Thursday, February 4, 2021
WORDPRESS THEMES
Top wordpress premium themes 2020
You can find dozens of wordpress premium themes online, but there is no point in going for them if they don’t match with your blog’s niche. So, instead of wasting your time on trying random options, check My ThemeShop’s blogging wordpress premium themes that come with an eye-catching and SEO-ready structure, responsive design, custom features, detailed documentation, and 24/7 technical support.
All these wordpress themes are designed to rank your blog high on search engines for both desktop and mobile results. Plus, they come with built-in support for third-party tools you might want to install on your blog for an enhanced browsing experience. All in all, it’s a perfect way to design a food blog that can keep readers engaged for an extended period.
Unique Pricing Plans.
STUDIOPRESS
$ 99.95
24x 7 Premium Support
Suitable for All Businesses
Order Now
ELEGANT
$ 89
24x 7 Premium Support
Suitable for All Businesses
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THRIVE MEMBERSHIP
$ 19 / Month
24 X7 Premium Support
Use all of plugins & themes
Suitable for All Businesses
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PREMIUM CODING
$ 49
24x 7 Premium Support
Suitable for All Business
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EVANTO MARKET
$ 59
24 X7 Premium Support
Suitable for All Business
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HAS THEMES BUNDLE
$ 249 / Year
24 X7 Premium Support
For Unlimited Websites.
Suitable for All Business
Order Now
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WORDPRESS HOST
The best WordPress hosting
Managing a blog over time is much more challenging, though. You’ll need to find your own themes and plugins. And also keep them, and WordPress itself, up-to-date (although you can even get that done automatically).
Blogs are often targeted by malware, so it’s important you have some way to detect and remove any threats, and you’ll want regular backups to help get a broken blog working again.
There’s a long list of hosting companies offering WordPress plans, but we’ve picked out nine of the best to point you in the right direction. Whether you’re a first-time user or a big business, there’s something for you here, and with prices starting at around a pound per month, it’s well worth taking the time to find out more.
If you have any specific requirement mail to -info@cityhost.store
Unique Pricing Plans.
20% OFFER
WPENGINE
$ 25 / Month
10GB Disk Space
50GB Bandwidth
25,000 visits / month
1 sites included
24x 7 Premium Support
2 months free
Suitable for New Users, Startups and Small Businesses
Order Now
15% OFFER
FLYWHEEL
$ 15 / Month
5GB Disk Space
20GB Bandwidth
1 Website
Nightly backups
24x 7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
managed WordPress hosting
Ideal for small, simple installs
Order Now
18% OFFER
KINSTA
$ 30 / Month
10GB Disk Space
20,000 visits
Free SSL
Free CDN
24 x7 Premium Support
1 Website
Premium WordPress hosting
cutting-edge technology
Startups and Small Businesses
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20% OFFER
I/O ZOOM
$ 5 / Month
10GB Disk Space
Unmetered Bandwidth
Up To 20x Faster
Free Cloudflare CDN
24 x7 Premium Support
Daily Backups
2 Sites
Suitable for New Users, Startups and Small Businesses
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40% OFFER
HOSTGATOR
$ 5.95 / Month
Unmetered Space
100k Visits Per Month
1 Site
Free Domain
24 7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
$100 free adwords
Suitable for Intermediate Users and Medium Businesses
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22% OFFER
INMOTION
$ 6.99 / Month
40GB SSD Storage
20,000 Monthly Visitors
Free domain
WordPress Optimized Stack
24 7 Premium Support
Staging Environment Included
WordPress website with BoldGrid
Unlimited Email Accounts
Suitable for intermediate business
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60% OFFER
BLUEHOST
$ 4.95 / Month
Unlimited Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited Websites
Free CDN
24 7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
Free domain
Suitable for New Users, Startups and Small Businesses
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90% OFFER
GODADDY
$ 1 / Month
30GB Disk Space
Ideal for up to 25K monthly visitors
Free business email
Free domain
24 7 Premium Support
Website backup
Automatic daily malware scans
Suitable for Intermediate Users and Medium Businesses
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18% OFFER
WORDPRESS.COM
$ 8 / Month
13GB Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Jetpack Essential Features
Free Domain
24 7 Premium Support
Unlimited Premium Themes
VideoPress Support
Site Monetization
Suitable for Professional Users and Large Businesses
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DEDICATED HOST
TOP DEDICATED HOSTING 2020
Very low prices probably mean the host is cramming more customers onto each server, for instance. Performance will be poor as there aren’t enough resources to go around, and the extra load could mean more server problems and downtime.
Dedicated hosting implies that you also get far more control over how the server is configured. You can add and remove software, install updates or tweak all settings, allowing you to optimize the server for your specific needs.
Best of all, dedicated hosting contracts often come with fast and knowledgeable support. The best providers will even monitor your server for issues, like failed services, and can often fix them before you’ve realized there was a problem.
This kind of power doesn’t come cheap, and although there are some good signup deals around, you can easily spend $50-$140 a month and more on just a basic package.
With that kind of investment, it’s important to make the right choice. Here, we’re going to highlight top dedicated hosting providers who you might want to check out first.
Unique Pricing Plans.
50% OFFER
LIQUIDWEB DEDICATED
$ 119 / Month
2 x 240 GB SSD Primary Disk
5 TB Bandwidth
32 GB RAM
4 cores @ 3.9 GHz Max
24x 7 Premium Support
250 GB Acronis Cyber Backups
1 x 1 TB SATA Backup Disk
high traffic sites, multiple websites, small apps, resellers.
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17% OFFER
A2 DEDICATED
$ 141.09 / Month
2X500 GB Storage
10 TB Transfer
8 GB RAM
2 Cores
24 x7 Premium Support
Intel 3.1+ GHz
Free cPanel Control Panel
Suitable for Intermediate Users and Medium Businesses
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20% OFFER
FASTCOMET DEDICATED
$ 111.19 / Month
80 GB SSD Space
4 TB Bandwidth
4 GB RAM
2x AMD EPYC 7501 Cores
24x 7 Premium Support
4000 Mbps Network Out
cPanel/WHM/Softaculous
Fully Managed
Suitable for Professional Users and Large Businesses
Order Now
37% OFFER
HOSTGATOR DEDICATED
$ 118.99 / Month
1 TB HDD
Unmetered Bandwidth
4 Core / 8 Thread
8 GB RAM
24x 7 Premium Support
Linux or Windows OS
Suitable for Small & medium Businesses
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18% OFFER
IPAGE DEDICATED
$ 151.99 / Month
1000GB disk space
10TB of bandwidth
4 Core CPU
8GB of RAM
24x 7 Premium Support
CentOS 6.4
Suitable for Intermediate Users and Medium Businesses
Order Now
31% OFFER
INMOTION DEDICATED
$ 115.69 / Month
500GB SSD or 1TB 7.2K HDD
6TB Data Transfer
8GB DDR3 DOUBLE RAM
3.50GHz Turbo 4C/4T
24x 7 Premium Support
5 FREE IPs Included
Intel® Xeon® E3-1220 v2
Suitable for Professional Users and Large Businesses
Order Now
VPS HOST
Best VPS hosting providers of 2020
Standard shared web hosting packages are cheap and user-friendly, but they’re also slow, inflexible, and don’t have the power or functionality that professional and business users often need.
If you need more than a basic host but can’t afford a dedicated server or don’t want to deal with the complexity of these beasts, VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting could be a smart choice.
Buying a VPS plan means that you get your very own virtual server environment. You have full control over the operating system, the extensions and apps you install, and all their settings. Each physical server will still host multiple VPS customers, but not as many as with shared hosting, and typically each VPS will be allocated a share of key resources – RAM, storage space, CPU cores – for their use alone.
This can be easier to manage than you might think. Many VPS plans include standard tools like cPanel to help monitor and configure your site. Some hosts will manage the service for you, monitoring for problems like a crashed service, and fixing them as soon as they’re detected.
VPS prices and specs vary from a few dollars a month to hundreds, depending on your requirements. There’s a lot of choice out there, but don’t panic – our list of best VPS providers will point you in the right direction.
Unique Pricing Plans.
20% OFFER
A2 VPS
$ 10 / Month
30GB Disk Space
2TBB Bandwidth
1 CORE
1 GB RAM
24x 7 Premium Support
20X FASTER
Suitable for Small Businesses & Intermediate
Order Now
10% OFFER
FASTCOMET VPS
$ 59.95 / Month
50GB Disk Space
2TB Bandwidth
Single 2.50GHz Core
2 GB ECC RAM
24 x7 Premium Support
cPanel/WHM/Softaculous
Suitable for Intermediate Users and Medium Businesses
Order Now
70% OFFER
LIQUIDWEB VPS
$ 59 / Month
40GB Disk Space
10TB Bandwidth
2 GB RAM
2 vCPU
24 x7 Premium Support
+ Free 100GB Backup
Dedicated IP Address
Save 70% on yearly plansSuitable for Professional Users and Large Businesses
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75% OFFER
HOSTGATOR VPS
$ 19.95 / Month
120 GB Disk Space
1.5 TBB Bandwidth
2 GB RAM
2 Cores CPU
24 x7 Premium Support
FULLY Managed (with cPanel/Plesk)
Suitable for New Users, Startups and Small Businesses
Order Now
53% OFFER
HOSTWINDS VPS
$ 18.80 / Month
75 GB Disk Space
2 TB Bandwidth
2 CPU Cores
4 GB RAM
24x 7 Premium Support
Free Website Transfer
Suitable for Intermediate Users and Medium Businesses
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20% OFFER
I/O ZOOM VPS
$ 20 / Month
60 GB Disk Space
3000 GB Bandwidth
4 GB RAM
2 CORES CPU
24x 7 Premium Support
Free DDoS Protection
Fully Managed
Suitable for Professional Users and Large Businesses
Order Now
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SHARED HOSTING
Do You would like a web Host?
If you run a business, you wish a website. If you do not have one, you should. Of course, on-line businesses need websites for selling and selling product or services by definition. within the web age, however, even native brick-and-mortar business must at the terribly least be discoverable via {the web|the on-line|the net} (and they most likely should be marketing online, too).
Word of mouth solely gets you to this point during this internet-centric age. These days, individuals discover new businesses—even native business—via Bing, Google, and Yahoo, search engines that create it unbelievably easy to seek out companies’ product, operational hours, and prices.
If your business does not seem within the search results, particularly on the primary page, it will be troublesome for potential clients and customers to seek out you via search. And if you do not have a sharable link, your possibilities of building on-line word of mouth via social networking plummet, too. In different words, no website, no discoverability, no money. Of course, web hosting is not just for businesses. you will wish to host a personal web site or blog, too. Either way, the services here have you ever covered.
Search and register your best domain below
Unique Pricing Plans.
Are you looking for a best web hosting provider? You are at right place.
60% OFFER
BLUEHOST
$ 3.95 / Month
50GB Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Free Email Accounts
Free domain
24 x7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
Suitable for New Users, Startups and Small Businesses
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60% OFFER
HOSTGATOR
$ 2.75 / Month
Unlimited Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Free Domain
$200 adwords credit
24 x7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
Suitable for Intermediate Users and Medium Businesses
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74% OFFER
HOSTINGER
$ 2.89 / Month
Unlimited Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited Email Accounts
Free Domain
24x 7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
2X Allocated Resources
Suitable for Professional Users and Large Businesses
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28% OFFER
CONTABO HOSTING
€ 2.99 / Month
50 GB Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
1000 Email Accounts
1 Domain
24x 7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
Suitable for small Businesses
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70% OFFER
FASTCOMET
$ 2.95 / Month
15GB Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Daily Backups
Unlimited FTP Accounts
24x 7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
Suitable for Small & Intermediate Users
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70% OFFER
TURNKEYINTERNET
$ 2.49 / Month
Unlimited Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited Email Accounts
Host 10 Domains
24x 7 Premium Support
Free SSL Certificate
Dedicated IPv6: Included
Suitable for small & Intermediate Users
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60% OFFER
FATCOW
$ 3.15 / Month
Unlimited Disk Space
Unlimited Bandwidth
Unlimited Domains
$100 google adwords
$100 bing ads
Suitable for New Users, Startups and Small Businesses
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75% OFFER
IPAGE
$ 1.99 / Month
Unlimited Disk Space
Scalable Bandwidth
Unlimited domain
$100 google adwords
$100 bing ads
Suitable for Intermediate Users and Medium Businesses
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20% OFFER
SITEGROUND
$ 3.95 / Month
10GB Disk Space
Unmetered Traffic
Daily Backup
Free CDN
Unlimited Databases
Free SSL Certificate
Suitable for Professional Users and medium Businesses
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5/5
Web Hosting for small businesses & individuals.Visit site.
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Low Cost Managed Linux VPS with 24×7 US-based Support.Visit site
FatCow Web Hosting
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Studiopress Review:Read This And Make It So
Studiopress has been a major player in the WordPress community for years with their flagship theme framework, Genesis. I’ve come to expect a certain level of quality from the people behind StudioPress. When I heard that they were offering a moderately reasonable managed WordPress hosting service. I had to check it out myself in this StudioPress Sites review.
In this review we look at the pros and cons of using the new StudioPress Sites managed hosting service.
Overview
Before getting into the details, I want to go over the a brief overview of my main thoughts on the service. Consider this a quick reference to what I consider the top three pros and cons of going with their service.
ProsConsGetting Started
Genesis is known for being light and fast. Right after setting up my StudioPress Site (complete installation guide below) I ran a speedtest on Pingdom Tools. I thought this an important metric to track since StudioPress advertises as “Fast Loading Performance”.
The speed was alright. I would have expected it to be a bit faster but without having a caching plugin installed it is more than acceptable. So that’s what I did. I installed and activated WP Super Cache and was returned with an error. This was a great opportunity to test their “World-class support” as they advertise it.
Support answered the question within just under 24 hours. Their answer: “Caching plugin are not necessary on StudioPress Sites since we include a very powerful caching technology that is 100% compatible with our stack.”
I also asked them in a separate ticket a non-technical question (that I already knew the answer to since it is on their sales page)
I was pleased to get an answer within just over an hour. Pretty good response rate in my opinion.
Overview StudioPress Software Monitor
After setting up your StudioPress Site (instructions below) you will have access to the standard WordPress Dashboard.. plus some extras. We aren’t going to dive into the default WordPress dashboard as you can read about that here; but rather focus on the StudioPress stuff.
First we’re going to take a look at the Site Tools under the StudioPress header in the dashboard.
There are several helpful (and some not-so-much) items here. Think of this as general “how healthy is my site?” type of information. This tells you if you have any inactive themes or theme issues as well as the ability to take a snapshot of your current themes.
I don’t see the real benefit to the snapshots as it doesn’t save any settings from your themes. I could see this being handy for those who add custom CSS.. if it backed that up. The StudioPress Software Monitor also has the same features for plugins that it does for themes.
StudioPress Themes
Yes, you read that right. StudioPress Sites comes with access to many of the popular themes created by StudioPress. This has got to be one of my favorite pros. Installing a theme is a simple as clicking on Use This Theme.
Partner Plugins
StudioPress has a built in list of what they call their Partner Plugins. At first glance I didn’t think anything of this.. until I saw OptinMonster was included? Could this be? Although I prefer Thrive Themes as my optin plugin.
If OptinMonster is included for free with your StudioPress site that is a huge win as it would normally cost you a minimum of $108 per year.
Sure enough.. I clicked the blue Activate button and unfortunately it isn’t free. My Dashboard now prompts me to “GET OPTINMONSTER NOW”.
Nope. I have a feeling that these “Partner Plugins” are just a sales funnel with affiliate links. Yep.. that big green button teasing me to get
OptinMonster is a shareasale affiliate link. Well played, StudioPress.. Well played.
Content Optimizer
Not much to be said about the content optimizer settings. When enabled, it allows you to set your SEO tool preference, URL, security method (ssl or non-ssl), user permissions, and post types.
Mobile Menu Bar
I think this feature is absolutely great. We are in a mobile-first world and having the ability to fully customize your mobile menu is a must. This allows you to make only the important menu items appear on mobile.
SEO Settings
You don’t want to gloss over these settings. If you want search traffic to your site (you do) than you need to have things set up right from the get-go.
The Genesis SEO Settings gives you the ability to customize default titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, robot meta tags, and the ability to remove unnecessary header tags. The robot meta settings is important as you can noindex category archives, tag archives, etc.
Let’s have a fast check out a number of the StudioPress themes best design features:
Installed demo content easily
Color scheme, font, and layout customization
Custom page templates, including an exclusive landing page
Widget ready homepage
6 default layout options including sidebar options
Custom header with logo upload capability
Social icon and share buttons
Recent posts, complete with featured images
Built-in search bar and breadcrumb navigation
Setting Up Your StudioPress Site
As with my previous experiences with StudioPress; I expected setup to be elegant yet straightforward. And for the most part they met those expectations. As noted previously you will need to have your own domain registered elsewhere.
Once you have your StudioPress account made and logged into the dashboard you will see a page similar to what we have below. After which you will want to click on Setup a New Site.
Great! Now we are at the point of actually getting to start setting up our new website. Click Got it. Let’s get started! to begin the process. You will be prompted to enter your domain name, site name, and create an admin username.
Fill in the required information and click on the Complete and Review button.
Now that you have these first steps finished you need to connect your new hosting account to your domain. It is essentially as simple as managing your DNS records to point to the StudioPress IP address.
We aren’t going to be able to show you how to perform this step because it varies per your domain registrar; but StudioPress does have instructions for most popular registrars.
After connecting to your domain, you will now have access to view your Live Site Info (the globe icon). After your domain name finishes propagating you’ll be able to log into the WordPress dashboard. This should be located at yourdomainname.com/wp-admin.php as shown below.
After clicking on your URL login you’ll be prompted to type in your username and password. This is case-sensitive. Click Login and you’ll be in the standard WordPress Dashboard.
Now at this point we see that StudioPress has, by default, propagated your new website with loads of posts and pages.
I know StudioPress did this so you can see what the website could look like fleshed out with content; my suggestion would have an option during setup to include or not include demo content. We need to go in and delete all of that content so we have a fresh slate for our website. This includes posts, pages, and menus.
After removing the bloat you’re left with a standard WordPress installation on moderately fast servers.
PRICING
StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package includes all StudioPress themes (55+ themes) for $499.95 + $99.95/year after. This theme pack includes all third-party and future themes in their collection.
I found many higher paying gigs involve companies who wish to use Genesis, so being truly a WordPress developer (and Genesis developer) can get you more clients in itself.
FINAL FINDING
All StudioPress themes are mobile responsive and even have clean, lightweight code that creates your website fast, secure, and run smoothly.StudioPress themes are designed on clean code that meets up with the very best WordPress code standards.
As a result, your website will always quickly run, securely, and smoothly for the simplest user experience.All StudioPress themes are inbuilt the Genesis Framework. This framework is one among the highest frameworks is respected in many WP communities.As well because the support team is usually able to provide any assistance if you’re experiencing any problem.
VISIT STUDIOPRESS
The benefits of LiteSpeed WordPress Hosting
According to usage statistics provided by W3Techs, WordPress powers over 35% of websites on the Internet and is by far the most popular content management system (CMS).
The latest data from the 1st of January 2020 shows WordPress has a CMS market share of over 62%, sitting way ahead of other popular systems like Joomla, Shopify and Drupal.
WordPress is constantly evolving with improvements taking place all the time.
Recent highlights include the sometimes controversial block based editor code named Gutenberg and the release of Google Site Kit, an official WordPress plugin that helps website owners to stay on top of their game.
According to Search Engine Land, page load time and crawl budget rank will be the most important SEO factors in 2020.
Google also now includes an experimental page speed feature in Google Search Console meaning webmasters have easy access to current and historical load times.
Although end users have been installing cache plugins to speed up WordPress for years, a little-known fact is that caching should also be enabled on the server side.
Most web designers are familiar with Apache and its faster competitor NGinx, but there is another web server called LiteSpeed which has both a client-side cache and server-side technology built especially for WordPress.
In this world where the ideal loading time for a website is 2 to 5 seconds, getting the entire ecosystem correct is critical.
Vander, a company founded by the original founders of Snowball, offers cPanel based WordPress hosting and the LSCache plugin for all WordPress websites.
I/O Zoom offers really cheap WordPress hosting, and there are 5 packages named as Personal, Professional, Premium and Platinum respectively. Personal is the entry-level package, which starts at $5/mo. Even personal users can afford I/O Zoom WordPress cloud hosting.
What’s more, the company offers customers 3 days free trail, which enables them to start their risk free experience with I/O Zoom WordPress cloud hosting. Even better, if customers cancel account within the first 30 days, they can get a refund from I/O Zoom with no question asked. So, customers are protected from big loss.
I/O Zoom integrates WordPress into cloud hosting, making high-availability WordPress cloud hosting for customers. In order to fit customers’ needs better, the company designs 4 packages, Personal, Professional, Premium and Platinum. Each package comes with proper and even redundant resources.
Package Resources & Advanced Features
In Personal, I/O Zoom provides 10GB SSD disk space, unlimited visitors per month, 2 websites hosted, unmetered monthly bandwidth and 512MB memory. Besides, the company also includes many advanced features to optimize the WordPress cloud hosting, such as Hardened multi-PHP allows customers to use the favorable PHP, email backlist prevention can help them start with email marketing easier, and more.
WordPress Features
As WordPress cloud hosting, four packages all come with rich WordPress features. 1-click WordPress Installer, WordPress staging and cloning, 1-click WordPress hardening, WP CLI, mass install and updates, as well as easy migration from existing host are all included in packages. With these easy-to-use WordPress features, customers can easily install WordPress, create WordPress sites, and manage their websites.
I/O Zoom works hard on keeping its servers online all the time. According to its SLA, the company offers customers a 100% network uptime guarantee policy. It makes customers get credit in case that they encounter any downtime. How does it keep perfect uptime?
I/O Zoom now has great support from 5 top-class data centers, which not only allows customers to select the nearest location to their websites for best response, but also offers redundant resources available to handle the quick growth of customers’ websites.
VISIT I/O ZOOM
Simple WordPress Hosting: Best Management and Services
There are many occasions on which you may want to start a blog or a website but you don’t want to deal with installations and setup, so, using an easy WordPress hosting service should fix the problem and help. In this post, you’ll find the list of the best web hosts that offers simple management for WordPress sites with all the tools you need in one place even without the need to install any CMS.
Liquid Web (easy managed WordPress hosting)
Because I know that Liquid Web is a top-notch WordPress hosting platform that I’m using, I can tell you how easy is it to start your site. First, this is not any regular web host, it’s the fastest managed and fully optimized WordPress hosting that never lets you waste the time with updates and technical issues.
When you create your web hosting account dedicated especially for WordPress sites, you get the software installed and fully optimized for speed, performance, and security, and then, you have your WordPress credentials to login and see your admin area.
Liquid Web offers something special and unique for WordPress users, there is a central dashboard for all your sites, so, you can manage WordPress blogs from one account.
The dashboard is not only simple and easy to navigate, but also powerful in features, for example, there is a menu for clearing the site cache if you make changes in theme CSS, so, that will be helpful. Moreover, there is simple and automatic access to the WordPress database with one click, and of course, access using SFTP or SSH.
Liquid Web WordPress hosting features
When you first created your WordPress site, you’ll find good surprises in the plugins list
First, it’s the premium version of the famous WordPress security and malware scan plugin called iThemes Security Pro
Second, there will be the iThemes Sync plugin that allows you to manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard.
And third, you’ll find a premium version of image optimization and compression plugin that speed up your site, all their premium tools are offered for free just because you selected their premium hosting services.
Simplified WordPress hosting experience
Optimizing WordPress for speed, security and performance takes too much time, especially for beginners who know nothing about plugin code, theme editing, and server configurations.
I saw WordPress beginners spend days and nights trying to follow online tutorials to apply the same settings for caching plugins without achieving the level of optimization and speed they looked for.
So, for forgetting all these things today as you don’t need any of these tools or any caching plugin with liquid Web, there is a server-level caching on multiple layers which makes WordPress work faster than any other web hosting environment. Additionally, you’ll find a modern, yet simple dashboard for site management and access.
Best of all, the only thing that you have to focus on is your website content, let experts manage the servers peed, security and update your WordPress plugins and make sure there is no conflict with your the code when new version WordPress is released. By using this hosting you’ll solve 90% of WordPress related issues, and what you can do is building the best content your user deserves.
Here is why simple, yet super fast WordPress web host is the best
Unique web hosting dashboard for WordPress sites only
One of its kind optimized hosting infrastructure
Easy to use interface
No page view limits and no traffic limits
Optimized server RAM and sophisticated caching that rocks
Automatic WordPress installation and optimization
Premium plugins included for free
Daily site backup happens automatically
One-click, WordPress site restore if you want to undo changes
You can manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard
Automatic image compress when you upload them to WordPress
Automatically login to the database with one click
Stop worrying about security, it’s super-secure hosting
No need to update plugins or WordPress, expert WP engineers do that for you
Dedicated hosting area for testing purposes (live site is separated from staging)
A long list of up to date tutorial, guides and helpful resources for their WordPress site owners
First-class customer support
Enterprise-grade architecture that handles millions of visits
WooCommerce optimized hosting, so, you can build an eCommerce site easily and sell online, etc…
VISIT LIQUIDWEB
Bluehost (simple and affordable at once)
It’s not because Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress, I just added it here, but Bluehost has an optimized hosting for WordPress that comes with automatic installation, and dedicated management dashboard.
Please note, the Bluehost shared hosting does not come with a dedicated dashboard for WordPress it includes cPanel which may look overwhelming for beginners. Instead, there is a Pro WordPress hosting with WordPress panel that you can use easily like the following screenshot example I created.
Bluehost WordPress management
Everything is simple to use, no more installation scripts or complicate tools when you create your account, the web host installs WordPress for you automatically, and upon signup, you get your WordPress site login details with all the other information you need.
Next, you can access the admin area, add your content and it’s better to install the recommended plugins for security and easy content creation. If you have no idea about these tools, email me and I’ll suggest the right plugins you have to install before creating any page or post. There is some basic setup that even a child can configure with a few clicks.
Here is how simple this web hosting is:
You get a pre-installed WordPress hosting
No need for auto-installer tools
WordPress credential will be ready in minutes
Your domain name will be configured for you automatically
You don’t need to edit DNS or add any complicated records
Pre-Installed WordPress theme and you can add your own or choose from hundreds of others
Good customer support that can help you 24/7 by phone or live chat
VISIT BLUEHOST
InMotion Hosting
When you sign up for a web hosting plan with InMotion Hosting, the system installs WordPress for you and that’s because you have the choice to add WordPress or other CMS when creating the account.
Next, get your welcome email, and log in to WordPress, as easy as that. InMotion offers a different plan for WordPress and the cost depends on the server resources you get, but without a doubt, it’s one of the best blog hosting solutions for WordPress.
InMotion WordPress hosting
You can choose from their hundreds of free themes to install or use the BoldGrid WordPress site build tool that comes with easy but powerful utilities. In fact, BoldGrid is the easiest WordPress site builder plugin you can use and get sire running in minutes. I already talked about that and you can read my BoldGrid review article.
Easy WordPress Hosting
Free migration service for your existing blog (if you have one)
Simple WordPress hosting
A technician will take care of your existing domain and file transfer if you want
Easy WordPress themes and site-building
They have a web design and SEO services if you need them
A dedicated IP address for their managed WordPress VPS
Step by step guide on how to build WordPress sites, pages and manage them
Easy hosting service that offers email and SSL…
Besides the managed blog hosting plans, InMotion offers dedicated WordPress hosting for high traffic sites, and it comes with full management, extra levels of security and priority customer support.
Because InMotion offers easy website builder and also hosting that works well, you can add a beautiful theme and design your own landing page in minutes without wasting time. The premade templates help you customize the design of your landing page and build a complete website.
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NameCheap
NameCheap offers an easily managed WordPress hosting that costs less and offers more resources than other providers. There is no cPanel, and that’s better for you, instead, there is a custom managed WordPress dashboard that’s simple, and powerful at the same time. Unlike complicated cPanel things with Namecheap’s Easy WP hosting, you can see the site back up, domain files ad the database, etc.
Here is why this managed WordPress hosting rocks
Easy to use dashboard
Global CDN included
Easy backup and restore
Simple managed WordPress hosting
High availability
3 times faster than shared hosting
No matter if you want to start your first WordPress site, or build a web store, using this simple hosting service will save you a lot of time. Instead of thinking about SSL installations, domain name mapping, and file management, you get WordPress pre-installed and ready under one minute which is great.
EasyWP hosting features
The quickest way to get your WordPress blog ready in minutes is by using any of the above web hosting services. But it’s not all about ease of use and simplicity of dashboards, also, it’s about the quality of the web hosting and its customer support.
Creating a website in minutes is exciting, but what about problem solving and issues that you might get in the future, how would you like to get the support, by phone, live chat or just wait days to get a reply to your ticket like what happens with other companies?
Now, even if Namecheap offers the easiest way to host a website, it’s not that fast as first-class web hosts like the one on the top list of this page. However, you can still use Namecheap’s managed WordPress hosting plans to start a simple blog that can be used for personal uses without paying a lot of money for that.
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Final Finding
Because not everyone is looking for the same things, I’ll make the choice easy for you, if you want the best quality WordPress hosting that’s fully optimized, managed and well protected, then, choose Liquid Web, It’s hard to find a better web host that best them on speed and security, and of course, there is a one dashboard that’s dedicated for hosting all your site and manage them from the one location.
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Squarespace vs. WordPress.com: Who is the best?
So you want to build a website — maybe to support your business, to show off your portfolio, or to share information with wedding guests. Only problem is, you don’t know where to get started. Enter website building services WordPress.com and Squarespace, two solid options for quickly getting yourself from an idea to a live site.
Both WordPress.com and Squarespace are hosted website building platforms that give you tools and templates to create a personalized website on your own domain without any coding experience. While the end results from each site can be similar, their user interfaces and pricing are very different.
Here’s everything you need to know to decide if WordPress.com or Squarespace is the better web building platform for you.
SQUARESPACE
If you’ve ever listened to a podcast, you’ve probably heard ads for Squarespace. It’s an all-in-one hosted platform that differentiates itself from others on the market with its design sense, founder and CEO Anthony Casalena told CNET.
“We strive to create the most seamless end-to-end experience within our platform,” Casalena said. “There is no software to upgrade or plug-ins to maintain. Everything you need — from domains to email marketing to e-commerce tools — is built right into Squarespace.”
Squarespace makes it easy to integrate functionality for portfolios, blogs and commerce sites in one package, instead of having to patch it together on your own, Casalena added. It also offers commerce sites the ability to sell products online and in-person with a point of sale system, and sell services, accept donations and book appointments. Online businesses can also take advantage of third-party extensions like Quickbooks Online.
Start building a Squarespace site with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. You can skip through any of these steps, but I found them helpful. First, search through options for what your site is about to find some starting ideas and examples, ranging from a personal resume site to education to fitness. Next, select your top goals, like sell products, market myself or my business or get appointments. Then, tell the site where you are in the process, like “collecting inspiration” or “growing an existing business.” From there, you’ll see several different templates available to get started with.
You’ll be given a brief tutorial on how to create, edit and style pages. The interface is straightforward and easy to use — simply click on an area of your site that you want to edit, and do so directly. You can click an icon to switch between the desktop version and a mobile preview of your site. Built-in SEO tools can help your site gain more traction in web searches.
Squarespace’s beautiful templates may be particularly appealing for photographers and visual artists who want to take advantage of the aesthetics of their site. Its affinity for style and all-in-one platform is also very appealing for small business owners and entrepreneurs, as it saves them from having to hire a designer, consultant or e-commerce expert to create and run an attractive and functional website.
“Squarespace allowed me to get started without prior development knowledge and create a professional-looking website,” said Julia Goldstein, who runs JLFG Communications. “I can quickly and easily update content, add pages, and more. The templates work seamlessly to create a uniform look and feel. Features like a mobile-friendly website and analytics are built into the platform, and it integrates well with third-party apps. I don’t spend loads of time figuring out how to deal with website problems.”
If you already have your own domain name (like YourName.com), you can transfer that over to Squarespace, so the same address is then hosted on its platform.
Pricing
Pay monthly, or save money with an annual subscription to Squarespace. Here’s how much a Squarespace site costs:
Personal: $12 per month, billed yearly at $144 (or $16 per month billed monthly)
Business: $18 per month, billed yearly at $216 (or $26 per month billed monthly)
Commerce Basic: $26 per month, billed yearly at $312 (or $30 per month billed monthly)
Commerce Advanced: $40 per month, billed yearly at $360 (or $46 per month, billed monthly)
SQUARESPACE FREE 14 DAY TRIAL
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WORDPRESS
WordPress is the world’s most popular open-source web publishing platform, powering more than 35% of all sites on the internet, including The Walt Disney Company, Quartz and Mercedes-Benz. It’s a little confusing, but WordPress.com is a hosted website building service built on WordPress. Whereas WordPress requires you to purchase a domain name through another site and do more hands-on work creating your site, WordPress.com does all of that for you — making it easier to work with, but more limited in terms of functionality.
Create a free test site to try out WordPress.com, and select the type of site you want to create: blog, business, professional or online store. I selected the professional category. Getting a basic version of the site up was easy, and only required a username, password, my name and the name of the site. You can then go to Design > Customize to do things like add a logo or a widget (like audio, a Facebook plug-in or a follow button).
WordPress.com is a bit less intuitive than Squarespace, and it takes some trial and error to figure out what you’re doing — though each section you click on does contain mini-tutorials to help. But you can play around with it for free, and upgrade to a paid account if you like the results. You can also see a desktop and mobile preview of your site.
“The biggest thing we see with other website builders is that they might work well for a person in the short term, but because they are not open ecosystems like WordPress, people quickly start to find themselves limited or locked in when it comes to how they can expand or customize based on their growing business needs,” Mark Armstrong, editor for WordPress.com’s parent company Automattic, told CNET. “WordPress has the single largest ecosystem for plug-ins, services, and developer and designer expertise, working hand-in-hand with the software.”
To expand and customize your site, WordPress offers a number of plug-ins that attract users, including Yoast SEO (for SEO help), Jetpack by WordPress.com (for site security and performance management) and WPForms (for creating a contact form).
“Depending on your client’s needs, WordPress can be highly customized with plug-ins, and has a flexibility that just can’t be matched with other template sites,” said Basil Larios, SEO content creator for Falcon Marketing LLC. “Whenever we run into roadblocks with design it is usually because clients first build their sites on a template base. Once they begin to see growth and want to make more concrete changes then the template site becomes more limiting than what they had initially expected.”
Like with Squarespace, if you already have a domain name, you can transfer that over to WordPress.com, so the same address is then hosted on its platform.
Pricing
You can create a basic site for free, if you’re OK with the domain being “YourSite.wordpress.com.” Or, you can register a domain like “sitename.com” that you pay for.
Here is how much a WordPress.com site costs:
Personal (best for personal use): $4 per month, billed yearly at $48 (includes custom domain name and access to 24/7 support)
Premium (best for freelancers): $8 per month, billed yearly at $9 (includes advanced design tools, custom CSS and Google Analytics support)
Business (best for small business): $25 per month, billed yearly at $300 (includes custom plug-ins and themes, 200 GB storage and live support)
eCommerce (best for online stores): $45 per month, billed yearly at $540 (includes a more powerful, flexible platform designed to grow as your business does)
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The bottom line
As with almost any online platform, the best web-building and hosting service for you depends on your individual needs. If you’re a true beginner to creating a website and want an easy, intuitive platform with beautiful, premade templates, I’d recommend Squarespace. But if you’ve got a little bit of website creation experience under your belt and want a highly customizable platform, I’d go with WordPress.com.
The good news is you can try both WordPress.com and Squarespace out for free, to get a feel for what will work best for you. With WordPress.com’s free version, you can create a working website with a .wordpress.com domain. With Squarespace, the free version of your site is set to private by default — while you can turn it live, it will be hidden from search engines and only accessible with the URL.
Pricing between Squarespace and WordPress.com differs: WordPress’ option for a personal site costs less ($48 annually for WordPress.com vs. $144 annually for Squarespace), but its option for e-commerce costs more ($540 annually for WordPress.com vs. $360 annually for Squarespace).
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HostGator Web Hosting 2020
Texas-based HostGator is a well-known web hosting company with more than 15 years in the business. It’s now part of Endurance International Group, along with Domain.com, Bluehost, iPage, SiteBuilder.com and more.
HostGator offers a solid range of products covering all the core hosting essentials: shared hosting, a drag-and-drop website builder, cloud and VPS hosting, dedicated servers, a handful of Windows products, a reseller account and more.
There’s not a lot of depth to any individual area, though. HostGator only offers three VPS server plans and three base dedicated servers, for instance, and these only have very limited configuration options.
Dedicated servers only allow you to choose Windows or CentOS operating system, for instance. Meanwhile, Hostwinds has four VPS plans available in Linux and Windows flavors; its dedicated servers enable choosing up to three additional drives, adding RAID support, extra RAM, choosing from five operating systems and multiple versions, and adding extra IPs and bandwidth.
The products HostGator does offer are surprisingly capable, though, especially at the budget end of the range.
Shared hosting
HostGator’s shared hosting range delivers from the start. Even the cheapest shared hosting plan, Hatchling, gets you unmetered disk space; unlimited bandwidth, MySQL databases, email and FTP accounts; a free SSL certificate, easy WordPress and shopping cart installation (osCommerce and ZenCart) and full-featured cPanel-based site management. That’s more than enough power for many personal and business websites, yet it’s priced from only $2.75 a month on the three-year plan ($6.95 on renewal).
At the top of the range, the Business plan supports hosting unlimited domains and adds professional features such as a free dedicated IP and a premium SSL certificate. This has a very low headline price from $5.95 a month over three years, and renews at a still-reasonable $14.95-$16.95, depending on subscription length (1 month to three years.)
(If you’re looking for more detail, there’s a technical comparison of the various shared hosting plans on the HostGator site.)
The only small issue we could see was in HostGator’s choice of automated installers. Many web hosts offer Softaculous, a smart platform which simplifies the process of installing WordPress, Joomla, phpBB, PrestaShop, Drupal, Magento and hundreds of popular web apps. HostGator is mostly focused on WordPress, with just a handful of others. That will be fine for most users, but if you’re looking for something else, you may have to install and set it up yourself.
Application hosting
HostGator offers simple WordPress hosting for a very low price, but without the high-end features you’ll get with the more specialist competition.
The company claims’ 2.5X Faster Load Times & Increased Website Performance’ due to its ‘supercharged cloud architecture, low-density servers, CDN, and multiple caching layers.’
HostGator also offers a free migration service to transfer your existing WordPress site to the new account, while automatic WordPress updates should keep your site securely patched.
Prices are less than some basic shared packages, starting at $5.95 a month over three years (renews at $9.95.)
If you’d like a little more WordPress management power, InMotion Hosting’s WordPress plans include a staging environment to enable testing updates without breaking your production site. Prices start low at $6.99 a month over two years, $8.99 on renewal, but the plan only supports 20,000 monthly visitors. HostGator’s starter plan can handle 100,000, so if you only need the WordPress basics, it’s still the better deal.
a screenshot of a cell phone: HostGator makes signing up easy by putting all of the information you need onto a single page (Image credit: Hostgator)
makes signing up easy by putting all of the information you need onto a single page (Image credit: Hostgator) Signing up
While many web hosts force you to work through multiple pages to buy the simplest of products, HostGator crams everything you need – account details, your choice of plan, any extras you need, your preferred billing method (card, PayPal) and personal details (name, email and physical address, phone number) – onto a single page.
That makes for a lot of vertical scrolling as you make your way through the detail, but otherwise it’s a smart approach. It’s easy to see what’s involved, the choices you’ve got and their consequences, for example adding the daily backup option ($2.00 a month) with a click and immediately seeing the final price update to match.
It’s good to see a reminder of HostGator‘s 45-day money-back guarantee, too. That’s more generous than usual, but keep in mind that there are the usual restrictions: you’re not covered for dedicated servers or domain registration, for instance, and you won’t get a review if HostGator has given you one before.
We worked our way through the form and handed over our cash in the usual way. Some web hosts force you to wait for an email telling you they’ve activated your account, but not HostGator. The website redirected us to a ‘please wait while we set up your account’ web page, but after a brief delay, barely a minute, HostGator’s dashboard appeared and we were ready to go.
a screenshot of a cell phone: With HostGator you can build your site using WordPress or using a Weebly-powered drag-and-drop website builder (Image credit: HostGator)
With HostGator you can build your site using WordPress or using a Weebly-powered drag-and-drop website builder (Image credit: HostGator) WordPress
Launch HostGator for the first time and you’re presented with two website creation options: installing WordPress, or using a Weebly-powered drag-and-drop website builder.
Choose the WordPress option and you’re asked to choose your domain, and, optionally a directory.
Tapping Next enables entering a blog title, admin username, your first and last name and the email address. One further click on the Install button and the site installs WordPress for you.
While this works, it’s basic, and short on detail. What is the ‘admin’ user, newbies might wonder? Why does the site need your first and last name? There’s nothing on the page to tell you more.
It’s also very limited. Bluehost’s automated WordPress installer asks for your development experience, for instance. Your blog tagline. Whether you’d like to install a web store. You’re even able to choose a theme for your site. And despite all the extra functionality, it’s still more clear and straightforward than HostGator’s very stripped-back approach.
There’s a possible explanation for this at the top of the WordPress setup page, where HostGator suggests you ‘talk to a WordPress expert’ and offers a phone number. Alternatively, scrolling down takes you to a ‘Let a Pro do it for you’ panel, where HostGator offers to set up your site for a fee.
At its most basic, the company can install WordPress and your theme, and give you $49 WordPress Theme Credit, for $99. Well, okay, it’s there if you need it, but we would prefer HostGator offered a smarter setup process which made it easier for anyone to do this.
a screenshot of a social media post: HostGator provides a free Weebly-based website builder but there are some restrictions (Image credit: HostGator)
HostGator provides a free Weebly-based website builder but there are some restrictions (Image credit: HostGator) Website builder
HostGator’s Weebly-based website builder offers an excellent drag-and-drop editor that you can use it with your own domain, and there’s free SSL thrown in. There’s no limitation on the amount of space you use, but do be aware that you may need to upgrade your hosting if your website proves resource intensive.
The website builder simply makes it really easy to set up an effective and professional-looking website without any coding knowledge or experience, so will likely be well-worth it for those who aren’t familiar with HTML, CSS, and PHP programming, especially for mobile-friendly web templates.
There are a number of paid plans available, with the Starter priced at a discounted $3.84 per month for new users, and offers all the essential features you’ll need to build your website. The Professional plan, starting from $5.99 per month, simply includes priority support in case you need any help.
The Ecommerce plan, starting from $9.22 per month, gives you additional tools for building your own online store, and includes features for inventory management, a shipping and tax calculator, as well as the option to offer coupons to customers.
a screenshot of a cell phone: From HostGator's dashboard you can view all the information you need to know about your website and your account (Image credit: HostGator)
From HostGator’s dashboard you can view all the information you need to know about your website and your account (Image credit: HostGator) Site management
HostGator‘s customer portal is an online dashboard where you’re able to manage your account and take full control of your web space.
This is very text-heavy with a stack of links, but many of these relate to optional extras. ‘CodeGuard Backup’ sounds intriguing, for instance, but unless you purchased it during signup, you’ll just get an upselling attempt trying to persuade you to buy it now.
A ‘Search our knowledgebase’ box wasn’t as useful as it looked, either. We typed ‘cancel’ in the box and hit Enter, hoping to see the knowledgebase display a pop-up window with a link to a ‘how to cancel your account’ article. Instead, the site simply opened a new tab at the Help site, without even displaying matching articles. We had to search for ‘cancel’ again.
Despite these hassles, the dashboard scores for its many convenient touches. A ‘Control Panel’ section includes links to common site management modules – Email Accounts, Webmail, Databases, File Manager – and with one click you can get on with uploading files, creating email accounts or whatever else you need to do.
If you need more, a full-strength cPanel installation is just a click away. FTP, phpMyAdmin, Awstats, Webalizer and all the usual tools are ready and waiting.
Overall, while there’s room for improvement here, HostGator’s portal works very well. Once you’ve found your way around, it’s a comfortable place to work with plenty of useful shortcuts.
a screenshot of a cell phone: HostGator provides 24/7 support via live chat and telephone (Image credit: Hostgator)
HostGator provides 24/7 support via live chat and telephone (Image credit: Hostgator) Support
HostGator‘s first line of support is a comprehensive web knowledgebase, where a stack of articles are organized into sensibly chosen categories: cPanel, Database, Domains, Email, Security, VPS/ Dedicated and more.
If you’re unsure about the category, enter a keyword in the Search box and a list of matches appears.
HostGator‘s search engine generally does a great job of displaying the most relevant articles first. When we typed ‘import WordPress’, for instance, the site highlighted articles on transferring WordPress sites from WordPress.com or other sites, moving a WordPress site or using the standard Import and Export tools.
That’s just the start. When we hit Enter, the site gave us 100 matches of similar and related articles, including others which might be relevant (How to move your blog from Tumblr to WordPress.)
Most articles include plenty of detail, too. The official ‘How to Transfer Your WordPress Blog From One Host to Another Host’ advice, for instance, explains that HostGator might be able to transfer the site for you, points you to resources where you can find out more, explains four key steps (backup, download, create a new database, import), and includes some useful tips (don’t update WordPress on the new host until you’ve imported your database.)
If you run into trouble, support is available 24/7/365 via live chat and telephone (toll free in the US.)
We’ve always had good results from HostGator’s support, and this time was no different. When we tried live chat, a helpful agent responded within a minute, understood our question immediately and gave us sensible and accurate advice: exactly what we needed.
a screenshot of a map: We used the service Uptime.com to check the availability and response time of our HostGator site for a week (Image credit: Uptime.com)
We used the service Uptime.com to check the availability and response time of our HostGator site for a week (Image credit: Uptime.com) Performance
We began our performance testing by setting up a simple static website on our HostGator plan, then using the site Uptime to check its availability and response time for a week.
Our site was never down during the monitoring period. That’s what we would expect after only a week of testing, but it was still good to see.
Response times ranged from 216ms to 807ms, with an average of 251ms. That’s at the slower end of ‘mid-range’ (the very best hosts average around 100ms faster) but in most cases you’re unlikely to notice any issue.
There’s better news in HostGator‘s consistent response times. Strong variations in response times suggest an overloaded server (or network) with too much competition for resources. But HostGator’s response time chart was (for the most part) reassuringly flat rather than worryingly spiky, perhaps indicating that the server and network had resources to spare.
As a final check, we ran Bitcatcha’s Server Speed Checker on our test site. This tested the response times of our site from multiple locations around the world – North America, London, Singapore, Sydney, Japan and more – and was more enthusiastic about HostGator’s performance, awarding our server its highest A+ rating.
Final verdict
HostGator’s high-end VPS and dedicated plans are short on configurability, but its shared hosting plans offer loads of features for a very fair price, there’s top-quality support to ensure everything runs smoothly, and a generous 45-day money-back guarantee ensures there’s no risk. A smart choice for shared hosting users who need more.
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WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS
New research has revealed that WordPress is the top content management system (CMS) among enterprise businesses using two or more CMSs and it is also the dominant CMS for headless technology applications.
WP Engine’s new report, titled “The Rise of Multi CMS, WordPress and Headless in the Enterprise”, found that using a CMS is no longer optional for enterprise companies and that headless applications, which control the content that is separated from the display layer or the front-end user experience, are on the rise.
Vanson Bourne surveyed 300 enterprise-level IT and marketing decision makers in the US and UK to compile the new report that is a follow up to a similar survey conducted back in 2017.
The report shows a marked increase in the use of WordPress among enterprise customers and the popular CMS showed the highest increase in usage when compared to other CMSs including Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, Joomla, Drupal and Umbraco.
One of the most interesting findings from WPEngine’s survey was the clear return on investment advantage of WordPress. Of those surveyed, 31 percent viewed ROI as a major benefit of using WordPress and no other CMS scored higher than 27 percent with the average of all other CMSs at 20 percent. Of the IT and marketing decision makers who are already using WordPress, 38 percent saw ROI as a major benefit making the case that once an enterprise is using the CMS, its ROI is even more pronounced.
According to the survey, WordPress and Adobe Experience Manager are still battling it out for the top spot. While Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is still the most commonly used CMS overall at 68 percent, WordPress is catching up fast at 66 percent. At the same time, WordPress use in the enterprise has risen by 16 percent since 2017 and this is driven by businesses using multiple CMSs. Almost half (49%) of enterprises are also planning to expand to additional CMSs in the future.
Founder and CTO at WP Engine, Jason Cohen provided further insight on the report’s findings and how enterprises are now using multiple CMSs, saying:
“For today’s enterprise organizations, using a CMS is no longer an option, it’s a mandate. The research results clearly show that not only are most, if not all, enterprises using a CMS, they are most likely using more than one. WordPress is one of the top two leading platforms for both primary and secondary uses, with clear benefits in terms of ease of use, ROI, agility and a faster time to market. It’s also one of the leading CMSs for headless applications, which continue to grow in this all-important market.”
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Grow your business with wpengine
These days online presence has become so important for each and every individual, company or organization. People are often prompted by questions like:Want to grow your wordpress blog?Want to start your own website?Want to monetize and grow your online presence? want to? want to ? and so on.You all have come across all these questions and have also been recommended products and services based on these questions and might even have ended up with not-so-good products and service. Many people even tell you that they are not selling you anything but end up selling you something and get you frustrated.Trust me, I won’t do that. I am telling you that I am selling you something.I am talking about a product that could revolutionize and monetize your online presence. This product is for businesses that have an amazing online presence and are doing wonders in their field while getting frustrated with their hosting plans and slower loading time and also for the businesses that are starting out. The product I am talking about is WP ENGINE(One and only WORDPRESS Digital Experience Platform).WP ENGINE is VIP WordPress hosting. Their hassle-free hosting offers fast and robust servers that can handle anything. Your website is hacker-proof and their mind blurring customer service makes you feel like a king.It is beyond Managed WordPress Hosting. Bring your vision to life in breakthrough experiences, built on the best platform for developing and hosting fast, reliable, and secure WordPress sites..Now, let’s see what it offers?
Daily Backups
One-click restore points
Automatic caching
Top-tier security
One-click staging area ( instantly create a copy of your site for testing ) and many more
Automatic Security Updates
WP Engine is like having an army of WordPress experts on your side of assistance. It has a super support team of over 100 WordPress experts. They boost over 97% customers satisfaction with thousands of customer interactions per day.This Platform is designed around four pillars:
Enterprise Performance
Actionable Intelligence
Ecosystem Integrations
Creative Agility
Plus the Bonus is: You get all 36+ premium StudioPress themes and Genesis framework for free with all WP Engine accounts. Here, you all might be wondering how these themes are free as you have invested this amount of money. I’ll tell you how, whenever you buy paid theme you end up spending $30-$100 on one theme, and buying all these themes might cost you more than $2000 which is an extra investment for your business. Apart from all this, Every StudioPress theme is Gutenberg ready, which helps in simplifying the content design and editing process even further.
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WP Engine and Flywheel:Local and Genesis Products Available to All Customers
WP Engine, the WordPress technology company, announced today two updates to simplify the workflow of developers and enable them to create world-class digital experiences. Starting today, Local (formerly Local by Flywheel), will connect directly to the WP Engine WordPress Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Additionally, Flywheel customers will now have access to the Genesis framework and themes free of charge, a feature already available to WP Engine customers.
Now, all 130,000 Flywheel and WP Engine customers can enjoy the same world-class developer solutions to their combined customer base that they previously only offered to their respective customers. Local is the most relied upon local WordPress development solution with over 150,000 users who enjoy its easy development environment to build WordPress sites, test those sites and speed up their development workflow. Genesis is the world’s most popular theme framework for WordPress, used on over 600,000 websites.
WP Engine, the WordPress technology company
When WP Engine announced its acquisition of Flywheel in June 2019, its vision was to offer the most relied upon and trusted platforms in WordPress along with the most developer-centric tools to build on those platforms. These platforms and tools include WP Engine’s DXP, Flywheel’s managed hosting platform, Local and Genesis—all trusted brands under the umbrella of WP Engine, the WordPress technology company. Today, that company has more than 900 employees in eight offices across five countries.
“Our vision is to be the most trusted WordPress technology company in the world,” said Heather Brunner, Chairwoman and CEO of WP Engine. “Our family of WordPress solutions means we have the ability to meet any organization’s WordPress needs from getting started all the way up to scaling for the most complex and popular sites in the world. Over the past six months, we’ve been busy bringing the strengths of each respective brand to our customers through our industry-leading developer solutions, Local and Genesis, and these are just the first of several planned launches coming in the next few months.”
A Legacy of Commitment to the WordPress Community
Not only does this announcement open up the use of Local and Genesis to WP Engine and Flywheel’s broad customer bases, it also underscores WP Engine’s strong commitment and investment in the WordPress open source community. It’s thanks to the tireless efforts of this vibrant and devoted community of tens of thousands of developers around the world that Local and Genesis have become the world’s most popular development solutions. Some of the most beautiful websites in the world have been created by this community. WP Engine plans to continue building on its foundation of support for the WordPress community and its contributors by providing meaningful opportunities for continued collaboration for the ongoing betterment of WordPress.
The Best of Both Worlds: Local
Many novice and advanced WordPress developers face the issue of wanting to work on or test and preview their site in a safe, offline environment. Further, they want a great local development tool that is effortless to use for all skill levels while still providing advanced capabilities for those that need it.
Enter Local. Local is WordPress’ most popular, easy-to-use tool to build and test WordPress sites faster. Today, WP Engine is releasing Local Connect, which helps Local users deploy their sites to the WP Engine platform with a single click. In addition, WP Engine customers will receive award-winning technical support for Local from the WP Engine team. This is the first of several planned features between Local and WP Engine.
Key Benefits:
Get started in minutes with simple installation, intuitive interface, and easy site creation
Increase productivity with a suite of powerful dev tools including shell tools, email testing tools, and various website logs
Improved developer experience thanks to integration with and support from WP Engine
The Best of Both Worlds: Genesis
For WordPress developers seeking to shorten time-to-market, Genesis provides a trusted technical foundation on which to build well-designed, secure, fast-loading and SEO-optimized WordPress experiences. Additionally, it is Gutenberg-ready and the only framework in the market with built-in AMP support. It is now available at no additional cost for all Flywheel customers.
Key Benefits:
Lightweight codebase and built-in SEO delivers great site performance
One-Click Theme Setup gets sites up and ready for customization within minutes instead of hours
Seamless experience due to integration with and support from Flywheel
Story continues
About WP Engine
WP Engine is the WordPress technology company that provides the most relied upon and trusted brands and developer-centric products in WordPress, including WP Engine, Flywheel, Local, StudioPress and Genesis. With more than 900 employees in eight offices across five countries, WP Engine provides WordPress solutions for companies and agencies of all sizes.
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Top website builders for 2020: Wix or Squarespace
Building a professional website doesn’t have to take a lot of time, effort or money. Companies like Wix, Squarespace and Weebly have made it easy for even first-timers to hit the ground running, and the best website builder for you depends on your particular needs.
The website builder industry has grown substantially over the last 10 years, and it can be overwhelming to pick a company to use. But that complexity and growth also means that you have more choices than ever, and you can easily find the best website builder tailored to your wants and needs. It’s true that a few website builder favorites have emerged — and those sites are usually a good place to start — but even the front-runners aren’t ideally suited for every scenario. Now you can easily and professionally present your services or business without being a web developer, having coding skills, knowing HTML or looking like a middle schooler’s online science project. To make it easy for you, we’ve compiled all the information you need to make a good decision on the best website builder and get to the fun part of designing your site.
Best website builders compared
*Starting price doesn’t include cheaper plans if they are ad-supported. Some vendors offer free domain hosting for the first year on some plans as well.
These services are independently chosen by our editors. CNET may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
To compile this list of best website builders, we researched the prices, plans and features of over 12 different website builders and scoured website builder reviews from several sites, including PCMag, Wirecutter, WebsiteToolTester, SiteBuilderReport, WPBeginner and more, to see where there might be any consensus. We also surveyed the CNET staff, and ultimately spent time building some test sites using the tools below (if we weren’t already users). We paid particular attention to the categories that not only differentiate one site from another, but that actually matter to business owners, artists and creators.
If, by the end of the list, you’re still not sure which direction to go, we’ve included a guide at the bottom, including key questions you should be asking yourself as you start your online venture. Finally, if you already have a website and just need a host or you’re interested in building a WordPress site, check out our list of best web hosting services.
Jump to: How to choose the best website builder
WIX
Wix is the clear front-runner in the race for website builder dominance. It’s the biggest player, with over 110 million websites built, and boasts the greatest quantity of tools, capabilities, and freedom.
Wix covers the full ease-of-use spectrum by offering an AI-fueled automatic website creator on one end (“Wix ADI”) that requires minimal effort from the user, all the way to Wix Corvid, an open development platform for advanced applications like Javascript, databases and data-driven dynamic pages. To maximize the experience, we do recommend choosing one lane (e.g., Wix ADI, specific templates or design-from-scratch), since it can be difficult to maintain consistency across your website design if, for example, you start with a template but then decide you want to totally customize it.
Like many competitors in this space, Wix offers a basic free plan that lets you create a free website starter site with ads. If you like what you see, you can spend up for a premium, ad-free site. Pricing falls within industry standards with a $13-per-month “Combo” plan that covers most needs for a personal website, up to a $49-per-month “Business VIP” e-commerce plan for your online store. Those prices do not include a domain, so you’ll need to account for that separately. And if you’re interested in stats and analytics, you’ll either need to get a paid Google Analytics account or another third-party tool, as Wix doesn’t have its own.
Despite being the clear favorite among most reviewers, Wix does have a few drawbacks. Wix was one of the few builders that has data limitations for each of its plan tiers, so if you want to upload endless photos and videos, or expect more than 5,000 visitors a month to your site, make sure you do the math before choosing a plan.
Also, the editor’s freedom and range of options can be overwhelming for folks who don’t have the time or inclination to make lots of little decisions, and the design flexibility means you’ll need to be more hands-on with the format and layout, as opposed to more structured or limited editors where you can’t draw too far outside the lines.
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SQUARESPACE
Squarespace strikes us as being the cool kid in high school — flashy and hip on the surface but lacking substance underneath. We found it to be in between Wix and Weebly in terms of ease of use, though it did get consistently positive marks from reviewers for the quality of design. Where we think it really might shine is for small- to medium-size businesses who want a nicely designed page and room for e-commerce growth with lower transaction fees.
The Squarespace editor isn’t as intuitive as Wix and Weebly, requiring a little bit of work until you get the hang of it. It has a fair amount of add-ons, website templates and tools, and the universal style editor and strong photo editing are helpful. The responsive website editor means that your site will always look good on mobile, but you won’t be able to make mobile-specific edits like with Wix or Duda. We also found consistent high marks for helpful and responsive customer support, which should put business owners’ minds at ease.
Squarespace starts off with a $12-a-month Personal plan, which includes unlimited storage, bandwidth and a domain, and offers an $18 Business website plan that includes unlimited contributors, a Gmail pro account, and e-commerce capabilities. If you go for an “Online Store” plan, you can choose between $26 and $40 a month, the latter of which includes a few final touches like abandoned shopping cart recovery and gift cards. It’s important to note that the $26 online store plan, while maybe slightly above the market rate for an e-commerce site, comes with no transaction fees. So depending on your sales volume on a given month, those savings for our online store could really add up.
Overall, Squarespace’s website is a good analog for what you get with its products: clean, professional and inviting design, but without the layers of design power or freedom you get from other builders.
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WEEBLY
Weebly flies under the radar relative to Wix with 50 million websites created, but offers some excellent options depending on your needs. If you want a simple and easy-to-use do-it-yourself website editor, a large site (more than 25 to 30 pages), unlimited storage, site portability and affordable yet powerful online store capabilities, Weebly plays a good David to Wix’s Goliath.
The editor is one of the easiest to use, and the low learning curve still nets great-looking sites. That ease-of-use means the editor is more limited in terms of add-ons and design flexibility, and it doesn’t have the range of options or mobile customization that a builder like Wix has. Still, in our testing, we never came to a point where we found those constraints to be limiting. For a high-octane web designer, though, it could come up.
Weebly’s prices are similar to competitors like Wix or Squarespace, but its free plan option is one of the most generous among free website builders, and for just $5 a month you can get up and running with your own domain name (albeit with Weebly ads). Its $12-per-month plan will give you an ad-free site with analytics and commerce capabilities, while the $25 plan gets you more store tools, like tax and shipping calculators, inventory management and discounts.
Weebly is a good option for those who may be more limited in terms of their time investment, and its commerce options outshine competitors like Wix and Squarespace. For those who are wary of committing to a website builder knowing that you won’t be able to pick up and leave later on, Weebly also offers the ability to download site files so you can move to another host, a rarity in the site builder landscape.
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GODADDY
GoDaddy is best known for its custom domain names and web hosting services, so it makes sense that it also offers website builder software. The problem is that it very much feels like an ancillary service — it doesn’t seem like it’s put in the development time and effort that some of the mainstream website building players like Wix, Duda and Weebly have. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for simplicity, and a user-friendly interface, GoDaddy could be a good option.
The GoDaddy “GoCentral” builder is one of the simplest tools available, but it’s also the most restrictive. You can build a website and get it live in an hour or two, and the rigid structures and lack of customization options means it will look good, if not dramatically unique. It is challenging to make specific site edits to the pre-made templates, as with pre-made templates you’re generally restricted to adding a content “block” that has preset text, image and formatting, instead of being able to add, drag or drop individual elements. The editor is more of a Madlibs-style fill-in-the-blank instead of a responsive, free-flowing experience.
It’s slightly ironic that it doesn’t include a domain name in its prices, given its core product offering, but other than that there aren’t too many surprises. The $6 monthly plan is straight-up basic; $10 gets you a PayPal option and SEO help; $15 tacks on email marketing and social media integration, and its $20-per-month plan is for online store capabilities, which are actually pretty impressive. You get abandoned cart recovery, inventory management, discounts and promotions, and Amazon, Etsy and eBay integrations — most of which are usually only available for an online store at higher prices.
GoDaddy is a well-known name, but not for its website builder. Still, we like that there’s a super simple and not-too-expensive option out there for those who don’t care about specific style placements and nuanced themes.
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WordPress
When most people talk about WordPress, they’re usually referring to the free open-source software available through WordPress.org. That’s very powerful, but it takes some time to learn and still requires that you find a website host and domain name. If you’re interested in going the advanced route of WordPress.org, we recommend you check out a tutorial or guide such as those you can find on WPBeginner or WebsiteToolTester to learn how it works.
The WordPress.com website builder is something else. It’s similar to the other builders listed above and is primarily geared toward bloggers and writers. The editor is fairly limited compared to other services, but is easy to set up and has everything you need for blogging. We should also note that it’s not an intuitive drag-and-drop website builder like Wix or Weebly.
Its pricing is fairly cheap, starting off at $5 per month to remove WordPress ads and giving you 6GB of storage. From there it goes to $8 for 13GB of storage and online selling capabilities, and finally a $25 option that allows you to use custom themes and add-ons. The $8 option seems like the best deal if you’re setting up a blog and thinking about monetizing it at some point.
Overall, WordPress caters to bloggers who don’t want or need to spend a lot of time on website design, but it feels very limited for most other use cases. That said, anyone who’s looking for more robust off-the-shelf CMS (content management systems) options should consider Joomla and Drupal. Both are arguably less user-friendly than WordPress, but offer more customization options. At least one CNET editor also felt that Drupal and Joomla also offered faster page loading speeds.
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SHOPIFY
If Wix is the clear favorite for most website building needs, Shopify fills that role for an e-commerce store. The platform offers an easy and user-friendly way to get an e-commerce website store up and running online, and it supports business owners throughout the process with their e-commerce tools. Shopify is a safe place to start for most “e-tailers,” though similar to Wix, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect for every scenario.
Like most other commerce-focused builders, Shopify’s platform is geared toward your product and sales details. Fortunately for those without a ton of experience setting up a retail operation, Shopify’s process ensures you won’t miss an important step as it guides you through inventory, customer information, and tax and shipping rates. And if you still have a question, Shopify offers 24-7 phone and chat support and an active online community forum.
Given that its user base is fairly defined, Shopify doesn’t offer a plethora of plan options, and its prices come in above the market average. The “Basic Shopify” plan is $29 a month and covers most of the basic needs for an online store, while the $79-a-month plan offers gift cards and more staff accounts. From our perspective, it was hard to rationalize the $50 jump from basic to standard, but if you factor in the reduced transaction fees and shipping discounts, it might make sense. If you’re running a bigger operation, they also offer a $299-a-month plan.
The main drawback of Shopify is probably its pricing model. If you want the support, guidance and a builder that will take care of most of the technical details, the extra costs are worth it. And the many apps available are enticing, but can also add up if you’re using those that cost extra. If after considering the different e-commerce features you’re still on the fence, we recommend you calculate the total cost of additional add-ons and transaction fees based on your sales, and then compare with competitors like BigCommerce, which offers more product variants and combinations and lower fees.
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BIGCOMMERCE
BigCommerce lives up to its name — it’s best for medium- to large-scale online stores that can cash in on the lack of added transaction fees and unlimited product variants. The store site builder might not be quite as easy to use as Shopify’s, but the amount of time you spend getting used to it could save you a lot of money down the road.
The editor has a lot of features and flexibility when you’re getting set up, but similar to Wix, that can be overwhelming for newcomers. If you have a little experience, however, those features and tools — like product variants and tax rates — will probably come in handy as you grow or if you’re already at scale.
BigCommerce’s price tiers are identical to Shopify’s at $29 (Standard), $79 (Plus), and $249 (Pro), but what you get at each level differs. Even the lowest BigCommerce plan at $29 gives its clients unlimited users, unlimited bandwidth and storage, unlimited products, and no added transaction fees. You can even link your e-commerce site to eBay, Google Shopping and Amazon. Where the pricing gets a little tricky is with the sales thresholds: The Standard plan only supports annual sales of less than $50,000, while Plus supports up to $150,000 and Pro up to $400,000. So basically you save a lot of money on transaction fees the more sales you rack up, but if you have enough sales, you have to upgrade to the next plan tier.
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As with all the online store builders, it’ll be worth it to do a little math based on your product inventory and expected sales. No transaction fees — they even have a discount deal worked out with PayPal where you can save an additional 0.5% to 1% — strikes us as a major deal-maker depending on your size, so if you’re a bigger operation, take advantage of the 15-day trial and give BigCommerce a shot.
How to choose the best website builderscreen-shot-2019-05-14-at-3-09-11-pmWix
Given the wealth of options and the fact that many website builders don’t allow you to pick up and move later on, it’s important to enter the fray with a clear idea of what you need. By first establishing your priorities and direction, it will be easier to find a match for the best website builder and avoid buyer’s remorse down the road.
In terms of pricing, most builders offer two to four different price tiers, each with a different set of features. This can make comparing services difficult, since they don’t make it easy to line up apples-to-apples, but that’s a big reason why we’ve created this handy guide!
Generally speaking, you can get a good individual website built for around $8 to $10 a month with an annual subscription. Most e-commerce plans range between $20 to $25 per month, and if you need an enterprise-style plan with multiple editors and VIP-level support, prices can go up to $300 per month for premium plans.
Storage and bandwidth are usually unlimited, but there are exceptions like Wix, which scales its storage capacity according to the plan tier. And even its lowest tier plan has a decent amount (3GB of storage and enough bandwidth to support up to around 5,000 visitors per month).
After the big questions like price and storage, finding the best website builder all comes down to what you’re looking for. Below are some guiding questions to help ensure you’re ready to shop like an expert and find the best website builder for your needs.
What is the purpose of your site?screen-shot-2019-05-14-at-3-10-23-pmscreen-shot-2019-05-14-at-3-10-23-pmSquarespace
Your first step should be to determine the primary goal of your web presence. Do you want to sell a product? Attract potential customers for your services? Build a portfolio page?
By first establishing your raison d’etre, you’ll be able to prioritize the tools, plugins and capabilities you want in your builder and not get pulled off track by a fancy add-on that isn’t actually helping you achieve your goal. If you’re primarily interested in racking up sales, start by looking at the e-commerce specialists, like Shopify and BigCommerce. If you’re a photographer or designer who wants a beautiful portfolio site, Wix and Squarespace are good places to start. Wix might edge Squarespace if you want more control over the design, while Squarespace might be better if you just want a stylish frame for your work.
If you just want something easy to use, Weebly and GoDaddy both offer intuitive builders, with Weebly offering more features and design finesse, while GoDaddy is much simpler and more limited. If you’re setting up a site or store and you want to present a customized experience to users or you have something specific in mind for the mobile version of your site, Duda offers the most customization capabilities. And if you’re a wordsmith who can’t be bothered by design decisions and fancy editors, WordPress can help you get your blog up and offers good ways to reach your readers.
How much time do you want to invest in building your website?
This obviously will vary depending on a number of factors, not the least of which is how clear of a design vision you have and whether you have experience building a website. That being said, each site builder has pros and cons when it comes to level of usability or ease-of-use based on the features, flexibility and intuitive design of the editing interface. On one end of the spectrum you have a builder like Wix, which is very easy to use but also comprehensive — the sheer number of options and tools makes it hard to whip up a site quickly. On the other end, you have a builder like WordPress or GoDaddy, each of which doesn’t provide you with a ton of options when building your pages.
Most people will want to devote enough time to their site that it serves its purpose of representing you online in a good light, so we generally recommend you take the time to learn your editor and take advantage of the many options available.
How much design control do you wantscreen-shot-2019-05-14-at-3-11-53-pm
Wix offers a pretty comprehensive suite of site editing tools.
Wix
This goes hand-in-hand with time investment, since the more control you have, the more choices you have to make. There are builders like Squarespace that have a fairly rigid design structure, but still let you customize fonts, colors and content, and on the other end of the spectrum you have a site like Wix, that lets you place objects anywhere on your site (at your own risk!), or Duda, which allows you to customize the mobile experience or create custom user experiences based on browsing history.
How big is your site?
Certain editors are more geared toward large site structures (40-plus pages) than others, so it’s important to know whether you will have a ton of pages and sections, or whether it’s more in the realm of a glamorized digital business card or fancy work portfolio.
The number of navigation levels, for example (which you can think of like file folders (or Inception): a page within a directory within another directory would represent three levels of navigation), can be an important consideration. Most pages probably use two levels — sections and the pages within each section, but online stores and other types of sites might need more. Weebly and BigCommerce are probably the best examples of builders that support large site structures, while Squarespace and Wix limit you to two levels of navigation.
How important is e-commerce?screen-shot-2019-05-14-at-3-35-11-pmShopify
Every builder we researched has an e-commerce option available, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all up to the task. A site like WordPress isn’t really what you want if your plan is to sell products online, while a site like Shopify or BigCommerce is expressly focused on online sales and has lots of e-commerce features. If you really just want to have a clean and easy-to-use online storefront, one of the dedicated e-commerce builders makes the most sense, but if it’s more of an ancillary service or simply nice to have, you can go with the builder that feels the best and sign up for its e-commerce option. There are even builders like Duda, which allow you to sell up to 10 products for free using another plan.
How big is your sales operation? screen-shot-2019-05-14-at-3-38-32-pm
Many website builders support Square’s payment solutions.
Square
Transaction fees: While we’re not small business owners, we do like math, and this variable struck us as particularly important. If you sell $10,000 of products in a month with a 3% vendor processing fee, you’re spending an extra $300 every month. If you’re paying your website host an extra 1% to 3%, that’s another $100 to $300. Those numbers greatly eclipse the monthly rate you’re paying, and add up even more if you’re selling significantly more. So before you choose a builder, make sure you read the fine print about transaction fees.
Many builders don’t charge on top of the Square or Paypal rate (usually 3%), but some do. Shopify charges extra if you don’t use Shopify Payments, but if you do use its services, you can get a rate below 3%. Then there are sites like BigCommerce that doesn’t charge extra and even has a PayPal discount, but has sales limits for each plan.
We know you’re a smart and savvy business owner who pays close attention to the books, but we thought it would still help to remind you: do the math before signing up.
How flexible do you want to be with the host?
As we mentioned at the top, many builders lock you into their hosting service, but not all. If you’re afraid of commitment or think you might want to switch as your business or services evolve, go with a service like Weebly or Duda that allows you to download your website files for easy use on another host.
The other big factor here is the free trial period. The industry standard is around 14 days, but some go up to a month, and others don’t have a trial period but will give you your money back within 30 days if you’re not happy.
This story has been updated to better reflect the free option available at Wix.
Best Blogging Platforms 2020
There’s a lot of different ways to do website marketing, but blogging is one of the most accessible — and, depending on how much work you put into it, it can be one of the most effective ways to get customers in your door virtually for free.
Whether you’re in restaurant marketing or are trying to track down more real estate leads, creating a blog can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
If you’re putting together a small business marketing plan, you need to leave room for a blog. And if you want to design one from scratch, there are a few great blogging software options that can help you.
• Wix
• Squarespace
• WordPress CMS
• HubSpot CMS
What to consider when choosing a blogging platform
Creating a blog is a little bit different than creating a website. The purpose of a blog is to showcase content specifically, and you aren’t worried about many of the other functions of a website.
Consider these three things to make sure you choose a platform that will make your content shine.
1. Simplicity
Blogs must be simple to use. You should be able to draft up a post, get it up on the site immediately, and watch the traffic roll in. And it should be simple to design the blog to begin with, so look for software options that are easy to use and won’t require you to take a class to figure out the interface.
2. Customization
Sure, the content is what’s most important. But you want your blog to stand out, so it’s always to your advantage to avoid a cookie cutter look that you can see on a thousand other websites if you can.
If you’ve got a little bit of tech know-how, consider an open source platform that you can mold as you see fit.
3. Analytics
It’s vital that you understand how customers are responding to your content. Are they clicking on your posts but not reading them? Are they interacting with the content but not going to your store? A platform that can track the marketing analytics and metrics that matter most to you will help you get vital insights that you can use to adjust your blogging activities for success.
5 best blogging platforms for small business
There are a lot of content management platforms out there, but not all of them are great for small business or for blogging in particular.
Here are the top five options in this area in our estimation.
1. Wix
Wix is a content management system that is perfect for a business that wants to create a simple but professional looking blog from scratch in an hour or two. The software, which may be the easiest blogging platform out there, has a simple drag-and-drop interface and lots of templates so you can go from having no website to having a sleek-looking blog in practically no time.
It doesn’t have all of the powerful features you might find with other CMS systems, and it’s primarily geared toward small business owners strapped for time who just need to look professional when they send a client to their site. However, there are customization options and advanced plug-ins that can take the site to the next level if you want.
With company claims of more than 150 million users, it’s certainly one of the most popular CMS options out there.
a screenshot of a cell phone: Wix onboarding screen showing steps to set get a website up-and-running.
Wix onboarding screen showing steps to set get a website up-and-running.
Key feature: One nice and surprising feature Wix offers is e-commerce automation. The software can automatically thank visitors for contacting you, ask customers for feedback, and more.
Pricing: Wix offers a free version of their website builder, but if you want to increase the professionalism of the site with your own domain name and no ads, or if you want access to more apps and more bandwidth, it’ll cost between $13 and $23/month, which is certainly affordable for most small business owners.
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2. Squarespace
Squarespace is another highly accessible option ideal for small businesses that just want to quickly create a professional blog and don’t want to deal with complicated design software.
Squarespace has a solid range of customization options and templates and a lot of features that can help those looking for more advanced website features.
Unlike some other options, Squarespace offers no free version, and it is fairly limited when it comes to widgets and apps, with just a few, mostly e-commerce extensions available. That’s not a problem for many small business owners who need a simple solution, and Squarespace excels there.
a screenshot of a social media post: Squarespace template selection page with filters options by category and previous tiles of individual themes.
Squarespace template selection page with filters options by category and previous tiles of individual themes.
Key feature: Squarespace does well when it comes to analytics. Many other website builders allow you to integrate a third-party analytics platform, but Squarespace does it directly through the site builder, which is certainly a big plus.
Pricing: As stated, there is no free version of Squarespace, although you can get a two-week trial to try it out. The cheapest plan is $12/month, and it ranges up to $40/month depending on what features you want access to, putting it at the higher end in terms of CMS solutions.
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3. WordPress CMS
If you’ve ever been involved with a company that publishes content, you’ve probably heard of WordPress. The company has been around since 2003 and is one of the best-known names in content management.
What makes this platform great for small business is not just that it’s easy to use, but that it’s a free and open source platform. That means you can stay within budget and you have a lot of customization options at your disposal. It may be the best free blogging platform out there.
WordPress also boasts a lot of powerful plug-ins and features. Many small businesses won’t need these features, but as your business grows, you may find that you need some more advanced tools, and WordPress has you covered there.
a screenshot of a cell phone: WordPress screen showing plugin options displayed as three columns of tiles. Summary of each plugin is in each tile.
WordPress screen showing plugin options displayed as three columns of tiles. Summary of each plugin is in each tile.
Key feature: Multisite integration is one of WordPress’s most impressive abilities. You can launch a number of different sites through WordPress, and a wide range of plug-ins lets you build everything from product pages to menus.
Pricing: As stated, WordPress has a 100% free version. However, if you want to upgrade to Personal to get a custom domain and 24/7 support, it will cost you $4/month, billed annually. It’s $8/month for premium which offers more advanced design tools and Google Analytics support. Finally, the Business version, at $25/month, provides 200 gigabytes of storage, live support, and custom plug-ins and themes.
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4. HubSpot CMS
HubSpot is a major player in the marketing and sales world, so you know their CMS is going to have some major strengths in that area. Not surprisingly, HubSpot CMS has a lot of tools for achieving your marketing objectives, helping you bring traffic to your site through content.
Interestingly, HubSpot eschews templates or common coding languages in favor of its own language, “HubL.” That’s great for tech novices who should be able to pick it up pretty easily, but perhaps a little off-putting to professional developers who want to customize the software and would prefer a more familiar coding language.
But the great thing about HubSpot for small businesses is that it’s easy to use, with simple navigation and a step-by-step approach to building your blog.
a screenshot of a cell phone: HubSpot CMS page builder screen with a tooltip suggestion to A/B test different variations of the page.
HubSpot CMS page builder screen with a tooltip suggestion to A/B test different variations of the page.
Key feature: HubSpot allows A/B testing of web pages, which means you can try different types of blog posts with your customers to see which resonate better. This provides vital insight that allows you to tweak your content to maximum effect.
Pricing: HubSpot will give you some sticker shock compared to other CMS options: it starts at $400/month plus a $1,000 onboarding fee. The plus side is you won’t get nickel-and-dimed by all the upgrade fees and extra plug-ins offered by other “free” platforms. It might still be too pricey for a small business, but you may find that HubSpot’s features are worth it.
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A top-notch blog is not so hard to get
Creating a small business website can be frustrating for the owner who is not tech-savvy, but these are some of the best platforms for blogging, and you can’t go wrong giving them a try.
You may find out that creating a professional, highly customized blog is a lot easier than you thought, and it could have an immediate positive impact if you’re wondering how to market yourself.
If you’re looking to build a brand, you need one of the top blogging platforms to get your company to the next level and increase the amount of free, organic traffic rolling into your small business website. The best next step would be to give one of these options a try for a week or two to see how they feel.
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