For web design and digital marketing agencies, fully-optimised WordPress hosting can be a real game changer. When your workstream involves building and managing multiple client sites - all with very different needs - choosing the right platform is a pretty high-stakes decision.

With WordPress hosting, you can streamline website builds for all your clients (no matter how big or small) and generate extra income to boot. Let’s dive into what it is, and all the ways your agency could benefit.

What is WordPress hosting?

Simply put, WordPress hosting is a type of web hosting that’s specifically designed for WordPress sites. When you choose it, you’re getting a platform that has the CMS pre-installed and is purpose-built for optimal WordPress performance and easy platform management.

What’s the difference between web hosting and WordPress hosting?

You may have seen the two terms thrown around and have been left wondering what exactly the difference is. The main thing to remember is that “web hosting” is a catch-all term used to refer to all types of website hosting, like shared hosting, dedicated hosting and cloud hosting.

On the flip side, WordPress hosting refers to a type of hosting built for the WordPress CMS that gives you high levels of performance and tech support, as well as support for the latest WordPress releases.

WordPress is known for being the world’s most popular CMS – as of 2022, it has a massive market share with 43% of all websites (that’s over 450 million websites!). But the big question is “why?”.

Well, for starters, it’s one of the most powerful, versatile, secure and user-friendly options on the market. On top of that, since its launch in 2003, the WordPress platform has consistently evolved, with continuous improvements to meet the changing needs of users, from new features and plugins to security patch updates.

And let’s not forget about the 59,000+ plugins and 9,000+ themes available for free, so you can build and customise for any and every use case, no matter what your client’s thing is.

Why should agencies choose WordPress hosting?

WordPress is hugely popular with agencies for good reason and if you're not already using it yourself, there are tons of ways you could benefit from making the move. We’d struggle to squeeze them all into one post, but here are a few that we think really hit the nail on the head with why your agency should be using WordPress.

Benefits of WordPress

1. Extra service equals extra revenue

You can add ‘website hosting’ to your list of available services, growing your offering as an agency with an extra revenue stream, and all without having to expand your team.

For example, say you’ve been working with a client on and off for a while and you’ve done a handful of ad hoc projects for them. Offering to host their website will usually mean starting up a retainer, so you can bank on a more reliable income. This is ideal for any companies you work with that have minimal technical expertise available in-house, as they’ll likely prefer to outsource it to an agency like yours. Plus, if you’re using an external hosting provider (like us) and then reselling hosting to your client, you can charge a premium, or add an extra fee for website management.

2. Get set up quick

Having WordPress pre-installed with your hosting means you won’t need to spend time downloading the CMS on your server. Just purchase a plan and start developing (or migrating) your clients’ sites in a snap. There’ll be no complicated server settings to mess around with, all the tools you need are there ready for you to use straight away.

And the added bonus is that most providers make it easy to add extras like SSL certificates and domains in the same place so you can set those up quickly too.

3. Performance that does your clients justice

Because it’s specifically optimised for the CMS, this type of hosting amps up the performance of WordPress sites so that glitches and system freezes are kept to a minimum. It also boosts your clients’ sites in more ways than one – like page speed, error rate and time to interact. Fast sites equals happy clients, and happy clients leads to more revenue.

4. Keep on top of things with automatic updates

When you’re managing multiple sites, you probably don’t have the time to juggle updates and security patches for all of them. But without regular upgrades, your clients’ sites will not only miss out on helpful bug fixes, but they’ll also be more vulnerable to external security threats.

That’s where WordPress hosting comes to the rescue! Many hosting plans now come with an ‘automatic updates’ feature, so rather than manually upgrading every site in your portfolio, each site updates on its own. That means more time for your developers to focus on building stunning sites.

5. Robust security that keeps client data safe

Speaking of security - we know it’s one of the biggest concerns agencies have to deal with. Handling confidential data and sensitive material for many different companies at once calls for super tight security for your WordPress hosting. Most providers offer security features like two-factor authentication and pre-installed security plugins to keep your clients’ data away from prying eyes. You’ll also find a lot of them, including us, have data centres that boast the latest in hardware and software security so your WordPress hosting is secure from every angle.

6. Round-the-clock support from the experts

It’s no secret that devs are usually tackling a long backlog of jobs to keep up with client needs, and fixing minor site issues is the last thing they need to add to the pile. That’s why we offer 24/7 tech support with our hosting packages, so our team of experts is on hand to help, day and night.

When you weigh up everything that WordPress hosting has to offer an agency, it’s really no surprise it’s so popular. It’s great for helping to ease the pressures of agency life, making it easier to create impressive sites for clients and manage it all hassle-free.

And it doesn’t necessarily have to put a dent in your wallet either. For example, our WordPress Hosting is stuffed full of features like free SSL certificates, automatic updates, unlimited bandwidth, first-class security and flexible performance, starting from only £1 per month for 6 months! Why not make your website go even further with a .agency domain?

Want to learn more about WordPress? We have loads of interesting reads on our blog, like troubleshooting a slow WordPress site, the best themes to get started with and how you manage it all from the WordPress app.