When a website takes more than 5 seconds to load, 38% of visitors will leave without waiting any longer. In our own testing of almost 1,500 agency websites, we found that every single site took more than 2 seconds to fully load, with many of them taking 5 seconds or longer. To compare, the recommended load time is 2 to 4 seconds, max.
Overall, these findings are way too slow. By switching to Convesio, you can improve your load time by approximately 160% or more – just like these brands did. Just about every one of these Convesio-hosted sites fully loads in the 2-to-3-second window.
Furthermore, the 2018 Hacked Website Trend Report from Sucuri reported that 44% of WordPress hacks are due to outdated sites – an incredibly easy fix if you know what you’re doing. And on average, a website is attacked 94 times every day.
Both of these problems – speed and security – can be solved by investing in innovative, next-generation hosting instead of relying on low-quality hosts.
Today, millions of WordPress websites are delivering awful user experiences. What could be worse than a super-slow website that spreads malware?! Low-quality hosts are to blame, and they’re doing nothing to solve the problems they’ve created. Luckily, high-quality, next-generation hosts are helping.
We can’t say it enough: you can solve just about all of your WordPress problems (which are also your business problems, if you’re being honest) with better hosting. In this article, we’ll go over cPanel and why it’s a terrible hosting option, talk about the drawbacks of relying on a legacy host and explain how investing in a quality host will help your business as well as the WordPress industry overall.
The WordPress industry needs innovation to grow and evolve, which is why it’s so important to support a premium host that’s doing something fresh. Get behind companies like Convesio, Kinsta and Pantheon, all of which are creating advanced tech and elevating standards to move the industry forward. That’s the only way to solve your WordPress speed and security troubles.
Why You Should Avoid cPanel and Other Low-Quality Hosting
Supporting cPanel or an off-the-shelf shared host only makes hosting more of a commodity – and a poorly-performing commodity at that. These hosts have done very little to make WordPress better, but they’ve done plenty to make it worse. While cheap hosts may make WordPress more prevalent, those websites have huge problems, particularly when it comes to speed and security. Let’s dive in.
What is cPanel?
cPanel is an online interface that serves as a control panel for hosting providers, and the idea is that it’ll make website and server management simpler – but “simple” is relative, because cPanel also comes with a lot of drawbacks. Essentially, cPanel is used by a lot of hosting companies as a sort of default, one-size-fits-all dashboard.
It sounds good at first, though. With cPanel, you can:
- Manage domain names
- Publish a website
- Keep web files organized
- Create an email account
A lot of hosting companies offer cPanel to customers as a standard part of their service package. The customer is in control of the user interface (typically powered by cPanel), while the host is in charge of the server interface. As the customer, you just see cPanel.
cPanel is prevalent because it is moderately easy to use, has lots of functionality, and can be rolled out by shared hosts at scale. cPanel makes it fairly easy to install WordPress (although it has no loyalty to WordPress — it can also be used to install plenty of other CMS platforms), but it typically just offers you regular WordPress.
If your host uses cPanel to offer you regular WordPress – and nothing more – they’re leaving you high and dry when it comes to speed and security. Remember how we mentioned that WordPress is the slowest and most-hacked CMS? You can undeniably draw a straight line between these problems and low-quality hosting.
What is a legacy host?
Legacy hosts have been around for a long time, which gives the impression of quality. You may think, “They’ve lasted this long, and a lot of clients trust them, so they must be great!” However, many legacy hosts haven’t innovated in all the years they’ve been in business, and while they may still be powering a lot of sites, how well are those sites performing? (Not well at all.) Whether or not legacy hosts use cPanel – and many of them do – they often have the same exact issues: poor speed and security.
Problems You’ll Face with Low-Quality Hosting
- It’s super slow. Users are responsible for optimizing their site, which they don’t have the experience to do. On the other hand, next-generation hosts know how to do this for you.
- You have to use caching plugins. This is totally unnecessary, as caching can be built right into the host’s server structure.
- Uptime is unreliable. According to research from Hosting Facts, downtime takes the average website offline for three hours every month.
- Support is, at best, antiquated. The “modern” customer support that legacy hosts offer is live chat, which just means long waiting queues. Otherwise, you’ll have to submit a support ticket – and wait who knows how long for an answer, let alone a solution.
- Pricing is set no matter how much you do (or don’t) use. This means you and your clients will be paying for unused capacity. You’ll have to charge every client the same amount, which means smaller clients will be over-paying.
