Create a slick and fast website using WordPress
Launching a new website or revamping an old one? WordPress is an obvious choice, but there’s more than one way to implement it, as Barry Collins explains
Are you launching a new website or just revamping an old one? WordPress is the obvious choice, but there’s more than one way to implement it. Barry Collins runs through the various options.
If you’re planning to set up a new website – or even migrate an existing one – it’s highly likely WordPress has crossed your mind. It’s the CMS that powers more than half of the world’s websites (where a CMS is identifiable), but that familiarity has its downsides.
One is a misconception over your hosting options. If you were planning anything more challenging than a basic blog, you might have thought a self-install of WordPress on third-party hosting was the only way forward. WordPress.com is for teenagers who want to pour out their thoughts on Fortnite using a boilerplate template, right? Actually, that’s not even remotely the case these days.
WordPress.com now hosts some of the world’s biggest websites and it’s arguably the perfect host for anyone looking to set up a WordPress-based site. It offers far more flexibility than was the case even two years ago, such as allowing customers to install whichever site theme they choose.
Here I’ll share my personal experience of setting up a WordPress.com site to explore the pros and cons of hosting with the mothership and help you get started with your own site.
WordPress vs WordPress.com
Before we start, it’s worth underlining the differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Both can be used to power websites and they share many features, but there are key differences.
WordPress.org provides the free, open-source WordPress software that you can use to host a website with any provider. In fact, most web hosts will offer WordPress installers as part of their hosting packages, meaning you rarely have to go to the trouble of hunting down the software and installing it yourself.
With a WordPress.org site, you’re entirely responsible for the installation. You (or your web host) must deal with updates, backups and maintenance. WordPress.org just provides the software.
With WordPress.com, Automattic – the company behind WordPress – is both your host and the software provider. Software updates are applied automatically, backups of your site are taken several times a day and WordPress provides facilities such as comment spam filtering.
It’s possible to migrate a WordPress.org site to WordPress.com and vice versa, although there are bumps along the way, which we’ll also come to. But first, let’s deal with some of the misconceptions about WordPress.com.
Breaking the handcuffs
One of the big reasons to avoid WordPress. com in years gone past was the tight restrictions on the look of your site. You could pick from a selection of WordPress Premium Themes, but custom themes were barred, making it very difficult to give your website a unique style.
That’s no longer the case. You still get access to WordPress’s Premium Themes, many of which are attractive, especially if you’re looking for a portfolio-style site for your business. But you can now also upload any theme you wish, or those purchased from stores such as themeforest.net.
If you enter the username and API key from your theme store into the site’s settings, you’ll get reminders when updates are available for your theme from the main WordPress.com dashboard, but these updates aren’t rolled automatically in case they break a feature on your site.
Custom CSS tweaks are permitted, letting you alter the design of your theme with a little hand coding, although you don’t get access to the site’s underlying database, like you would with a third-party host. That could be a showstopper for those who are used to FTP-ing changes to their site’s database and does pose further problems, especially if you’re migrating from another WordPress.org site.
As well as themes, you also have a free hand to install WordPress plugins, if you’ve a particular type of SEO service you prefer to use or want greater control over your mobile AMP pages, for example. Although, as with all WordPress installations, you’re well advised to take it easy on the plugins to reduce the chance of conflicts and damaging page-load times.
“YOU GET A 30-MINUTE VOICE SESSION WITH AN AUTOMATTIC ENGINEER AFTER SIGNING UP”
Unlimited hosting
At £25 per month for the top-end package (if paid a year in advance), small businesses may bristle at WordPress.com’s fees when compared to the cheap hosting packages you can find elsewhere. However, if your site is even remotely popular or you’re planning to stuff it with lots of multimedia content, that may prove a wise investment.
The Business Plan includes unlimited storage, meaning you never have to worry about uploading too many images or video and busting through your plan’s storage limit. Likewise, bandwidth isn’t capped, so there’s no need to worry about a sudden influx of traffic resulting in a site being dragged offline or an unexpected bill.
The other thing to consider here, and something that’s not exactly trumpeted by Automattic, is that you get the same level of hosting on the Business plan as huge commercial clients such as The Metro get. The biggest benefit of this is load times. When we transferred our site from (an admittedly cheap) third-party host to WordPress.com, we saw average page load times drop from around five seconds to just under three seconds. Given that Google is known to punish slow-loading sites, that might be the difference between appearing on page one of search results and the relative Siberia of pages two and three.
In the year since we’ve been running on WordPress.com, we’ve only suffered one major outage in which the site was unavailable for several hours due to a cable cut near a US data centre. It’s disappointing there’s not greater resilience for business customers and there’s no published uptime guarantee nor compensation for downtime, which may concern some customers. “[There’s] no official SLA but we are particularly proud of our dependability and performance – WordPress.com Business uptime was over 99.9% this past year,” a WordPress spokesperson told us.
If it’s any consolation, there’s an option in the settings to get an email if Automattic detects your site is down, so at least you should know if you’ve got problems. Even if there’s often not a great deal you can do about it other than email the support desk.
Talking of support, that’s offered via online chat or email only – no telephone helplines. Response times are swift in our experience, however, and you do get a 30-minute voice session with an Automattic engineer after signing up, who can talk you through any technical problems you might be having or just provide general advice on building traffic and optimising your site for Google. Certainly, the expert we spoke to was reassuringly knowledgeable and offered genuine insight.
The backup plan
Another huge advantage of going with WordPress.com is the automatic backup provided by the site’s Jetpack service.
Previously, we were relying on a manual backup procedure, which basically involved taking a daily dump of the entire WordPress database and storing it on a local system, ready to re-upload to the server if something went catastrophically wrong.
Premium web hosts may offer better backup solutions, but WordPress.com’s system is simple, if not quite as well designed as it was when we first signed up a year ago. Back then, you could simply click on a day in the calendar to roll back the site to how it was on that date, much like Windows’ System Restore. Now you have to plough through a long timeline of events on your site, with each event (such as a new post) appearing with a Rewind button alongside it, allowing you to revert the site to the previous state. You can also download a backup of your site if you want to have a local copy.
We’ve never hit the Rewind button as it’s running on a live site, so can’t vouch for its efficacy. (I’m mindful of the Honeyball maxim of a backup only being as good as the recovery.) That said, we have no reason to question that the Rewind will work as promised – certainly there are no mass howls of protest about failed backup restores that we can find online.
Making the move
It’s obviously easier to move to WordPress. com if you’re already running a site based on WordPress – although perhaps not as easy as you’d hope it might be.
WordPress has built-in Export and Import tools in its menu, allowing you to transfer content from one site to another. However, transferring even our reasonably modest months-old site wasn’t seamless. The transfer of files from our old host to WordPress.com was frequently interrupted. WordPress’s support engineers believed it was down to configuration or bandwidth limits imposed by our former host. We eventually migrated the content across, but it took several re-runs of the import tool.
Even when the content did arrive, it was incomplete. The main “featured” image of every post was successfully transferred across with the words, but none of the images embedded in the body copy were. And as we don’t have FTP access to the image folder on WordPress.com, we couldn’t merely dump a backup of body images into the new WordPress site, which was hugely frustrating. In the end, we ended up fixing dozens of articles by re-uploading images by hand and simply leaving those that were no longer generating much traffic, but it was a tiresome, manual process.
When asked why WordPress.com customers can’t have access to their site’s database, a WordPress spokesperson told us: “Our goal is to make building a WordPress site accessible to as many people as possible. To that end, we’ve given customers of the Business Plan the power to add plugins and themes, but more developer-oriented features that pose security and ease-of-use risks, like FTP access, could get users in trouble. We have found that standard hosting (through offerings like Pressable) already work well for those who use FTP.”
The right way to WordPress?
A year after we moved to WordPress.com, we’ve had no regrets about switching. The site is snappy, constantly updated, the backup headache has gone and we get to concentrate on building traffic instead of the mechanics of the website itself.
If you’re an old hand with WordPress who prefers to FTP and edit files manually, this isn’t the route for you. Those supporting multiple sites on multiple domains might also find conventional hosting cheaper. But for single-site businesses who want to focus on the content, it might well be the right way to WordPress.