Hosting is a must-have feature of every website. It ensures the site’s functionality and helps it handle the incoming traffic. Most importantly, a good service provider makes your site dependable by ensuring a solid uptime and allowing for future scalability.
If you’ve built your site with the help of WordPress, you have access to multiple opportunities in terms of selecting your perfect service provider. Namely, this CMS allows you to choose between WordPress managed hosting and a shared one. The choice you make can greatly affect not only the performance of your site but your search engine optimization efforts as well. Read on to learn how and which option is best for you!
Source: Freepik
Alt: Web hosting concept
The Impact of Hosting on SEO Performance
As you should know, search engine optimization (or just SEO) is the practice of improving your site and its content to match search engines’ algorithms and appear at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs) in organic search. Basically, using best practices to improve your SEO rankings is a powerful and often cost-effective way to create awareness, establish trust, and drive lots of targeted traffic to your site, which can later transform into sales.
While SEO is an absolute must-have today, it’s typically something you think about later, not when building a site and picking a hosting provider. And that’s in vain.
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Although these two might seem unrelated, the provider you use can actually affect your SEO performance in many ways:
- Uptime: Uptime is the time when servers are in operation, making your site accessible to users. Frequent downtime can hinder user trust and engagement metrics, lowering your rankings.
- Security: The provider you select will determine the security measures applicable to your site. A website’s security is directly linked to user trust and, thus, affects SEO.
- Speed: Depending on server power and location, the chosen provider can impact the loading speed of your pages, which is one of the direct ranking factors.
- Scalability: A provider supplies you with the storage space and hardware for your site’s operations, directly affecting its bandwidth. Selecting a quality provider can help you ensure that your site can process large volumes of traffic and data, thus securing scalability.
The safety, reliability, accessibility, and speed of your site, as determined by the service you use, affect all spheres of your online reputation because it not only signals search engines that your site is not reliable but also inhibits your visitors’ engagement and trust. In the long run, it can affect the overall domain authority – a cumulative SEO metric that spans various factors determining your rankings. To test your current authority score, you can use a reliable domain checker, such as that by NinjaReports. It will help you gain deeper insights into the different aspects of your site and identify existing areas for improvement that might be holding you back from getting the most SEO benefits.
What Is WordPress Hosting?
WordPress hosting is a type of web hosting that makes your website accessible on the Internet. Basically, it performs all the same functions but is tailored specifically to run WordPress sites, making it a good choice if your site operates on this CMS.
What Is Managed Hosting?
Managed service implies that you receive a fully managed, dedicated server. That is, a third-party provider handles most routines and technical tasks, such as the setup, backups, administration, and so on.
Such an environment offers you much simpler site management with automatic updates and enhanced performance.
What Is Shared Hosting?
First, as the name suggests, this type of service implies that multiple sites are facilitated on a single server. This means that you have to share the core resources, such as bandwidth, storage space, and processing power, with other sites.
Respectively, such an environment often restricts the resources available to you. Yet, it’s often more budget- and beginner-friendly.
Managed vs. Shared Hosting WordPress: A Complete Comparison
Ease of Use
A shared hosting WordPress is known for its beginner-friendliness. It’s typically easy to set up even for non-technical users, and requires minimum management to take care of backups, updates, and other routine tasks.
Yet, a managed service lets you offload technical responsibilities to a third party, making it even easier to use. Unlike shared options, it comes with premium support, which can help you solve any issues that arise faster and more easily.
Speed and Uptime
A managed option is usually optimized for smooth performance. It provides you with a dedicated server, meaning that you don’t have to share resources with other websites. Due to these reasons, it tends to offer better uptime and speed by default.
On top of that, managed services typically include extra features, such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), caching, and advanced server configurations, which can help you optimize the site’s speed further and meet Google’s Core Web Vitals standards that define websites loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability.
Source: Freepik
Alt: Data center with multiple racks of servers
Security
Although shared service comes with baseline security features, such as password security and software malware scans, it’s typically more vulnerable to risks than managed services. Latter ones typically have stronger security features, including advanced ones like DDoS protection, firewalls, and malware analysis. Additionally, daily backups and automatic updates ensure that your site is always up-to-date and, thus, less vulnerable.
Finally, it’s worth saying that shared services also imply shared risks. If one website within your server gets compromised, it can put risks on other sites due to shared resources.
Scalability
Generally, shared WordPress hosting is considered a good option for small sites. However, since it requires multiple sites to share the same resources, it implies less power available to each site. Respectively, such services might be okay for smaller sites but can struggle under heavy traffic or demand, making them not very good in terms of scaling.
Thanks to dedicated resources and optimized performance, managed services are typically able to withstand greater loads, making them suitable for larger sites that scale rapidly.
Cost
Finally, when comparing shared hosting vs WordPress hosting with a managed type, it’s crucial to look at the price. From this perspective, a shared service is the clear winner. Since it implies distributing resources across multiple websites, the cost of such a service is usually much lower. It can be as low as $3-$15 per month, which is perfect if your budget is restricted. Yet, you must remember that the low price comes with limited features and performance.
Managed service is typically more expensive. The price per month can be anywhere between $15 and $100+, which isn’t cheap. However, at this price, you get more advanced services, including enhanced security, automatic updates, greater reliability, and more.
What Is the Best SEO Hosting?
Now that you have a complete comparison of a managed service and a shared one regarding performance, reliability, and cost, let’s answer the most important question: which option is best for gaining maximum SEO benefits?
If you’re interested in growing your site and getting it higher SEO rankings, a managed service is generally a better option. Namely, if you pick the best managed WordPress hosting, it can offer you the following perks in terms of SEO:
- Faster loading speed. First of all, loading performance is one of the direct ranking factors that determine your position in SERPs. Besides, the faster your site loads, the better user experience it delivers, which also means greater engagement, lower bounce rate, greater retention, etc.
- Greater reliability. Generally, higher uptime ensures that your site will always be accessible to both users and search engine bots, which is also crucial for rankings.
- Enhanced security. The safety of users and their data is crucial for your online reputation. A managed service can help you ensure a higher level of protection, and automatic backups and updates can help mitigate vulnerabilities further.
- Scalability. At the end of the day, all your technical, off-page, and on-page SEO efforts are aimed at the same ultimate goal – to deliver more traffic to your site. Respectively, when investing in SEO, you want to know that your site will be able to handle the growing traffic and managed services are more scalable thanks to dedicated resources.
A shared service, on the other hand, might be an okay option for small sites with minimal traffic. Yet, its performance and resources are so limited that they don’t make a good option if you need solid SEO hosting because it will likely not be able to handle growing traffic. Add to this potential loading, accessibility, and security risks, and you should clearly see the downsides of this option.
Conclusion
Hosting is an element of your site that predetermines its functionality, loading performance, security, and more. Respectively, by affecting all these performance indicators, it also greatly affects the efforts you put into search engine optimization.
Eventually, the choice of WordPress hosting comes down to you and your site’s unique needs, requirements, and budget. Yet, although it’s more expensive, a managed service tends to offer more benefits and opportunities in terms of performance and SEO, which makes it a good option to consider.
