You’re ready to get started with a self-hosted WordPress.org website and now need a hosting provider. Or, you have a provider, but are about ready to pull your hair out from frustration. Either way, this is a checklist of what to look for when selecting your new hosting company, and a few recommendations.
Many people have websites and offer free downloadable materials to their visitors. You could be a CPA with a PDF brochure or a custom window installer with an excel file for cost estimates. You want to provide materials, but you also want to gather the visitor’s email address and contact info before letting them download the files. This tutorial will cover how to do that with some helpful free WordPress plugins.
There are a lot of companies out there offering managed WordPress hosting now, but the question is, who’s the right company for your needs? I’ve been working with WPEngine, Flywheel, GoDaddy, and Kinsta managed WP hosting for a few years now, so here’s my analysis of the companies and why they would or wouldn’t be a good choice for you. All of these companies have multiple levels of plans, so I’ve selected the plans most useful for a typical small business website. First Disclaimer: The below opinions are our own, you should always consider multiple sources when choosing a provider. Second Disclaimer: All hosting companies offer a referral program, if you found the information here valuable, please consider clicking on my links – referral programs help pay for the time it takes to write up these in depth articles.
WordPress is the most popular Content Management System, or CMS, with over half the CMS market. That’s a pretty good endorsement for it, but it also means it’s a bigger target for hackers. Because of this, updating your WordPress website is just as important for site functionality & security as updating your Windows computer.
Domain registration is quite quick and easy to do. The largest challenge is to decide whether you want a company to just register a domain or if you also want hosting.
In a previous article on registering domains I discussed domain registration & recommended domain registrars. Now I’ll cover how to transfer a domain from one registrar to another.
Wistia has grown in a lot of popularity as a video hosting service with a lot of premium options, however, many WordPress plugins still don’t work well with it. The good news is, anywhere that you can put an HTML5 video with mp4 extension, you can put a Wistia video. All you have to know is how to generate the URL.
Here’s something most people don’t know: if you don’t have a privacy policy then you’re probably breaking the law and violating the terms of service of your analytics provider (like Google).
Lots of business websites need to post a quick announcement. Maybe you’re closing for a holiday, maybe a major storm is causing problems, or maybe you’ve got a limited time special to announce. Whatever the reason, we get a lot of requests to add a simple announcement to websites. So here’s a simple and fast way to add an announcement to your WordPress website.
You’ve set up your WordPress site, there’s just one issue.
Your website can’t send mail.
This means your contact forms don’t work, new user emails don’t work, password reset requests can’t be sent. It’s not a good situation. The good news is, there’s a pretty simple fix.