Fast, performant, and close to home? It sounds like a line from an ad. But it’s not. It’s about what a hosting provider should offer a WordPress business. So let’s dive into the behind-the-stage attributes that will give you ultimate WordPress Hosting Performance.
To have great WordPress performance, you should look for the following magic features: CDNs and your server location. A data center that’s geographically-close to its users guarantees low latency. While CDN ensures excellent response times to users worldwide. Let’s call them the salt and pepper of the WordPress hosting performance dish. Read on to discover the rest of the equally important ingredients.
The WordPress Community on WordPress Performance
We asked the WordPress Community for a top tip to boost WordPress Performance. Here’s what we got.
Must-Have Hosting Performance Features
WordPress needs hosting. Which WordPress performance attributes would make the latter one the best match?
Server-level Caching and CDNs
Server level caching is a great way to provide a significant performance boost to most websites with a lot of static content (images, CSS, HTML). While CDNs also perform caching, it’s good to have a server-level caching by default.
Speaking of Content Delivery Networks, the providers who offer a CDN with the selected WordPress plan score higher in the attractiveness top. Even upper on this list are the providers who offer a CDN that’s integrated into a control panel.
HTTP/2 and DNS
Also, the hosting provider or CDN one must enable the HTTP/2, the latest major revision of the HTTP Protocol. Moreover, to make a good impression and provide the best possible performance for the users, Gzip compressing should be part of the offering.
A performant hosting experience includes offering a fully-featured DNS service. The providers which offer restricted DNS or domain features (like adding a parked domain, add-on domain or subdomain) don’t make the best impression.
First Byte 300ms or Less
Can it make it in under 300 milliseconds? Then, it’s a keeper. For the end-users, it means their browser will receive the first byte of response within this time-frame. Apparently, 300 milliseconds or less is the golden number – according to numerous e-commerce studies.
Detailed WordPress Performance Benchmarks
“We want it all and we want it now”. These are the expectations we hear from customers browsing online platforms. This is why speed and performance play a major role in the success of any online business. Website performance is about retaining users, improving conversions, making customers happy – and ultimately, growing your business.
Studies say you have just 27 seconds to make a first good impression. When you have an e-commerce website, you have even fewer seconds at your disposal. Neil Patel, digital marketing guru, states that 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Moreover, Google penalizes slow and poorly performing websites from an SEO perspective and downgrades search engine rankings.
Therefore, other than the managed WordPress hosting plans, how a provider handles various levels of traffic in real-time is also very important.
What Makes the Difference?
- Concurrency is the number of multiple simultaneous users that are connected to your application, requesting content as quickly as possible. But not all at once.
- Meanwhile, Requests Per Second (RPS) represents the number of requests the web server can respond to within 1 second. Sites with higher RPS will be able to handle more traffic.
- As for the latency, it represents the response time observed for 95% of the requests sent during a time frame.
Why Geography Impacts Performance
How do you feel about long-distance connections? They may work, but with some struggle. This also applies to your WordPress hosting, so that you can get the bets WordPress Hosting Performance.
Your website may not perform at its best if the location of the data center that hosts it is not close to your audience. Picking a data center in the same city as your audience will provide much lower latency.
An ideal scenario would be to have two data center locations in the same region to deliver at full speed dynamic content. In particular, PHP generated content dynamically, which can’t be cached easily. And even all your users are in the same area as your data center, you don’t want to lose points for high latency.
This is why using a CDN comes handy. As a Content Delivery network helps you to deliver excellent response times to users worldwide.
Top WordPress Hosting Performers and Why
So, now you know what to look for in a WordPress hosting provider. But do such ideal hosting providers exist? Well, yes. According to Cloud Spectator Report, the best ones, in terms of performance features, are:
- FlyWheel
- Kinsta
- Pantheon
All three of them are A-class hosting performers because they have in place: server-level caching, HTTP/2, gzip compression, premium DNS, First Byte at or under 300ms in at least 1 location, CDN available and CDN management.
FlyWheel and Kinsta are top performers also in regards to Global Reach. Pantheon got maximum points for Backup and Restore features, too. For Staging & Cloning, both Pantheon and Kinsta got gold medals. Kinsta received a two more on WordPress Support, respectively Onboarding chapter.
Nevertheless, on Developer Friendly, General Support, respectively Security Features aspects, other providers got into the spotlight. However, none of the 17 providers included in the international benchmark study achieved top scores across all nine listed categories.
Important takeaway: as a WordPress owner you need to determine which feature sets are vital for your needs before selecting a WordPress Hosting provider.
How Plesk Impacts Your WordPress Performance
Lots of points to consider when choosing the best-performing WordPress hosting provider for you, right? Fortunately, there is another way to get the same perks, but without any headache. While using Plesk Hosting Platform for your virtual or dedicated server, you can also use the WordPress Toolkit extension on top of it.
Instant benefits? Everything becomes simpler regarding configuration, routine management or overall performance of all your WordPress projects. Remember that Google likes performant websites and ranks them higher in the search results.
Discover more ways to turbocharge your WordPress Performance here.
To keep it short and simple: a fast and well-optimized WordPress website will do the work. And happy visitors can become satisfied customers later on.
