Five signs your WordPress site has outgrown its hosting

1. It is slow, and getting slower

Pages that take several seconds to load lose visitors, especially on phones. On budget shared hosting, your site shares a server with many others, and when they get busy, so does yours. If the site is slow and nobody can tell you why, the hosting is the first suspect.

2. Nobody is updating anything

WordPress, its plugins and the version of PHP underneath all need regular updates. Most hosting plans do not do this for you: they keep the server running and leave the site to you. If you log in and see a wall of update notices, nobody is looking after it. Out-of-date plugins are one of the most common ways into a WordPress site.

3. You do not know when it was last backed up

Many hosts take backups, but often on the same server as the site, and restoring one means a support ticket and a wait. If the site broke this afternoon, how old would the backup be, where is it kept, and who would put it back? If you do not know, you do not have a backup plan. A shop is the extreme case: restore a week-old backup and you lose a week of orders.

4. You hear about problems from customers

If the first you know about the site being down is a customer ringing to tell you, nobody is watching it. Good hosting monitors uptime and speed around the clock, so someone usually knows something is wrong before you do.

5. Every change is a job for someone else

Hosting support will restart a server, but it will not fix a broken contact form or add a page. So every change becomes a hunt for a freelancer, a quote and a wait. The hosting is cheap. Everything around it is not.

What managed hosting changes

Managed WordPress hosting puts the site and the server in the same hands. Every Wrev plan includes:

• Fast UK servers with SSL and a CDN, a firewall and malware scanning.
• WordPress, plugin and PHP updates, with a backup taken before every one.
• Backups stored away from the server: weekly on Core, and daily, kept for 90 days, on Pro and Unlimited.
• Uptime and speed monitoring around the clock.
• Developers who know your site, for the changes you need.

Moving is less painful than you think

The biggest reason sites stay on the wrong hosting is fear of the move. It does not have to be dramatic. We move WordPress sites of ordinary size and build for free, and plan every move to avoid downtime. For most sites there is none, and most end up faster than they were. All you do is give us access.

One or two of these signs is normal. Three or more, and your hosting is probably costing you more than it saves. Book a demo if a few of these sound familiar.