Cloud7 is gathering opinions of the important names in cloud computing, web hosting, cybersecurity, data center, Linux, and other industries for 2022 in the Cloud7 Expert Series. Alongside their evaluations of 2022, they will share their expectations for 2023.
Dennis Kittrell is a 20-year veteran of the hosting industry with over 17 years of experience in product management. His expertise has been largely focused on products related to hosting software, infrastructure, managed services, and security & compliance. Prior to joining CloudLinux, he worked with notable industry leaders GoDaddy, Aplus.net, ePages, Mattermost, and ClearDATA.
Staying ahead of demand: The shifting role of the WordPress hoster
The hosting industry is moving even faster in the direction of increased demand for high-performance small business websites (mostly WordPress). The trend of customers educating themselves on SEO, and how the hosting provider can impact that, is continuing to increase.
Because of these trends, WordPress performance is (as it should be) top of mind for the vast majority of hosting providers.
Everything is about performance and WordPress itself does not appear to be focused on these issues. It’s up to the hosting providers to find ways to improve in that area.
Most traditional shared hosting providers are acutely aware of competitors that are hyper-focused on powerful, performant, and reliable WP – such as WP Engine, Kinsta, and Page.ly. They know about the shift in market demand, and they’re working hard to fine-tune their WordPress value. The biggest question they are asking themselves is: “How can we make WordPress websites faster for our customers at a price they can afford?” Solving that challenge not only reduces churn, but it also attracts new business – the right kind of new business.
As the industry knows all too well, many hosting end customers are business savvy but often novices when it comes to troubleshooting technical issues (including performance). With this trend of demanding performance, it’s quite easy for the end customer to make the assumption that the hosting provider is the problem. While it’s actually related to conflicting, outdated, or malicious plugins/themes, not using the right tools for their needs (CDN, image optimization, etc), or not having the right caching. While this is not an infrastructure problem, hosting providers are learning that they can actually help to resolve these issues, too.
Security matters now more than ever
The other focus this year, as in previous years, is on WordPress security. As expected, the trend is still exponentially increasing. With the colossal number of websites running WordPress, it’s no surprise that it’s the biggest target for attackers. As every hosting provider knows, an infected website is the most likely to churn. We know there is only so much we can do to educate non-technical or novice users about security best practices, but every year it’s becoming more important in the hosting industry.
Here are some useful statistics to put this in perspective:
- 61% of infected WordPress websites are running an outdated version of WordPress
- 52% of WordPress attacks use vulnerabilities in plugins
And these numbers keep going up every year.
The hosting industry is spending a lot of time and energy honing in on these numbers – because there are increasingly new and better ways to educate and notify end customers about the risk. Not only that but new software solutions are being created for hosting providers to automate mitigation steps for the mostly non-technical end users.
I’m quite certain both of these trends (security and performance) will continue. I also believe that in the coming years – or possibly even sooner – WordPress is going to compete with a lot of alternative tools just chomping at the bit for a piece of the CMS pie. It might be coming sooner than we think, and the hosting industry has to be ready with blazing-fast WordPress. If not, those users will be tempted to make the jump, causing churn and contraction.
At the end of the day, the website visitor experience is what matters, and that bubbles up from the website visitor to the website developer, then the business owner, then Google and other search engines, then the hosting provider – and ultimately to the software providers that empower them.
I should confirm that while I forecast some relatively popular WordPress alternatives, I do not believe that WordPress will stop growing or even slow its growth rate. I’m saying that if hosters and WordPress and the plugins and the theme and community stay focused on optimizing for performance and security, WordPress will retain the CMS champion title for much longer. The bottom line is that it’s up to the hosting and WordPress communities, hosting providers, hosting ISVs, the plugin and theme developers, and WordPress/Automatic themselves to prioritize performance and security.
Security and performance: CloudLinux is prepared for 2023
As a hosting industry ISV and a major backbone of the industry, we are working hard to do our part. We are laser-focused on both performance and security with acute attention to WordPress. We want to continue to pay close attention to performance and security-related challenges and deliver tools that not only improve the performance and security of websites, but educate users on the root causes of issues – helping to inform the market that the issue is not related to the infrastructure. For example, a specific plugin caused a problem, or the fact that no page caching, object caching, or image optimization solution was not previously in use on the website. These are the most important ways we can empower the hosting provider.
- You may be interested in: Speed up WordPress websites with AccelerateWP
I should add that this is exactly what non-WordPress utilities and SaaS website service providers are doing, as well. They are owning performance and security at every level to compete – and if the hosting and WordPress community doesn’t keep up, a shift will occur.
Remember, the focus on both performance and security matter more and more every day. The importance is growing because those elements translate to lower bounce rate, better SEO, higher conversion for e-commerce, and overall perceived value. It’s critically important to the core goal of hosting a website – to promote information, build a brand, and sell a product or service. They’re all working hard to build a vision, and that vision wavers with a slow or infected website.