Is there a real benefit in using wordpress optimized hosting?

I'm building a site for a client. This site often takes a long time to load initially, but is rather fast when loading the next page because of WP Super Cache plugin.

But still, the majority of people visiting a site for the first time will navigate away if the site doesn't load completely in 3 seconds. So I'm having a bit of a problem here.

We are considering a new hoster. The budget is limited, so we prefer the (starter package) hosting of www.neostrada.nl, but they have a shared server, and it is not wordpress optimized.

Is there a real benefit in using Wordpress optimized hosting like www.bluehost.com/wordpress? Or are there any other things that can make a Wordpress site load faster on the first visit?

Topic shared-hosting vps Wordpress performance

Category Web

1
answered at

It depends on what you need.

The software environment is the same you need for every other PHP site where you want to get an efficient workflow:

  • up-to-date PHP (currently 5.5, so you can use Opcache) with at least 128 MB memory limit
  • the same for MySQL
  • web server with a rewrite engine
  • regular backups
  • SSH
  • Git

You can get that everywhere for 5 €/month. In fact, I have seen more expensive “WP optimized” hostings where you could not even get PHP 5.4. Not acceptable, newer PHP versions are much faster.

What does make a difference is the support: If you need a lot of support and there are people who know WordPress very well, this will be very beneficial. Good, fast support is worth some money.

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