While digital marketing agencies excel in their domain, they are not specialized WordPress experts or managed WordPress hosting providers, leading to various issues that can severely impact website performance. Keep reading to learn that your WordPress website is best left in the hands of industry professionals specializing in WordPress.

Why It’s a Bad Idea to Depend on a Digital Marketing Agency for WordPress Services and Hosting

Digital marketing agencies are excellent at helping companies improve their overall online presence—from ad campaigns to working with online influencers. Where they fail is in WordPress design, development, and hosting. The best digital marketing agencies are self-aware and refer their clients to WordPress agencies like us instead of taking on your WordPress needs. Why should more digital marketing agencies send their clients to WordPress agencies instead of taking on the tasks themselves? The answers are below.

Lack of Specialized Expertise

Digital marketing agencies typically lack specialized WordPress design, development, and hosting knowledge. Their focus is primarily on marketing strategies rather than the technical aspects of website management, which can result in subpar website performance, security, and scalability.

Performance and Speed Issues

Digital marketing agencies often do not invest in high-quality hosting solutions, leading to slower load times and poor overall performance. Shared hosting environments can also result in resource contention, negatively impacting your website’s speed and reliability.

Security Vulnerabilities

Security is another critical area where agencies may fall short. Without prioritizing regular updates and best practices, your website becomes vulnerable to attacks. Outdated plugins and themes can create significant security risks.

Limited Scalability

As your business grows, your website needs to scale accordingly. Digital marketing agencies may not provide scalable solutions capable of handling increased traffic and data, often using hosting solutions that are not flexible or easily upgraded.

Slow Response Times

Marketing agencies juggling multiple clients may not offer timely support and maintenance, leading to longer downtimes and unresolved issues. Your website’s needs might not be prioritized, especially if the agency is focused on higher-paying clients.

Inadequate Backup Solutions and Recovery Challenges

Agencies may not implement robust backup solutions, putting your data at risk. In the event of data loss, they might not have the expertise to restore your website effectively, leading to prolonged downtimes and potential data loss.

The Impact of Poor Digital Marketing Practices

Poor digital marketing practices can negatively affect website performance and user experience. Slow-loading websites frustrate users, leading to high bounce rates and low conversions. Additionally, slow website speed negatively impacts SEO, as search engines like Google prioritize faster websites in their rankings. Ultimately, a poorly performing website reflects negatively on your brand, eroding customer trust and damaging your reputation.

How WebDevStudios Saves Your WordPress Website

When a potential client approaches WebDevStudios with a myriad of mishaps, we set up a call with them to discuss what they’re seeing go wrong and offer some possible solutions. These are the most common.

Identify the Problems with a Website Audit

Saving your WordPress website can begin with a comprehensive website audit to evaluate performance, security, and functionality. A client can only know so much about what looks to be wrong with their WordPress website based on the frontend. However, a website audit allows our team of WordPress experts to get under the hood for a thorough investigation.

Common signs of poor website performance include slow load times, high bounce rates, and low conversions. We often find typical issues such as outdated plugins, bloated code, and poor hosting, which most marketing agencies miss.

Optimize Website Performance

Once we uncover the difficulties with a website audit, we can focus on cleaning up and optimizing code and removing unnecessary plugins and scripts that slow down your site. Enhancing security measures, such as implementing SSL certificates, regular backups, and security plugins, ensures your website is protected from threats.

Implement Best Practices

We ensure your website has a responsive design for all devices and optimize images and media for faster load times. Implementing caching solutions and CDNs improves performance, while regular maintenance and updates keep your website running smoothly.

Recommend Managed WordPress Hosts

Improving your managed WordPress hosting is crucial. WebDevStudios has established partnerships with the best options. Based on your specific needs, we recommend managed WordPress hosting providers and facilitate the necessary introductions to ensure you receive the best hosting solution.

Prevent Future Issues

To prevent future issues, WebDevStudios offers ongoing WordPress support services. Our team becomes your team, helping you maintain optimal website performance and emphasizing the importance of regular audits and performance checks.

Does Your WordPress Website Need Saving?

Rescuing and optimizing your website is crucial for maintaining a robust online presence. At WebDevStudios, we specialize in identifying and resolving performance issues, ensuring your website runs efficiently and effectively. Contact us for a comprehensive website audit and performance improvement plan.

The post Saving Your WordPress Website: How WebDevStudios Rescues Clients from Poor Digital Marketing Practices appeared first on WebDevStudios.

[0] => Survey Your Requirements

When migrating your WordPress website and choosing your next host, some things worth considering are:

• How many users you have or expect to have
• What level of support you require via email, live chat, or phone
• Where you are hosting your email

Traffic

Be cautious with budget hosts (typically, $8 per month) that advertise UNLIMITED bandwidth or traffic. While cheap vendors might be sufficient for small blogs, often several thousands of websites are being hosted on the same server, fighting over the same system resources, which can result in slower speeds for more complex websites.

If your website is critical to your business success, it’s best to go with a company that allocates service by visitor count and typically starts with pricing around $29 per month. Often, when choosing a host based on metered traffic, your website is hosted on faster servers with a minimum guarantee of system resources.

Support

While a 99.99% uptime guarantee is typical of most modern-day hosts, in reality, things go wrong that can’t be expected. When choosing a vendor, always look for what ways you can reach out to support. While paying more for your hosting may not be fun, having phone or live chat support in the middle of a crisis can save you countless hours, rather than waiting for a reply by email.

Email

While this does not directly impact the performance of your website, often when purchasing hosting from budget hosting providers like GoDaddy or Host Gator, you also receive email hosting as part of your hosting price. When migrating to a specialized WordPress host, often they do not provide email services at all. In that case, consider budgeting $6 per month per email address for hosting your email with Google App for business.

[1] => Backup, Backup, Backup

Now that you know where you are migrating your WordPress website to, it is time to make a backup of your website. Depending on your size and budget, there are a lot of great choices on the market with some detailed below, in no particular order. When backing up your website, it is vitally important that you back up not only your website files but also a copy of your database.

Backup Solutions

• ManageWP is an affordable tool to backup and manage multiple websites at once. You can request backups manually or set up a timed interval to backup monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly.
• UpdraftPlus offers a robust free option as well as options to backup on a timed interval. One major plus to this plugin is the ability to backup to Google Drive, Dropbox, and Amazon S3.
• BackupBuddy  offers the ability to backup your entire website to remote locations on a timed interval, just like the previously mentioned options. However, one thing that is unique to this plugin is its ability to restore and optimize your database.

[2] => Set Up Your New Host

At this point, you should have a list of host requirements and your website backed up. Now, it’s time to buy your new hosting service. When selecting your host, it’s worth checking to see if they offer migration services during checkout. Often, migrating a WordPress website is included free with annual plans or made available for a one-time setup fee.

Having your host migrate your website might be a good option to consider if you are not comfortable with the technical aspects of setting up your new hosting environment. If you are still undecided on who to choose for hosting, consider using our WordPress maintenance, support, and hosting company, Maintainn. Maintainn’s hosting includes migrating your WordPress website, along with top-notch support, blazing fast hosting, and affordable pricing.

Note: If your new host is providing your migration services, feel free to skip to step 05 Setup Backups.

[3] =>  Upload Your Backup

Note: For demonstration purposes, we will be showing how to set up your hosting in a DreamHost shared account; however, your chosen host’s interface may be different. If you have any questions on any steps, reaching out to your host’s QA and support will be your best first step.

Set Up Your Domain

In order to upload our website backup, we must first create a domain record for it. Under manage domains, click Add Hosting to a Domain / Sub-Domain.

Next, enter your site’s domain. In our case, the website’s URL is holyfaithpsl.showing.work. You can choose to have “www” added to your website, but for our example, we won’t. After you are happy with your domain settings, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Fully host this domain button.

Next, since we are not going to have Dreamhost manage our DNS, we need to get the IP address for the server on which our site is now provisioned. Back under the Manage Domains page of your account, click on DNS under the domain name we just created. Scroll to the bottom of the page and record the IP address for the A record next to the domain name; in our case, we were assigned 67.205.10.79. Record this for later.

Import Database

Now it’s time to create a database for our site. Click on MySQL Database under the More header and use the following steps to define your new database. Ensure you record the database name, user, and password you defined for later.

1. Enter desired database name.
2. Select Create a new hostname now…
3. Select your domain and use mysql as the subdomain.
4. Under user, select Create a new user now…
5. Enter desired username.
6. Enter desired password.
7. Confirm password.
8. Finally, click Add new database now!

With our database created on the MySQL Databases page, click on phpMyAdmin next to the database we just created above.

Once you log in to phpMyAdmin, click on Import. In the importer upload the .sql file exported from your backup and click Go. That’s it for our database!

Upload Files

Now it’s time to upload the site files themselves. Under FTP & SSH Users > Manage Users, find the domain you registered and click Manage Files.

Now that you are in the WebFTP view, simply upload your website backup files (not your database).

Lastly, it’s time to update our wp-config.php with the database we created earlier. Right click on wp-config.php and click Edit. With the wp-config.php open, scroll down to your ‘DB_NAME’, ‘DB_USER’, ‘DB_PASSWORD’, and ‘DB_HOST” section and update with the information we recorded earlier.

Note: Most hosts require the DB_HOST be set to localhost; Dream Host, however, requires this be the specific subdomain we made earlier.

[4] => Update Your DNS

The last step to bringing our website online is updating our domain to point to our new hosting provider. From the IP address we recorded earlier, log into your domain DNS control panel and create an A record to point to the IP address we recorded in the step before.

Congratulations! Your website is now migrated to your new hosting server.

[5] => Set Up Backups

Although your hosting provider may provide incremental backups for your website, it is always recommended to set up at least one other third-party backup solution for your website. In the event your host experiences any downtimes or data loss, you can never have too many backups. One of the easiest ways is to use ManageWP, which will back up your website to their third-party servers starting at only $2 per month.

 

The post 5 Steps to Migrating Your WordPress Site appeared first on WebDevStudios.

WP Engine is a WordPress-focused hosting company headquartered in Austin, Texas. WebDevStudios loves working with WP Engine and has a number of clients who are using their hosting services. We even host our own sites, including WebDevStudios.com on WP Engine!

Why do we love WP Engine so much? There are TONS of reasons!

• Easy to migrate your WordPress website to WP Engine.
• Easy to maintain whether you are a developer or an individual.
• Speed & Caching
• One-click staging with GIT integration
• Great customer support
• Dedication to the WordPress Community

WP Engine has a number of different plans to fit your WordPress website needs. Every plan includes amazing support that starts with website migration and continues through out the life of your website. As I have mentioned many times before, I am in no way a technical person, but with the help of WP Engine’s documentation and support team I was able to migrate my own WordPress website all by myself! They were also able to help me with a few small plugin issues post-migration in a very timely manner.

WP Engine is great to work with as a developer too! Brad has worked with the WP Engine team for a variety of projects from a simple blog to a complicated Multisite install. We can certainly say that due to unforeseen, random issues not every migration has gone super smoothly, but working with the WP Engine team is always a pleasure.

One of the biggest things we notice about sites that are migrated to WP Engine is the instant speed increase. If you are looking for a hosting company that is implementing all the best practices when it comes to site speed, this is it. WP Engine does a great job managing traffic spurts and site loading times. They also manage page-caching, database-caching and object-caching.and have a CDN upgrade to account for sites with a large amount of media.

As a WordPress development company one of our favorite features is the one click staging site. We really appreciate how WP Engine makes it easy to stage and test your site before pushing it live. WP Engine also provides Git integration available to all of their clients.  The Git-push-to-deploy setup adds the ability to deploy your applications using the open-source Git version control system. These features are great for us as a development company, but are also ideal for anyone who is looking to update a live site or learn WordPress development as they go.

We also can’t say enough great stuff about all the things WP Engine does beyond providing great hosting! WP Engine is a HUGE supporter of the WordPress community. They have been a sponsor for our local WordCamp Philly for the last three years and have sponsored a number of other WordCamps all over the country as well. They take their community role seriously and try to do their best to both promote their product and help WordPress improve the WordPress community.

If you haven’t already, check out WP Engine today. You won’t be sorry!

**DISCLAIMER: WebDevStudios is an affiliate member of WPEngine. The links in this post are affiliate links which means that if you make a purchase after clicking the links in our post, we get a small payment from WPEngine as a thanks for promoting their product and brand. WebDevStudios does not participate in affiliate programs of products that we do not love to use ourselves – – we fully endorse and regularly use the products we promote on our site. If you have questions, let us know!

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Rackspace is the second venture-backed technology company to go public this year. ArcSight had its public offering on Feb 14, 2008. 48 venture-backed tech companies went public in 2007, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

Rackspace was founded in 1998, and has been a leading website hosting provider ever since. WebDevStudios utilizes Rackspace servers to host all of our production websites.

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