Not sure why your WordPress site hosted on GoDaddy is slow? Here’s how to speed the site up!
Did you know that 53% of visits are abandoned if a site takes longer than three seconds to load?
53%!
One of the usual suspects for a slow-loadingWordPress website is its hosting. And if you’ve ever owned a website, chances are you’ve thought about or have seen an ad offering to host it on GoDaddy
GoDaddy is one the most popular WordPress hosts. Thus one would expect due to their dominance, they’d be one of the best.
Right?
GoDaddy’s mission as a host is to make creating your company’s digital presence extremely easy.
Writer’s note: I actually just took a look at their site, the second sentence you’ll see upon loading in is “Creating your website is easier than you think”
We’ve seen companies take the simplification approach before, and it’s worked nearly as many times. Look at Apple — they morphed the household consumer’s view of computers from a novelty, into household devices.
Long story short: they did this by changing the consumer’s visual of a computer from a hulking beast, into the lovable iMac (who doesn’t love the vintage iMac ads?)
Okay, so we know the simplification process works, and that it’s what GoDaddy uses in their marketing/products. Why are we even talking about this?
PS. stick around, we’re almost at the good part!
Because through this marketing technique, GoDaddy is hoping that their WordPress customers won’t take the extra step into something they perceive as being too difficult.
By reading this article and learning just a little more about website hosting, you’re already doing more than GoDaddy wants you to. So let me tell you what they don’t want you to know:
GoDaddy’s slow hosting is inherently flawed
GoDaddy utilizes what is known as shared hosting. The TL;DR (Too Long; Didn’t Read) of shared hosting is this: Multiple websites running on one server.
What this means is, for all you know your website could be sharing the same server as two, three, twenty, or who knows how many other websites! The problem with this is if one website becomes strained, through factors like extra traffic or even a DDOS attack, your WordPress site will become a victim of said issues as well. Even though your website isn’t being targeted, you’re still the victim!
This is going to be a significant part of why your website is consistently slow, or will randomly slow down during portions of the day whilst hosted on GoDaddy (or other shared hosting services).
Alright, now you know the problem. It’s time to fix it:
The solution
It’s immensely simple: stop hosting on GoDaddy. I’ll make it even easier, and give you hosting options I recommend. And before you ask, don’t worry: I’m not going to be selling you anything
I will not be providing any affiliate links at all, just so you know you’re getting truthful answers
For ease, and simplicity: If you really don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of hosting, your best solution is going to be WPEngine. While this is still shared hosting, from my and others’ collective experience, it seems to be the best of the bunch when you need simplicity and just want it to work.
Sidenote, WPEngine is the most expensive of the bunch; expect to pay up for a decent plan
For overall fastest hosting, my personal pick for this would be Skystra. Skystra is what this WordPress site is hosted on! (as of 05/29/2021). Pricing is decent, and the speed/ease of setting up SSL was a huge positive. They do attempt to tack on a significant amount of services at checkout, so be wary whilst signing up.
Finally, if you are interested in your own hosting, you could look into services like Google Cloud, AWS/Lightsail, and DigitalOcean. However, I find that the money you save + the extra power/control of the server, is out-weighed by the difficulty & the time that will be wasted learning how to configure and troubleshoot issues (SSL install, domain configuration, Apache & PHP updates).
That’s how to speed up a slow WordPress site on GoDaddy!
If you learned something from this article, and would like to have one written for your site/social: set up an appointment with me here!