How to Choose Enterprise WordPress Hosting for Publishers
In today’s fast-changing digital world, publishers need to balance multiple distribution channels and content-sharing platforms. The platform over which publishers have the most control — their website — remains a critical piece of their stack. And in an often unpredictable industry, having reliable enterprise hosting infrastructure is more crucial than ever.
WordPress is renowned for its user-friendly interface and flexibility, giving publishers the tools they need to craft and manage content effortlessly. However, when it comes to hosting solutions for WordPress, one size does not fit all, especially for publishers with diverse content and audience demographics.
Finding the right host can be a difficult task. This article delves into the features and benefits of enterprise-level hosting to help publishers choose the right host for their websites.
Understanding the needs of publishers
Publishers encompass a diverse range of entities, including media outlets, creators, and the marketing arms of brands. Each has unique requirements dictated by their content type, audience demographics, and traffic volume. Enterprise WordPress hosting must cater to these diverse needs, offering scalability, security, and performance tailored to publishers’ specific use cases.
High traffic and content volume
Managing high traffic on publisher websites presents several challenges, including:
1. Scalability issues
When a website experiences a sudden surge in traffic, it can overwhelm the server’s resources, leading to slow response times, site crashes, or even downtime. Traditional hosting solutions may lack the scalability needed to accommodate sudden spikes in traffic effectively.
2. Bandwidth limitations
High traffic consumes significant bandwidth, especially when serving multimedia-rich content such as images, videos, and interactive elements. Bandwidth limitations can result in slower page load times, reduced responsiveness, or even bandwidth overage charges from hosting providers.
3. Database performance
High-traffic websites often rely on databases to store and retrieve dynamic content, user data, and other website assets. Database performance can become a bottleneck during peak traffic periods, resulting in slow database queries, database server overload, or even database connection errors.
4. Content delivery optimisation
Efficiently delivering content to users across different geographic regions can be challenging. Slow content delivery due to distant server locations or network latency can negatively impact page performance.
The impact of poor performance
Poorly-performing sites can have a significant negative effect on user experience, SEO, and advertising revenue.
User experience
Website visitors have increasingly high expectations for fast, responsive, and seamless online experiences. Slow-loading pages are a major deterrent, leading to higher bounce rates as users quickly lose patience and move on to other sources. This is particularly critical for publishers, whose success depends on keeping readers engaged and encouraging them to explore more content. Engagement metrics such as time on site, pages per session, and return visits are all influenced by the initial user experience.
SEO
Poorly-performing sites can significantly impact SEO and how prominently content is shown in search results. Search engines aim to provide users with the best possible results for their queries, which includes listing websites that offer a superior user experience, signalled in part by fast page load times. Google uses Core Web Vitals, a set of specific factors that measure web usability such as loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of pages, as part of their ranking criteria.
Advertising revenue
The performance of a website can have a direct impact on the effectiveness of display ads, influencing both viewability and click-through rates. Advertisers prioritise placements on websites where ads are more likely to be seen, and a fast-loading site ensures that ads are rendered promptly, improving viewability metrics. The likelihood of a user clicking on an ad decreases significantly if the page or ad content loads slowly. In the world of programmatic advertising, auction and ad delivery speeds are critical. Slow site performance can delay ad calls, negatively affecting ad fill rates.
Security concerns
Digital publishers face constant threats from cybercriminals who seek to exploit vulnerabilities in their websites or infrastructure. These threats include DDoS attacks, malware injections, phishing attempts, and ransomware attacks. A successful cyber attack can disrupt website operations, compromise user data, and cause irreparable damage to the publisher’s reputation.
Features of Enterprise Hosting
With the right infrastructure, support and management tools, publishers are set up to handle high traffic volumes, accommodate growth, and maintain fast and responsive website performance.
Scalability
Most web hosting platforms are set up to scale vertically – adding more power to their existing stack. An enterprise host will include the capability to host horizontally – or multi-server. Choosing the right host will help avoid some of the common mistakes associated with moving to multi-server yourself.
Scaling infrastructure to match increasing demand in real-time is essential for ensuring uninterrupted website performance during traffic surges.
Performance optimisation
Enterprise hosting solutions implement content delivery networks (CDNs) and edge caching solutions. This can improve content delivery speed by caching content closer to users’ locations and reducing latency.
It’s not only frontend performance that has an impact, backend performance of the CMS and hosting infrastructure is equally important for editors producing content:
- Fast load times and responsive interfaces mean editors can edit, publish, and update articles with ease
- Editors can preview changes quickly and efficiently, allowing for faster content iteration and ensuring that readers always have access to the latest information
- Multiple editors are able to work concurrently on the same website without compromising speed or performance.
Enterprise hosts offer dedicated resources which offer a significant advantage over shared hosting, where multiple websites share resources on the same server. Dedicated hosting allocates an entire server exclusively to one client – this ensures consistent performance and reliability, with no fluctuations caused by other users.
Security measures
Enterprise hosting differs from self-managed hosting in several key areas, providing layers of protection for publishers and website visitors.
Dedicated resources and server clusters isolate website infrastructure from other hosting customers, while global data centers ensure content is available from multiple locations. Access and authentication are controlled and limited to only the specific users who need it and advanced access for more granular control is not enabled by default. Data is protected with multiple encrypted backups and robust disaster recovery procedures in place in the event of a breach. In addition, networks are monitored with web application firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDS), DDoS mitigation, CDN integration and enforced SSL/TLS encryption.
Bonus feature: multiple environments
The integrity of a Production environment is one of the most important requirements for publishers. Their website needs to run like a well-oiled machine and remain free of experimental features.
Managed WordPress hosts provide separate environments in the same ecosystem to serve these purposes. This typically looks like:
- Production
- Staging
- Development
Having multiple environments allows for testing on the same infrastructure as Production, without the risk of impact to real users.
Comparing enterprise WordPress hosting options
Many specialised managed WordPress hosts in the market offer solutions to suit smaller or low-traffic websites. Here at The Code Company we recommend WordPress VIP and WP Engine to the majority of our enterprise and publishing clients.
There are several important factors to consider when researching your enterprise-grade hosting options; reputation & reliability, support & customer service, performance & speed, and security features.
WordPress VIP
WordPress VIP is designed for enterprise-level clients with high-traffic websites and applications. It is a fully managed WordPress hosting service that employs strict coding standards and provides dedicated infrastructure and support.
Its plans include website optimisation tools like a built-in CDN with data centres around the world, code minification and concatenation, image optimisation, and performance monitoring. There’s also a strict review process for any third-party WordPress plugins and custom code, creating improved security measures for your site.
Additional features include hourly backups, load-balancing, built-in automatic scaling, and general updates for the core software.
Key features:
- Automatic scaling
- Strict coding standards
- Advanced customisable performance tools
- Proactive threat detection and prevention
- Continuous monitoring and patching
- Security audits
- Server-level access
- Advanced analytics and reporting
- Integrations for enterprise tools such as CRM and marketing automation
- Dedicated support team.
WP Engine
WP Engine provides hosting solutions suitable for small right through to enterprise-sized businesses. Their platform is user-friendly and allows most themes and plugins (and customisations) to be installed.
WP Engine’s plans include Staging and Development environments, automated backups, managed updates to plugins and core, CDN and 24/7 support.
Key features:
- Scalability
- Global CDN
- Fast performance out-of-the-box
- Localised servers
- Proactive security measures
- User-friendly interface
- Automated backups
- Staging & Development environments
- 24/7 support.
How do I choose the right host for my website?
Many other factors impact decisions around hosting providers.
There may be technical considerations with your theme, plugins and integrations. Your traffic or page views may impact which plan is required and associated costs.
The Code Company partners with the best enterprise WordPress hosts and can provide guidance and solutions for your business.
