Thinking About Starting a Website Using Wordpress?

This is my personal experience, the good and the bad, with using the WordPress platform for my website, DogPerDay.com…

The website was started about nine years ago in 2008. My wife, Kate, was in the computer science industry, and so she was able to build it from scratch. WordPress was not really an option at the time, or at least we did not know about it. We hosted the website with a company called Lunarpages, and our email marketing system was some free software that came along with the hosting package.

We loved our little website, and it actually obtained a very good Alexa ranking of about 350,000 at its height. We got up to around 400 email subscribers before I kind of lost interest and stopped updating the site and stopped sending out my daily emails.

In about March of 2015 I decided that I wanted to revamp the website and get it going again. We wanted our redesign to utilize WordPress, and so we hired a web designer for about $2,000. He had some good of experience building WordPress websites. He did a great job on the design and look of the website, and we got pretty much exactly what we wanted as far as that went.

What our designer did not really tell us about were the potential security issues that come along with a WordPress website. So if you are just starting, be aware of security and potential attacks from hackers. We were also not told about how to optimize our content, especially our images, as DogPerDay is an image-heavy website.

So as a result of our WordPress website’s poor optimization and security, we were harassed by Lunarpages regarding something called “CPU Usage.” Usually a website is hosted in what is called a “shared environment,” and if your website takes up too much CPU percentage, you may get a notice from your hosting company. This is also something we were never warned about, and so at the beginning I was posting all kinds of images at 500 KB, or 1 MB or more, thinking nothing of it. Don’t do that… if you’re building a new website using WordPress, optimize all of your images as much as possible from the very beginning.

Lunarpages was almost no help at all in solving these issues. In fact, they pretty much harassed us with unfriendly, threatening email warnings, making us feel like we were guilty of some kind of a misdemeanor. Lunarpages had no expertise at all in WordPress websites. And by the way, my website was extremely slow loading with Lunarpages. And so… just the other day I decided to terminate my account with Lunarpages and migrated my website over to Siteground.

I did some research trying to find the best hosting company to support a WordPress website, and Siteground was one that I kept seeing over and over again. They didn’t always receive the #1 best review, but they were the most consistently in the Top 3 of any WordPress hosting company review. In fact, I learned that they are an officially recognized hosting company by WordPress itself. During discovery, the sales associate in the Live Chat was able to answer all my questions and made me feel like Siteground could easily handle the former problems I was having.

The migration of my website over to Siteground was not perfect… it was not a perfectly smooth transition. But the Siteground support team was always very quick to respond to my questions and very helpful. They have a Live Support Chat, and so technical issues and problems can be taken care of swiftly and painlessly. So now DogPerDay is up and running with Siteground, and I can already see a difference in my website’s loading speed. And it’s affordable.

If you’re thinking of starting a WordPress website from scratch, or you’re thinking of migrating over to a new hosting company, I recommend Siteground.

Click here to check out Siteground’s WordPress Hosting Plans >>

GetResponse All-in-one Online Marketing Platform

And when we were researching email marketing platforms to use for DogPerDay, we chose GetResponse. They have a great email newsletter creation tool that is easy to use for a non-technical person like me. My DogPerDay daily emails look great using the GetResponse WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get).

GetResponse also has a great Live Chat tool for their customers, and they are always there to answer questions and resolve issues quickly. They have a free trial if you’d like to try it out before committing.