lot of time and aggravation.

What is Akismet and Why You Should Start Using it Right Away

Smush Image Compression and Optimization

Images are often responsible for slow page load speeds, which is why you absolutely need Smush Image Compression and Optimization. This plug-in optimizes your images so they take up as little storage space as possible without compromising quality.

This is another plug-in from the WPMU DEV team, but there is a free version available, as well as a premium one. WP Smush PRO, of course, comes included in the WPMU DEV membership, along with Hummingbird and a host of other plug-ins. Even if you aren’t getting the membership, we still advise you get the free version as it will do wonders to speed up your site.

BJ Lazy Load

BJ Lazy Load can also help increase the speed of your website. What it does is to put a placeholder instead of the images that aren’t on screen. So, the images only load when they come close to appearing in the screen of the browser, without forcing the visitor to wait for everything on the page to load before they can see the page properly.

How to Implement WordPress Lazy Load on Images and Videos

Plug-Ins to Keep Your Website Safe

Website security is one of those essential things that you can’t overlook. Not only do you run the risk of having your site hacked or it simply breaking down, you also run the risk of hurting your visitors, which is the last thing you want to do. This is why we consider security plug-ins to be absolutely essential elements for any website.

Force Strong Passwords

No matter how often we’re told that we need a strong password for every account we have, we still have a tendency to choose the simplest one that we can remember. And this can expose your site to major issues, especially if there are other people with administrative rights.

The Force Strong Passwords plug-in ensures that everyone with an account on your website has to use a strong password, because it won’t let them register without one. Once you have the plug-in installed, you won’t have to worry about anyone accessing your site without authorization because some special snowflake used password as the password.

RapID Secure Login

To really secure your website, you can also set up this plug-in that requires two factor authentication people to sign in. The advantage is that it’s pretty easy to do with this plug-in, and in no time at all you can be using your smart phone to sign into your site. Install RapID Secure Login and you’ll greatly reduce the chances of anyone gaining unauthorized access to your website.

BruteProtect

An increasingly common problem webmasters experience is attacks from unwanted bots. The BruteProtect plug-in is quite defective at blocking many of these bots from attacking long before they managed to gain access to your site. However, note that it’s not perfect, and it certainly shouldn’t be the only security plug-in you rely on.

Note that if you install the JetPack plug-in, BruteProtect comes included, so you won’t have to download it separately.

Wordfence

Wordfence is one of the most popular security plug-ins available, with over 1 million active installs, and for good reason. The developers of the plug-in have a database with every version of WordPress as well as every theme and plug-in that has ever been part of the directory. This way, when you run a scan, the plug-in can compare the original files from the developer’s server with the ones that are on your server, which allows it to detect any issues. If it does find any problems, you can replace the broken files with the original ones, even if you don’t have a backup of them yourself.

So, Wordfence can scan your site, find any potential problems including things such as malware, and identified files in your WordPress folder, updates you haven’t made yet, comments that have URLs which are not deemed safe, and much more. It also comes with a firewall that helps stop attacks, and features a whole host of other tools.

It is a great security plug-in that we highly recommend, and has free and premium versions available.

WordFence Review – Is It Really The Best WordPress Security Plugin?

Defender

Defender is also an excellent security plug-in that comes from the WPMU DEV team. In other words, if you opt for Hummingbird, you will also be able to use Defender within the same subscription price.

The security plug-in does pretty much what the premium version of Wordfence does, such as allowing you to scan for vulnerabilities, but it also allows you to clean up existing issues with one click. It also worked to improve the security of your site to make sure catastrophes don’t happen again.

BackupBuddy

As the name implies, this plug-in creates a backup of your entire WordPress website, which it then stores in the cloud, using the service of your choice, including Dropbox, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud and more, you even have the option of emailing the backups to yourself.

While BackupBuddy is an extremely popular plug-in, it is a premium one. There are a few pricing options to cover a wide range of budgets, which you can find here.

How to Keep Your WordPress Content Safe with BackupBuddy

BackWPup

This is a free WordPress backup plug-in and while not as effective as BackupBuddy, it is still a good option if you don’t have the budget for a premium plug-in.

Snapshot Pro

As promised, were including the offering from the WPMU DEV team, which you will get as part of your membership to their site. Snapshot Pro does everything you’d expect from a backup plug-in, but it takes things a step further by treating backups to your backups, ensuring that if something happens to the original backup, you will still be able to restore your website.

WordPress Plug-Ins That Are Good to Have

From our point of view, the only absolutely essential plug-ins you need are for security and speed. There many other useful plug-ins which we will cover, but our opinion is that sites can survive without them, whereas speed and security are nonnegotiable.

However, we feel this guide would be incomplete if we didn’t look at a series of plug-ins that can make your life easier in many respects, helping to automate some tasks and improving the user experience overall. We reiterate, though, that these plug-ins, while they may be good to have an certainly useful, are not absolutely mandatory, though we are sure many will disagree with us.

Also Read: How to Choose a Web Hosting Service For Your Website?

Plug-Ins for Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization has changed a lot since the days when keywords reigned supreme, which is made many SEO plug-ins redundant. Nowadays, the best SEO is all about creating great quality content. However, that doesn’t mean the following plug-ins won’t be useful, and they might give you a slight competitive advantage.

All-In-One SEO Pack

A little while ago, we would have said the Yoast plugin ruled supreme in the SEO space, but, unfortunately, the latest updates have pretty much broken it. And support for the free version of the plugin is practically non-existent.

The good news is that All-In-One SEO Pack is still a great plug-in and highly popular, considering it has more than 1 million active installs. Plus, the developers care and do provide support, even for the free version. This plug-in has everything you’d expect from an SEO plug-in, but also allows you to activate only the features you want to use. It also comes with a built-in XML sitemap generator, which means one less plug-in for you to install.

Beginners Guide for All in One SEO Pack

SmartCrawl

This is the WPMU DEV premium plug-in for SEO. As you’d expect, it does everything that All-In-One SEO Pack does, but also includes reports from the SEO industry from Moz, as well as automated keyword linking and a number of other features. Like with all other WPMU DEV plug-ins, you get access to it under the same membership.

All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets

You know the cool review stars, video thumbnails and other useful pieces of information you see next to a search result? Well, if you want your entry in the SERPs to show up the same, helping you set yourself apart from the competition, then use this plug-in.

SEMRush

This is a useful plug-in to spy on your competition. It lets you figure out what keywords they are paying for, which ones they are ranking for and much more. It’s a good way to improve your marketing and SEO strategies so you might eventually outrank the competition.

While these SEO plugins are useful, we have to say again that if your content is poor, no plug-in can help you rank near the top of the SERPs. Conversely, great content will help you get to the top, even without these plug-ins.

Plug-ins for Images, Site Design and More

WordPress allows you to do a lot to create a great looking site, but there are some plug-ins that can make certain tasks easier.

Envira Gallery

WordPress makes it relatively easy to create galleries for images, but they aren’t exactly what we call impressive. Envira Gallery, on the other hand, gives you the tools you need to put together stunning galleries that will impress everyone. You can put together as many galleries as you like, place them anywhere you like, build albums, and even set the images to open up in pop-ups, and that’s not all. It’s a very useful plug-in.

Gallery

This plug-in makes it easy to work with images, allowing you to edit and add images for different sizes on different screens, making them fully responsive. It’s a very useful plug-in that allows you to do a lot with image files, including helping improve page load speed thanks to the responsive images.

TablePress

If you want to use relatively good-looking tables on your website, you will need TablePress. It not only allows you to create tables that look good, but also tables that can be searched and filtered, which you can’t really do on your own, unless you have a tech streak a mile wide.

All you have to do is install the plug-in and use the options to put together any table you want. You can even import or export tables from spreadsheets, edit a cell or more, hide columns or rows, and use a host of other options to create the perfect table.

BeaverBuilder

BeaverBuilder is an effective page builder that allows you to create lightweight pages that load quickly. You can create layouts that are as simple or as complicated as you like, allowing you to customize themes to your heart’s desire.

However, if you find that BeaverBuilder isn’t helping you achieve what you want, then you might want to get a professional to do the work for you because other plug-ins will make things much worse.

Also Read: HostGator vs Bluehost review – Which is the best hosting?

CSS Hero

If you don’t know CSS but would still like to make changes to your site’s design, then you will need CSS Hero. This plug-in will let you change any WordPress theme as you see fit without you having to know anything about CSS. CSS Hero let’s you make changes using a WYSIWG interface, so it’s almost like using a relatively simple graphics program to make changes to your site, which CSS Hero “translates” into the CSS that WordPress understands. It’s a pretty great plug-in, but it is a premium one. However, at only $29 per year for a site, it’s still a much better deal than trying to learn CSS.

Soliloquy

If you love sliders but have never managed to create a decent looking one, then Soliloquy is the plug-in for you. It allows you to create beautiful sliders you can use to present anything from your products and services to different posts and announcements. The sky’s the limit, except that with Soliloquy, it will always be a beautiful one.

Display Widgets

Display Widgets lets you modify the content of your sidebar so you can have different sidebars on different categories and different pages. You don’t need to know anything about coding to modify the sidebars however you like. You simply click on a checkbox to tell the plug-in where it should display widgets and where it shouldn’t and you’re done.

Content Aware Sidebars

Content Aware Sidebars takes things to the next level and allows you to, essentially, convert your sidebars into anything you like. You can even use a contact form inside the sidebar, if you so choose. It’s an excellent plug-in with a lot of functionality and is generally considered to be very robust option with clean code that is unlikely to break anything else on your site.

How to Display Content Aware Sidebars for Any WordPress Page or Post?

Plug-Ins for Site Management and Troubleshooting

Sometimes things go wrong, and sometimes you just need a plug-in to make certain tasks easier to perform.

Broken Link Checker

Broken links are unavoidable, especially on sites that have been around for a while. You link to a piece of content that gets moved wrong or is taken down without you knowing and you end up with a broken link. The problem is that broken links can irritate your visitors. They’re looking forward to learning more, click on the link and… nothing. It can be disappointing and annoying, and it’s not something you want your visitors feeling all the time.

The Broken Link Checker plug-in goes through your site on a regular basis, finding any broken links. It will send you an email of the broken links it found as well as their location, making it easy for you to fix the problem quickly and easily.

WP Migrate DB

If you’ve ever wanted to change hosting companies, you are probably aware that one of the things you have to do is to move your site to the new server. It might even be why you decided against moving to a new host, even if it was a much better option, simply because the idea of migrating your site was too daunting.

The good news is that you can use WP Migrate DB to move your site quickly and easily. There is a free version available, but it doesn’t handle media files, meaning you will have to move those manually. The Pro version of the plug-in will migrate your media files as well as everything else, and even has a multisite add-on. So, if you never again want to be beholden to one host for fear of the migration process, then you definitely need to get WP Migrate DB. To really make life easy, go for the Pro version and move everything with a few clicks of the mouse.

Migrating WordPress with WP Migrate DB and DB Pro

Safe Redirect Manager

Setting up redirects at some point in time will become a necessary, regardless of what type of website you are running. Once upon a time, the only way to do it was through server configs or .htaccess files, but things have changed. Safe Redirect Manager is an excellent plug-in that helps you manage your redirects so that any structural change you make, including deleting posts and changing permalinks, will be covered and your visitors won’t end up in the wrong place. Just a few clicks of the mouse, and you’re done.

Plug-ins for Marketing

This is where we’ve included all those plug-ins that you’ll find useful to improve the user experience, generate vital marketing information and more, all with the end-result of improving your conversion rates and making your website even more successful.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

YARPP is a powerful plug-in that combs through your content and displays other posts users might find relevant, based on the current post they are reading. It’s a great plug-in because users tend to spend more time on a site because of it, as most will click to see a related post to the content they are currently reading, especially if you are providing excellent quality content.

This plug-in can also give you the opportunity to earn a little extra cash if you choose to show sponsored content on your page. However, if the sponsored content isn’t good quality, you could end up annoying your visitors and might be better off ignoring this option. The only way to figure out if it works well is to actually test it.

Google Analytics +

Google Analytics + is an excellent plug-in if you want to understand your traffic better. It brings all the information in the Google Analytics tool to your dashboard, making it easy for you to see things like number of visits, how many page views you get, what your bounce rate is, how long people spend on your site on average and more. All this is vital information if you want to improve your site, but it’s also essential when you are negotiating prices for advertising.

Good Reviews for WordPress

You likely already know how powerful testimonials are. They are the equivalent of word-of-mouth marketing online because they are personal endorsements from people who have used your product or service. This makes other people even more open to the idea of doing business with you, because you’ve essentially been validated by their peers.

Good Reviews for WordPress allows you to stylishly display testimonials on your site. It’s a great plug-in because it’s pretty lean and doesn’t negatively impact the speed with which your pages load. It’s also pretty easy to use and won’t break your site.

Tweet Dis

Giving people the opportunity to share your content is powerful, because, once again, they’re personally endorsing whatever you’ve published. To take things a step further, though, you need to build interactive content. You know, when you see a Twitter button allowing you to tweet a particular statement within an article? That’s now known as interactive content because your visitors can actually interact with your content. And it’s very powerful.

With Tweet Dis you can create a variety of tweets that visitors can immediately post, such as box tweets, inline tweets and more. You can also change the various themes it offers to suit your style. So, not only does this plug-in make it easier for you to get more shares, and therefore more visitors, but it also helps to further break up the article, making it more visually appealing. And, of course, it’s easy to use. Simply highlight the text you want to use and click on the Tweet Dis button. Select the options you want and you’re done. It takes about half a minute but the return is immeasurable.

Jetpack

As previously mentioned, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content, so you have to give them the buttons to do it. Jetpack has an amazing module for social sharing. Though it has a lot of other features – some might say too many – it’s worth installing for the social aspect alone. It has some great buttons but also comes with a wide range of other features as well that make it a great option.

Should I use the WordPress Jetpack plugin on my site? 

Comments Not Replied To

This is a great plug-in for large blogs as it allows you to see, from the dashboard, what comments haven’t been replied to by the author of the post. Comments can add up quickly and it’s easy to miss a few. You might not think it’s a big issue, but for the commenters who have fallen through the cracks, we can guarantee it’s a massive problem. They’ll think they’re not worth your time, even though others are, and they will stop visiting your site.

Comments Not Replied To solves this problem. It reduces the chances of you missing a comment to zero, and it makes your life much easier.

Commenter Emails

Commenter Emails is a great plug-in that allows you to build a list of emails from the comments people have left. This is powerful because you can segment your email list and create personalized offers for people who comment regularly on your blog. This will not only encourage them to keep commenting, but will also entice others to come out of the woodwork and stop lurking.

Contact Form 7

A basic thing in marketing is making sure your customers can get in touch with you, and that’s precisely what Contact Form 7 does. It lets you create contact forms with a few clicks of the mouse. However, the results are relatively simple and not all that attractive.

Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is a premium alternative to Contact Form 7 that allows you to create stylish contact forms. The fact is that you can use this plug-in to build any type of form you can imagine, from the simple contact form to complicated billing forms. And that’s precisely why it’s so powerful and is still the best on the market.

Optin Monster

Though not everyone is fond of pop-ups, the statistics show that they are highly effective. Some say they are the best way for you to get those conversion rates way up. Like with any other tool, if used properly and without being irritating, your visitors won’t mind. In fact, they might be happy they can sign up without having to go to a different page.

Optin Monster is one of the most cost-effective premium plug-ins for pop-up creation. You can pretty much create the pop-up any way you like, as the plug-in gives you the ability to modify any aspect of it.

Though we’d love to be able to recommend a free version, there really isn’t a free plug-in that can come close to what Optin Monster does.

How to Integrate OptinMonster with WordPress

Leadpages

Leadpages is an alternative to Optin Monster. It’s more expensive than the latter, but the advantage is that you can also make landing pages with it. And the landing pages Leadpages helps you create come out looking really good and have been proven to generate really good conversion rates. So, the higher price is definitely worth it considering you can do so much more with Leadpages.

Plugins for Content

The following plug-ins making managing your content much easier, and some of them even help you create some of that content.

Better Internal Link Search

Internal links aren’t just vital for SEO, but they also improve the user experience by serving up related content to visitors. A good internal linking scheme will even keep visitors on your site longer simply because they know they have more content to read that will interest them.

Now, it’s a good idea to create all your internal links manually, even though there are automated tools to help you. What Better Internal Link Search does, though, is make it easier for you to find the best content to link to. The WordPress search box for internal links isn’t all that great, especially for sites with lots of content. Better Internal Link Search returns more accurate results, but also allows you to search among your drafts and even search some external sites. It’s a really useful tool to make internal linking much easier.

Coscheduler

Coscheduler is a premium plug-in that allows you to see at a glance what your posting schedule is, both on your site and on social media. It loads up an awesome calendar that displays everything you have scheduled. You can drag stuff around to change the time and dates, edit the posts, copy them and just, generally, make sure everything is in order so you are serving your visitors with great content regularly.

Simple Page Ordering

Changing the order of pages in your WordPress dashboard is an exercise in cruel and unusual torture. To do so, you have to change page’s order number, which gets really old, really fast. Simple Page Ordering is a plug-in that lets you order your pages by simply dragging and dropping them, making life so much easier.

All you have to do is drag and drop pages in your dashboard to make sure they are displaying in the order you want them to, without having to go through any complicated or tedious process.

WP Help

If you need to set up an FAQ section, or create a set of guidelines, or essentially put together any form of documentation, then WP Help is the best option. Not only does it make it simple to put together any sort of internal documents you need, it can also sync them across a multisite network, which can certainly save a lot of time and aggravation.

So, this turned out to be a pretty long list of plugins. And the fact is that there are many more great plug-ins out there that can help you do anything under the sun. However, if you load your site up with too many, you could end up slowing it down significantly. Furthermore, sometimes plug-ins don’t play nice together, and can cause even more problems.

We recommend starting with the essential ones and then only including the ones from the good to have list that you really, truly need. Remember, in some cases, we’ve provided a few alternatives to achieve the same thing, so you definitely shouldn’t be installing all the plug-ins in this list.