Everyone goes for the most popular and easiest Content Management System (CMS) with a well-optimized hosting platform when considering hosting a new website — WordPress. It's the most popular choice for a reason. See why WordPress users trust Nexcess fully managed hosting in this article.
WordPress Explained: An Overview
WordPress is a free and open-source web publishing system originally designed for bloggers but now used for many different types of websites. Built as a successor of b2/cafelog by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, WordPress has taken off as a huge name in digital publishing and website creation.
As the most used CMS in the world, WordPress towers above the rest with over 28 million websites using the behemoth system. To give you a better idea of just how big that number is, it’s actually more than the next nine most commonly used content management systems on the list combined.
What’s the story behind WordPress’ dominance? There are a number of factors that make WordPress so widely used, but perhaps none is bigger than the fact that it is free and open source, meaning just about anybody can use it however they please and not have to worry about costs other than those associated with development and website management resources.
If you have come to a decision and want to use WordPress to build your site, the next decision is to identify the best hosting service for WordPress.
Why not trust Nexcess as many of the most savvy WordPress users have? As they have learned, there are many good reasons, which stack up quickly:
- We make sites FAST with premium image compression, built-in CDN and advanced caching
- We include worry free automatic plugin updates with visual comparisons
- No overage fees, traffic limits or metered pageviews
- Migrations are free
- 30-Day Money Back Guarantee included in every plan
- We're here for you. Always-on security monitoring & support from our WordPress experts 24/7/365
If you are starting with Nexcess, then you are in the right place. Nexcess will help you get started hosting WordPress sites by covering each part of the process with an ample number of instructional guides and helpful videos.
Wouldn't it be nice if your host completely handled the service, so all you had to do was sit and run your business? This is just the service we provide at Nexcess, and it's called "Managed WordPress Hosting."
We want to make sure our clients will have the best user experience possible. The service consists of WordPress installation, updates, backups, speed optimizing enhancements, malware scanning, along with critical security and uptime monitoring.
Fixing WordPress bugs, updating, performing backups, and so on and so forth will be easy with the WordPress hosting service offered by Nexcess. The majority of the site's overhead, management, and maintenance functions will be handled by our experts.
Benefits of Using WordPress on Nexcess
Let's begin with what Nexcess can do for our customers. Leveraging WordPress hosting on the Nexcess infrastructure has several advantages. Our servers are optimized for WordPress, from ground up. It's what they were specified and built for.
When hosting WordPress with Nexcess, we help your website have lightweight back-end codebase, so that it runs smoothly and fast regardless of traffic on the site. We all understand why website performance matters more than ever.
A Quick Website Enhances Your Brand’s Credibility
In addition to an improved user experience, measuring your website speed and optimizing it can make your business seem more legitimate.
Performance
Our managed WordPress hosting plans are worth it based solely on their performance. Nexcess hosting solutions are optimized for WordPress-powered websites.
In addition, the server architecture, databases, network, infrastructure, and all other layers in the technology stack have been developed to enhance the performance of your website.
Choosing the right web host can significantly improve the performance of your website. Nexcess offers a wide range of hosting solutions with many options that include features such as premium image compression, a built-in Nexcess Edge Content Delivery Network (CDN), and advanced caching to make sites load fast.
Nexcess Edge CDN
Improve page speed with our purpose-built Content Delivery Network. It is integrated into our platforms for easy use without a ton of configuration complexity.
The Nexcess CDN offers significant benefits. The main benefit from an optimization perspective is that the CDN will serve static assets from geographically optimized locations closest to individual visitors globally. The CDN will save bandwidth by serving static assets such as images, CSS, and JavaScript from the CDN cache.
The CDN will also reduce traffic to the server by handling static assets rather than all those requests coming into the webserver. Fast loading pages improve user experience, increase your page views, and help with your WordPress SEO.
The How to configure the Nexcess CDN with WordPress and CDN Enabler article guides you through the CDN configuration process.
Large images can cause your site to load slowly. A remedy for oversize images has been provided by the Nexcess managed WordPress hosting solution. The Compress JPEG & PNG Images plugin from TinyPNG plugin is available to you at no charge.
Using this plugin, you can easily speed up the loading of sites that are slow due to large image files without ever needing to open an image editor.
WordPress has techniques that can be utilized to accelerate the front-end and back-end load times. Furthermore, excess has advanced caching methods to make your site quicker.
When hosting a WordPress website, have you ever considered that it would be more beneficial to monitor its performance on your own?
Nexcess provides this feature for WordPress hosting platforms with the Nexcess Plugin Performance Monitor.
The Nexcess Plugin Performance Monitor
Don’t let changes to your website slow you down The Nexcess Plugin Performance Monitor watches your site every day so you don’t just see the problem — you know how to fix it.
Never Wonder About Your Site Performance Again
— Check your performance score daily
— Discover which plugins are slowing you down
— See how site changes impact your performance
Your managed WordPress hosting plan includes a new and exclusive feature that performs performance tests on your site and displays the results to your admin. You can learn more about performance monitor by visiting and reviewing our Plugin Performance Monitor guide.
The Nexcess Portal permits you to change your PHP form depending on the situation, and our WordPress server supports PHP 7 and 8.
Security
Security is the main issue for any site. A hacked WordPress site can harm business income and notoriety with significant negative consequences.
WordPress is sufficiently secure to ensure that most web users with normal information should not be able to hack into your site. Nonetheless, WordPress isn't excessively protected. There may be exposure, if additional security precautions are not considered.
To avoid potential risk, the SSL security option is always available and Nexcess is committed to educating you how to use it: A Beginner’s Guide to SSL.
A Beginner’s Guide to SSL
By this point you surely have noticed the little padlock that appears next to a website’s address bar when browsing the web – and perhaps even gotten a security warning when that’s not configured correctly. What does it mean, why should you want it and how can you get it on your own website?
There is an adage that says, "an apple a day keeps the doctor away," and just in the same way, SSL protects your website from hackers. What is SSL (Secure Socket Layer) you ask? It's an encryption convention, which gives a safe association between two machines or devices.
Nexcess encourages use of the free Let's Encrypt SSL solution , which you can read more about within the Nexcess Knowledge Base:
We suggest you implement SSL with every site you host. It can be implemented quickly on your schedule. Let's Encrypt is a fantastic temporary solution during SSL provisioning delays/problems and a long-term solution for non-production websites (staging, development, non-customer facing).
If you have an ecommerce website that expects to conduct ecommerce business, Nexcess does provide paid SSL solutions. If you haven't bought an SSL certificate, kindly review our article on purchasing SSL certificates from the Nexcess Portal.
Malware Scan on Web Server
Running malware scans on the web server is a standard practice with Nexcess. Keeping your server free of malware is important.
As organizations are more "connected" than any other time, a safe exchange of information among customers and servers is fundamental
That is the reason running a malware scan on your cloud server is a significant piece of the general security methodology you get with Nexcess.
Website Backups
What if your website is hacked? If so, having a site backup available at all times is essential.
Nexcess uses off-site backup servers. You can retrieve individual files and directories from these servers for activities such as site restoration or forensic investigations.
Nexcess backs up the site on a regular basis. You can also restore your site from a backup from the Nexcess Portal, or you can directly contact our support team to restore your site from a backup.
For more details on the restoration procedure, see the Restoring a Site from a Backup in Managed WordPress and WooCommerce Portal article.
Solid Security Pro
Solid Security Pro is another security feature we provide on WordPress hosting.
Solid Security Pro is a security module for WordPress which has many security highlights and brilliant features to assist with hardening your site.
Migrating Your WordPress Site to Nexcess
Relocating from your current web hosting company to a new web hosting can be troublesome event if the proper tools, processes, and support teams are not provided.
However, Nexcess has already considered what is involved to allow it to go smoothly. With the assistance of our expert staff, such a move is not quite so complicated.
A Quick Note Regarding Migrations
Our migration service for managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce is free for those purchasing a paid WordPress or WooCommerce offering at Nexcess.
Our team will generally respond to a request for migration within 24 hrs of submission. While we’re working around the clock to migrate sites, occasionally because of high volume, a queue may build up.
What is the Process?
The general migration process consists of four phases:
- Phase 1 - Initial sync of the site from your old host to Nexcess.
- Phase 2 - Acceptance testing (that’s your part).
- Phase 3 - Scheduled re-sync of the site from your old host to Nexcess (to catch anything that’s changed in the meantime).
- Phase 4 - DNS update to point A record to your new Nexcess server IP.
How Long Will it Take?
Most migrations are completed within two to five days from beginning to end.
Some things can impact this timing including the number of sites, size of the site(s), source, and your responsiveness to questions and acceptance testing.
We make it easy to move to Nexcess no matter your current setup. And, such a move to managed WordPress is free for those buying a WordPress plan with Nexcess — take a look at the migration process at Nexcess.
If you are familiar with migration and wish to do a self-move, you can utilize our plugins to complete the migration yourself. The plugin Nexcess provides is the "Migrate to Liquid Web & Nexcess" plugin that permits you to perform the site migration from a distant server.
For more details about the plugin and process, see the Migrating to Nexcess with managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce hosting article.
Extended Support
Rest assured that our extended support solution for managed WordPress hosting is always there for you from Nexcess.
We’re your team. Always on. Monitoring your servers, mitigating risk, optimizing performance. And we’re here to help 24x7x365.
Why Nexcess?
So why do WordPress users trust Nexcess? There are considerable choices out there. Here are the top five reasons:
- Fully managed WordPress optimized hosting for a reasonable cost
- A 99.99% uptime guarantee and ultra-fast loading speeds
- Superior security, enhanced security options, and monitoring for websites
- No overage, traffic limits, or metering fees are charged
- Expert WordPress support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Ready to get started? Check out our WordPress plans or reach out today.
