six-benefits-of-mwp

The Six Benefits of Managed WordPress for Small Business


Are you looking for the best hosting plan for your small business? Managed WordPress hosting builds on WordPress’ best features to make your website competitive, secure, and easy to manage.

In this post, we’ll share six benefits of running your company’s website on managed WordPress. We’ll also dive into its downsides. Finally, we’ll compare the pros and cons to help you make an informed decision.

But before we begin, it’s worth asking: Why should you go for WordPress in the first place? Why not Wix, Squarespace, or another website builder?

Why Choose WordPress for Your Small Business Website

WordPress is the leading Content Management System worldwide. It’s versatile, beginner-friendly, and open-source, making it one of the best options to manage almost any type of site.

While WordPress was first designed as a blogging platform, you can unlock endless functionality through plugins and themes. As of this writing, there are over 59,000 plugins in WordPress’ official plugin directory. ThemeForest, one of the most popular theme marketplaces in the world, offers over 10,000 WordPress themes.

From an online store to a blog, to a conversion-oriented business site, you can get it done on WordPress. Some users even build complex, fully-functional WP websites without touching a single line of code.

Website builders are usually very limited in this regard, charging you extras as you diversify your website and your traffic grows. On the other hand, most hosting companies offer WordPress hosting, meaning that if you’re unhappy with your current provider, you can simply export and import your site; there’s no vendor lock-in. This is not the case for website builders. For instance, there’s no way to migrate a Webflow website into another platform seamlessly; you’d have to rebuild the entire site. 

If you don’t have a background in web development but want to manage your platform with flexibility, independence, and low costs, WordPress is probably your best option.

What is Managed WordPress Hosting?

Managed WordPress is a type of hosting service optimized to make your WordPress website fast and secure. But there’s more to it than just great performance. The key feature is that it puts your site’s maintenance tasks in the hands of experts.

With managed WordPress hosting, you don’t have to hire a team to keep your site optimized. Updates and backups will be in the hands of your hosting service provider.

Consequently, managed WordPress saves you time and costs while guaranteeing that your site will always be fast and secure.

6 Benefits of Using Managed WordPress as a Small Business

When you move your WordPress website to managed hosting, you’ll experience:

  • Extremely competitive performance
  • A higher position in search engine results
  • A simplified website management experience
  • Security and reliability, thanks to regular updates and backups
  • The possibility to edit your website without risks
  • Time-efficient website management

In this section, we’ll explore these benefits in depth. 

Extremely Competitive Performance

extremely-competitive

A website running on managed WordPress hosting is better prepared for traffic peaks than a website running on shared hosting. That’s because managed hosting services assign extra resources to your website when it needs them the most. 

Additionally, managed WordPress usually includes access to a CDN (Content Delivery Network). 

A CDN is a series of interconnected servers distributed around the globe. Back in the day, if a website were hosted on a server in Germany, a user from Chile would find it slower than a user in France. With a CDN, your website can provide a fantastic experience to all users, regardless of where they are. 

Google Loves Fast Websites

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is crucial for growing companies, especially if you’re running a local business. If you make SEO part of your digital strategy, you will bring qualified traffic to your website at a low cost. 

Using managed WordPress can give you a competitive edge when it comes to SEO. Google benefits websites that deliver competitive user experience, and page speed is a key ranking factor. In fact, since Google began to benefit fast websites, the web became faster.

Aside from making your site visitors happy, a fast-loading website will bring you more visitors.

A Simplified Website Management Experience

Managed WordPress services include some functionalities for developers. But these solutions are mostly designed for non-technical users. Therefore, your managed hosting’s control panel will be extremely intuitive to use. 

If your website will be in the hands of your marketing team, this will have two benefits:

  • Your team will work more comfortably
  • There will be a lower chance of human errors

Regular Updates & Backups

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On WordPress, security vulnerabilities and performance pitfalls tend to be a result of not updating your site. With managed WordPress hosting, your website will be automatically updated and backed up. 

Thanks to automated updates, you’ll always be running the latest versions of WordPress, your theme, and your plugins. Meanwhile, automated backups will help you restore your website if you accidentally break it.

Risk-Free Editing with Staging Websites

Aside from automatic backups, staging websites make managed WordPress ideal for experimentation.

Staging websites are not available to the public. They work as sandboxes where you can test changes without applying them to your live site. On your staging site, you and your marketing team will be able to test new themes, plugins, and optimizations risk-free. 

Time-Efficiency

Businesses only grow when everyone’s creating as much value as possible, and that includes you. That’s why growing your business is all about learning to delegate. By leaving certain tasks in the hands of employees and freelancers, you can focus on the aspects of the company that you can do best. With managed WordPress hosting, you’re putting your website’s maintenance in the hands of a reliable third-party, at a fraction of the price of regular outsourcing.

Managed WordPress hosting helps you focus on your business rather than your website. Additionally, it enables marketing teams to work on design, copy, and key performance metrics rather than struggle with plugin updates. For small businesses with a limited budget, that means getting the most out of your marketing team.

4 Disadvantages of Using Managed WordPress

Now that we’ve analyzed the benefits let’s look at four disadvantages of using managed WordPress as a small business.

Managed WordPress might not be the best option for you if:

  • You have an extremely reduced budget, and performance is not a priority right now
  • You want to use other CMS than WordPress
  • You want your web hosting and your email in a single package
  • You’re worried that forced updates might break your site

It’s more expensive than shared hosting

One of the main downsides of managed WordPress services is that your website’s maintenance costs will be higher than if you’re running your site on shared hosting.

But it isn’t accurate to compare the cost of managed WordPress to the cost of shared hosting. Instead, you should compare it to the cost of hiring a team to manage your website. With that in mind, managed WordPress is a cost-saving option. 

You’re stuck with WordPress

On a shared hosting plan, you can set up several websites with different PHP-based content management systems. These websites’ performance will be far below the standards of managed WordPress, but still, this option can be useful. For example, you could use PrestaShop or Magento for your online store and WordPress for your company’s landing pages and blog. 

Managed WordPress hosting services, on the other hand, are designed to provide high performance for websites running on WordPress specifically. And your limited control over the website’s technical foundations prevents you from uninstalling WordPress and installing a different CMS.

It’s just hosting

Sending emails from an address with your business’ custom domain makes you look professional and reliable. Since only you and your team can create addresses with your custom domain, it’s also a good measure to prevent others from impersonating you. A custom email address is essential for those businesses communicating with clients, partners, and employees online.

Unlike most shared hosting plans, managed WordPress services don’t include email hosting. To use a personalized email domain for your company’s communications, you’ll need an extra service. 

Forced updates

One of the greatest benefits of managed WordPress is that it updates your website automatically. As a rule of thumb, an up-to-date WordPress website is as secure as it can be. However, sometimes, forced updates can break some of your plugins, especially those that haven’t been tested for the last few WordPress versions.

These forced updates could break your WordPress installation. But, luckily, your managed WordPress plan includes automatic backups so that you can restore your website to the latest stable version.

Is Managed WordPress Right for Your Small Business?

In this post, we analyzed the pros and cons of using managed WordPress hosting as a small business. But, is it the best option for you?

Every company is different. Regardless of whether you’re a solopreneur or the leader of a 500-person team, your company is unique. Therefore, we can’t give you a 100% certain verdict about whether managed WordPress is right for you. But, leveraging the pros and cons, managed WordPress hosting can be a great choice, especially if you’re looking for competitive performance but don’t have the time (or the team) to optimize your website regularly.

However, not all hosting providers offer the same benefits. At HostPapa, we help small businesses get a competitive advantage through cutting-edge hosting solutions. 

Grow your company and website with confidence. Managed WordPress provides peace of mind with premium performance and security, without the usual WordPress maintenance. 

Managed WordPress comes with the following features and more:

  • Full-page caching (over 200 locations worldwide)
  • Automated backups and updates 
  • One-click staging website
  • One-click restore and recovery
  • Website Security Suite
  • Website Application Firewall
  • WAF/CDN analytics and reporting
  • 24/7 expert WordPress support

Are you already a HostPapa customer? Contact us today to get a 1 month free trial of Managed WordPress!

Last modified on: August 23rd, 2023

Categorized as Web Hosting

Freelance writer and designer based in Buenos Aires. Helping build memorable brands through content & UX.

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