A client reached out to tiny blue orange for some help with the layout of their site. After talking, we quickly realized there was a much bigger issue to solve first — their hosting drama. It was clearly time for them to switch WordPress hosting companies + you might be wondering if it’s time for you to do the same.
Negatively impacting your site health
The biggest red flag that your hosting company is holding you back can be seen right in your WordPress dashboard. Head to Tools > Site Health + let the scan run for a few seconds. Once it finishes, do you see anything about PHP in the critical issue section? If so, it’s time to switch WordPress hosting companies.
Any host using PHP 7.3 is leading you right into plugin or theme conflicts. That is, if you haven’t already experienced them. PHP is the language that WordPress uses + PHP 7.4 has been out since November 2019. Aka… it’s totally safe to use. In fact, the latest version, PHP 8.1 was released in November of last year + there’s a new version scheduled for this November.
No hosting company worth using would put you on a 5 year old version.
There are some WordPress hosting companies that have the newer versions but expect you to upgrade the PHP version manually. While this is annoying at best, it could be worth investigating if you’re seeing that critical issue.
Switch WordPress hosting to speed up a slow site
Is your site slower than molasses in January? Finding a managed WordPress hosting company could lead to a 30% faster website, at a minimum.
Is that the only way to speed up a site? No. Reducing plugins, saving images at the proper size, + using up-to-date versions of everything can do wonders. This blog features an entire category of ways to speed your site up.
Your site settings + files are held hostage
This one really grinds my gears. Almost as much as developer’s who purposely make sites harder to edit so they have job security.
If you don’t have access to the settings of your website, it’s time to find better solutions. While it’s great to have someone act on your behalf, at the end of the day, you still should be able to make changes as needed. You’re the one paying for the service, so you need to be able to log in + make changes to your billing info at the very least.
Countless clients have come our way with no access to their domain (the .com that their business runs on), the update settings for their site, + more. While many of our hosting clients lean on us for doing site maintenance, they have the ability to go in + change their site details whenever they want.
Once you find a hosting company that gives a damn about your success, the migration process can be pretty easy. The way that we do things is by making a copy of the site + testing that for any issues. Once it’s fully up-to-date + cleared, the domain settings are updated to point to the new server instead of the old one. That way your site visitors have no idea anything changed. Well… the 30% increase in site speed is usually a dead giveaway.