Good Wordpress Hosting Equals Fast Blogs, and Fast Loading Blogs Make Money

Once your Wordpress powered blog starts to see some solid traffic, you may well find that your $5 a month hosting plan is not up to the job.

The trouble for me started when my Wordpress powered site started to get around 500 page views a day. This caused my hosting services CPU to become a little hot under the collar and my site started to slow down. Sometimes it would crash totally. I won't mention the web hosting service I was using at the time, but a) it was not that cheap b) it had endless technical problems which were not the fault of my site.

Time to For A Move

The new host was OK for a while, but as traffic started to build, its server CPU started registering high usage levels as well. Another move - to the cloud this time. This was OK, but I managed to end up on the service's highest service level owing, once more to, yes, you guessed it - high levels of CPU usage. And again, my site was falling over - not good for my readers, nor for my wallet!

I started to think about dedicated servers and all that stuff, but you need time and knowledge to run your own dedicated server - I had neither. How about managed dedicated hosting? One look at the prices was enough to put me off that - and even then, dedicated hosting may not give you the results you are looking for - unless your host knows Wordpress very well indeed.

Hey, I thought, "How about a specialised Wordpress hosting service?" Do they exist?

Enter Specialised Wordpress Hosting

One quick search on Google revealed that they did. The prices were a bit on the high side, but I guessed that with a faster site I'd get more traffic and that the higher ad income would pay the extra hosting costs.

I fired off an email to one of the hosting services, told them about my situation and asked what they would recommend. The hostng service HostCo came back saying that their medium cost service - $20 a month would be OK for my site. That they had not suggested I go for a higher priced plan impressed me. I signed along the bottom line and let them do the migration of my blog from the old host to their servers.

At the same time they also kindly sorted out the new domain name and everything was up and running good and quickly.

Not only this, but I learned that HostCo is also familiar with the Wordpress theme framework - Genesis - which I use. Excellent!

Am I pleased? Definitely! Which is also why the link above is an affiliate link.

The numbers showed things were doing well too, and as you'll see in the next part below, a fast loading site can make a big difference.

Google started to take page loading speed into account last year and how fast your blog loads could affect your ranking in search engines. In other words, even if you have a great blog, write great posts and have got all the SEO right too, your blog might be under performing because it loads too slowly.

How fast should your pages load?

A good question. Within Google Webmaster there is now a section which tells you, roughly, how fast your site is. Fast for Google is 1.5 seconds. My site is around 5 seconds under load which is OK and I know that my web host is working to reduce that.

With my previous host, I was seeing 8 second plus load times. And don't be fooled into thinking your site is OK because with 30 visitors on site it's loading in under 3 seconds. The more traffic you get, the slower the page loading times will become and you may well hit a glass ceiling in terms of Google popularity if you don't keep an eye on page loading times.

How can you keep an eye on how fast your pages are loading? Easy - go use Pingdom tools and, they're free, test your home page and any pages which are popular or which have lots of images on them. And test your pages when you've got people on your site too. Fast changing numbers on the Wordpress stats plugin will tell you that you've got plenty of visitors.

If your pages are slow and you use Wordpress, get the W3 Total Cache plugin and get it set up right. Make sure your .css files are minimised - but be careful with java scripts - when I cached them, Google Analytics stopped working!

Luckily my host HostCo helped me set up W3 Total Cache for both the main and mobile versions of my site. Do not forget mobile sites - they are becoming ever more important.

Watch Out for Wordpress Plugins!

Get carried away with adding bells and whistles with lots of clever Wordpress plugins and you risk slowing down your site to a crawl when lots of people visit it.

Rouge Ad Code

Putting poorly written ad serving code which sits on slow servers can drag your site loading time into the doldrums - test page loading time before and after using new ad code.

Moral of the story: Fast Wordpress blogs get more traffic than slow Wordpress sites and more traffic means more money from ad income and affiliate sales.

Here's my blog all about Italy - Italy Chronicles - I get regular contacts from potential advertisers now. The site was a Google PR 4 - but is not ranked owing to the site name change - which Google has been told about. The Alexa ranking was at under 150,000 and is falling, er, up to this level.

Happy blogging and if you are a blogger - use Pingdom Tools to let us know how fast your site is loading.

Be fast and make money, be slow, and you won't.