WORDPRESS WEBSITES

WORDPRESS WEBSITES

WORDPRESS WEBSITES:

How to choose your web hosting and plugins

WordPress is one of the easiest application to use for a blogging website. The application is free to use but though it gives its users their own domain name and hosting plans, it is too expensive. Also, I feel it won’t look professional because the domain name comes with .wordpress.com.
My suggestion is to get yourself a domain name and hosting from a service provider or do your own hosting and connect it with WordPress application.

Right now this website is hosted on a shared hosting by GoDaddy. I feel it is worth the money spent. Though I am having an affiliate with Hostgator and my other website www.residentreporter.com is hosted in Hostgator, I would suggest you go with GoDaddy. It is simple to use and after having interacted with both Hostgator and GoDaddy customer support, I would say GoDaddy’s team is far better in service and they were more professional in handling customers.
Of course, there are few drawbacks while using this shared hosting. Godaddy allows only 150 users at a time to your website, while Hostgator allows about 30k visitors per month after that you have to change your plan. These shared hostings are handled by the hosting team.
Another problem is that with these shared hosting plans, be it with GoDaddy or Hostgator or blue host, you don’t know the other websites your hosting is shared with. For instance, every website has an IP address and suppose the IP address of your website is shared with an adult content website, then because of this blacklisted website, your website seo score is affected.
Hosting providers give a virtual private server and dedicated servers for a higher cost. This can handle higher traffic than a shared hosting.
If you want to switch from a shared hosting to a VPS or dedicated hosting you will need a full-time developer incurring further expense.

Only option for people who doesn’t know about coding and is not a developer and are anticipating huge traffic is to take up the cloud hosting or the business hosting (in GoDaddy). It is managed by the service provider but there is no traffic restriction.
I have been using WordPress for almost a year now and I have personally come across many plugins for my websites, some of them are extremely useful for your websites.

All in one favicon by Arne Franken
In the toolbar you see your website name, next to it a custom icon will come when you install this plugin. It will improve your seo score.

Contact Form 7 by Takayuki Miyoshi
This plugin will help you to get customer feedback or queries when they fill in a form.

Disable comments by Samir Shah
If you don’t want people to spam you with messages on your blogs this is the best plugin for it. It is a free tool

Pop up builder by sygnoos
This plugin will pop up in all of your pages, you should manually go to each page and activate it. There is a free tool and a paid tool. You could place anything in it like asking visitors to fill in the contact form or to subscribe to your YouTube channel.

For Google analytics and XML sitemap, I have used many plugins, you can use whatever is relevant to you.

If you are building an e-commerce website with word press and you need a payment gateway for it, I suggest that you get a plugin called woo commerce. There are normally many payment gateways like payumoney, instamojo and PayPal. I am using instamojo.
I will be writing more about this in later blogs.