My Web Maintenance

July 2022

Migrating your WordPress website: what you need to know

Are you planning to move your WordPress website to a brand new hosting provider? Many companies are faced with the choice to migrate their website to another hoster because they have problems with their current provider, who they may be fed up with!

Of course, no one wants to worry about switching WordPress web hosts. We all want 100% uptime, great load times, and an affordable solution, all in one package.

But unfortunately, the world of WordPress hosting doesn’t work like that, and the perfect scenario is almost impossible. Suppose you are unsatisfied with your present web hosting provider. In that case, you may have already experienced some of the following five reasons why businesses migrate their WordPress website to a new host.

1. Too Much Downtime

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All providers on the market guarantee 99.99% uptime. But how many of these companies can back up those words with actual uptime and peak WordPress performance?

Your website is a vital component to the success of your business, and that’s why you need a hosting service that offers stable uptime that will protect you from any loss of revenue or customers. There are several reasons why downtime can harm your bottom line:

Missed opportunities: If you’re in eCommerce, you can lose many sales opportunities, and if you’re in B2B SaaS, you lose product registrations and leads.

Damaged reputation: Downtime can easily damage your company’s reputation. First impressions count, and so do second ones. So if users want to access your website but experience downtime, that’s a big problem that could keep them away.

Wounded SEO: Depending on the duration and intervals of downtime, your SERP ranks could be affected. Repeated website downtime will give Google enough reason to push your website down in the rankings.

Consequently, anything shorter than 100% uptime means a drop in traffic and revenue. There is no room for downtime or website errors for a quality hosting provider and a reliable web experience.

2. Terrible Customer Service

Is there anything more disappointing than not being able to reach a customer service representative when you need to resolve an issue? Your business could depend on whether you can resolve the glitch, error, or problem quickly. There could be numerous difficulties if your web hosting experience is miserable. When problems occur, you require to be able to get in touch with a customer service representative right away.

Before choosing a hosting provider, you should at least check if the customer service team is up to the task! It would be best if you ensure that will solve all your problems before you decide on a provider.

To evaluate the quality of your hosting provider’s customer service, you require to analyze the following aspects:

Feedback time: How much time does the current holding company require to respond to your request? If you encounter a roadblock with your WordPress website, time is precious, and there is no excuse for not responding to your call. A fast response time is something you shouldn’t even negotiate.

Resolution time: If the hosting team are expert, the resolution time shouldn’t be more than a few minutes. Every second is crucial, and if your website doesn’t load properly, customers might churn. So, if you are stuck with a hosting company that takes too long to respond to your requests, you should cut your losses by switching to a new company.

Expertise: If you receive a quick response to your inquiry, but it’s unclear and doesn’t provide a practical option, then that response is no help! Make sure that you work with an employee trained to answer and solve any of your hosting queries.

A good hosting provider will offer you every kind of support, from a ticket system to live chat and email to phone and video calls – 24/7/365! Having multiple assistance choices at any given time can resolve critical issues quickly and with additional preventive measures.

3. Slow Loading Time

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Internet sites tons time is crucial to the success of your company. A delay of just one second can cost a company. Whether you’re producing content or selling a product on your site, fast data transfer can distinguish between acquiring brand-new clients and shedding them to your competitors.

Your hosting solution can make a significant distinction when it comes to the performance of your WordPress internet site. A modern SSD drive can read data much faster than a traditional hard drive, it may be much more costly, but the efficiency is well worth it. For this reason, you should choose a robust hosting provider with the latest infrastructure and solid-state drives.

Durable WordPress organizing carriers additionally use VPS environments or cloud networks to dedicate more resources to each client, resulting in faster loading of pages and databases. If the hosting infrastructure is designed for speed, the provider should make extra efforts to optimize the speed of your website additionally.

Caching helps your website deliver content faster while reducing the load on the web servers. A powerful hoster will offer you a caching system with plugins and add-ons for your static files and databases.

4. Poor Security

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Today’s technology has changed every industry, and one of the most significant issues is cybersecurity. Suppose you have a WordPress website that is not adequately secured. In that case, you are in for an absolute nightmare with stolen datawebsite glitches, and other malicious intentions that could harm your business.

Your WordPress web hosting plays a significant role in your WordPress website’s safetysecurity, and upkeep. The wrong host selection will result in inadequate protection of your build and all other websites hosted on the same server.

Despite WordPress’ robust core, you may need additional layers of protection for your website.

One of the essential steps for better WordPress security is automatically updating the corethemes, and plugins, which is, fortunately, an option in almost every hosting plan.

Suppose you’re working with a professional WordPress development agency. In that case, your development team will most likely provide an additional layer of monitoring to ensure that automatic updates don’t override any site features.

Other useful features for online security are automatic backups and SSL certificatesSSL certificates are crucial because they can encrypt communications between servers and browsers. Furthermore, SSL certifications gradually contribute to your search engine position, improving your position in SERPs.

Besides automatic updates and SSL certificates, an excellent hosting plan includes regular scans and solutions for malware and viruses, web firewalls, and protection against DDoS attacks.

5. Missing Features

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The host is a service that you have to pay for. So, to make an informed decision, you need to understand the features that each hosting package offers you and the impact that these features will have on your WordPress website.

It’s great to have all the essential features for your hosting package, but wouldn’t you like to get more for your money? There are features that you may have to do without, such as:

Great server location: Server place is just one of the most critical elements that affect the speed of your WordPress website. Usually, a website will load faster if accessed from a geographically close location to the server location.

A plethora of useful plugins: Do not look for a more significant number of plugins – seek plugins that you can benefit from! Ensure that your organizing service offers you plugins that increase your website’s security, improve your search engine optimization and simplify the monitoring and maintenance process.

Performance-oriented architecture: You deserve nothing less than breakneck speed and performance for your WordPress website! It would be best to have a web host that guarantees optimal use of modern technologies for maximum speed and efficiencies, such as NginxMariaDBPHP7LXD containers, and a minimalist hosting stack customized for WordPress.

Sandbox setting: With the sandbox or hosting a setting, screening and optimizing an improved variation of your WordPress website is a much more effective process, ensuring no downtime or other inconveniences on your live site. The sandbox must provide access to an SSH connection, at least SFTP, the database, and other files. If you run into problems, you have the time to fix them or find alternative solutions.

Server Space: Your current hosting plan may have worked well initially, but as your traffic increases, you will need to switch to a hosting plan with enough server space to support this growth. So, when comparing different hosting plans, you should choose one that offers the most storage space at the most affordable price.

Payment plans: With web hosting, you usually get what you pay for, but sometimes a comprehensive plan isn’t even necessary. How can you tell if you’re paying excessively? If your plan has many features, some of which you never use, or your website is still small, but you’re hosting it on a server with more storage than you need, you should reconsider your options.

The bottom line is that you must never settle for the cheapest solution for WordPress hosting. Check thoroughly what features are offered and if the company provides you actual advantages over other hosting providers.

Choosing A Managed Hosting Provider 5 Best Managed WordPress Hosting in 2022 Compared (Pros & Cons)

Once you have selected the attributes you need, you should choose a new hosting partner for your WordPress website that can handle heavy traffic, withstand security attacks, and provide an excellent foundation for your content.

A managed hosting service monitors and maintained every technical aspect of your WordPress websiteThe number of websites that have switched to managed hosting has increased over the past 8-9 years, and along with WordPress websites, this is the predominant way to manage businesses online.

The Top Four Advantages Of Using A Managed Hosting Provider Are

Better website security: Managed-to-host services offer unparalleled security compared to other types of WordPress web hosting. A managed provider offers the highest level of security, daily backups, malware scans, and updates that prevent hacker attacks on your website.

Uptime monitoring: Speed and performance directly impact search result rankings. Most managed-to-host providers offer 24/7 website monitoring, so you don’t have to worry about your website’s performance at any point in time.

24/7 support: Managed hosting providers have trained experts who know the technical details of the platform and how to solve common and complex problems.

Customizable solutions: Most managed hosts can support almost any niche, from educational blogs to e-commerce websites and everything in between. Will certainly customize the option to fit your company’s needs, not the other way around.

If you pay a bit more for a high-quality hosting provider, you will get additional security layers, 24/7 support, and regular malware scans. A top-notch hosting plan also includes top-notch caching plugins and CDN access, measures that can significantly impact the speed of your website.

At My Web Maintenance, We’re passionate about WordPress website design, hosting, and maintenance. We offer website design, web hosting, and maintenance solutions for your business to help grow your online presence.

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Examining the Importance of Monitoring Website Traffic

There are over 1.3 billion websites worldwide, and everyone is looking for visitors.

So the competition is fierce, and that’s one of the reasons marketers and businesses invest in SEO, PPC, and social media campaigns to drive website traffic. However, you won’t see any progress or marketing ROI if you don’t track your traffic volume.

Free tools, such as Google Analytics (GA), provide a wealth of information about your website visitors and their actions. This post is about why tracking your traffic is so important.

1. UNDERSTAND YOUR DATA

You can only know your traffic data and analytics through website monitoring. You can obtain a report on your traffic sources, keyword volume, number of pages viewed, and countries with the highest traffic. This data is crucial for decision-making regarding SEO campaigns and customer experience.

Most importantly, you can determine your conversion rate and understand your customers’ journey to optimize essential things. This way, it’s much easier to identify your visitors’ problems that prevent them from taking the actions you want them to take.

Solid marketing today is based on actionable data and consumer preferences. Google Analytics gives you the data you need to analyze your website’s performance and usage, increase traffic, and improve the visitor experience.

2. GET TO KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS

Your website traffic helps you understand what visitors are doing on your website, what they are looking for, and what drove them to convert.

You can improve your services and products when you regularly know what visitors are searching for. You can create purchaser profiles for your potential customers with your customer data. You can define your perfect persona by age, location, salary, and interests.

With GA, you can determine where most of your visitors come from. Location demographics will provide you with a list of countries with more visitors. This way, you know who and where to target to ensure consistent website traffic.

3. DETECT AND FIX ERRORS

Tracking your traffic also helps you identify potential website errors, such as replicate URLs, duplicate tags, web spam, and broken URLs. These are a few issues that affect your traffic and website performance on various browsers and devices.

If you observe a sudden drop in traffic, there is a possible reason. Besides search engine updates, it may be website hosting issues, 404 errors, or slow website speed. Fixing these issues can potentially lead to an increase in web traffic.

Google Analytics also sends notifications to your dashboard when there is an issue with your account setup and website accessibility. These can be redundant hostnames where your website receives data from different hosts. You will also be notified if your conversion rates drop.

4. KNOW THE PERFORMANCE OF YOUR PAGES

With an analytics tool that monitors your site’s traffic, it’s easier to monitor the performance of your pages. You want to find out which pages are ranking well, which can be improved, and which are not ranking at all.

If you know the content that keeps visitors on your site for a long time, you’ll also know what kind of information visitors want. This way, you can create content that quickly engages visitors. Also, you can add internal links to these posts to promote other pages and posts on your site.

Information about pages that perform the worst is also essential to make changes and improvements. They provide insight into how visitors arrive and depart from these pages. You can also identify the possible reasons for the high bounce rates on the worst-performing pages.

One reason may be that the content doesn’t offer what visitors want. It can also be because your web content is technical and complex for most visitors to understand. Conducting a content analysis will assist you in identifying problems and taking the right actions.

5. CHECK YOUR SHOPPING CART ABANDONMENTS

If you run an e-commerce website, you have every reason to track your website traffic, especially if your buying cart abandonment rate is high. With the Goal Funnel in GA, you can set up a goal if you have a multi-step checkout process.

This way, you can determine the points at which your visitors abandon the checkout process. For example, if you notice many visitors abandoning the checkout page, you need to determine why. It may be the total cost of the order, payment options, shipping costs, or an unfriendly design.

When you find out the reason, you can more easily optimize your payment process by eliminating the unpleasant points for your visitors. Review the information you ask for during checkout to see if it triggers purchase anxiety. You also need to eliminate any unnecessary steps.

6. IDENTIFY WHEN YOUR WEBSITE IS BUSIEST

Your content strategy and campaigns need to consider when your website is most visited. With GA, you can break down your traffic by day of the week and time of day to get a more accurate look at traffic during peak hours.

That will help you determine when you should release new content or expand your campaigns to get the most visitors. Knowing this information is key to your marketing success, publishing content that can be shared, and improving your conversation rates.

3 Tools You Should Use to Track Your Website Traffic

You need to know where your visitors are coming from, what they’re interested in, and what their browsing habits are. That way, you can target and effectively adjust your website content, SEO, marketing, and advertising strategies as your business grows. 

1. GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is the king of all site monitoring tools – a free web analytics tool offered by Google that assists you in analyzing your website traffic. Evaluating your advertising strategies, optimizing SEO, digital marketing, etc., is essential.

Knowing how many individuals visit your website by age or location, where they come from, and what pages they visit is very helpful in figuring out who your primary target audience is on the internet.

Google Analytics is placed on your website with a tracking code that needs to be entered under the “Website Settings/Third Party Vendors” tab in Showit and an embedded code that needs to be placed in your custom head HTML section.

2. HEATMAP

This feature is good. Heatmap shows you exactly where visitors are clicking and how often. While Google Analytics shows you which pages are visited, Heatmap shows which parts of the page are clicked.

3. GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Google Search Console shows me what people search for when they type something into Google. It is an excellent tool for search engine optimization – it shows you what people are searching for and how they phrase their search queries. Focusing on these keywords when writing your website copy, naming your images, and writing meta titles and descriptions would be best.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console send monthly updates via email, and Heatmap constantly runs in the background of your site (you can turn the results on and off if you don’t want to see them as often). Use all three applications to track traffic to website, and also recommend them to all clients!

As long as you have a website, tracking and monitoring your traffic is essential to see how visitors engage with your content.

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