An essential step before starting to build your website is choosing its web host. This will practically connect your site to the internet. There are thousands of web hosting services out there, all with a wide range of features on offer. Choosing the right service provider may be a confusing process and should not be taken lightly.
If you are starting out your internet endeavor, you want to be sure you pick a hosting package that suits your budget. While some of them like shared hosts are affordable but with limited features, other hosting services provide plenty facilities but prove to be too expensive.
Even if you are a small company but expect to grow over the next years, then you should consider choosing up a web host that it can offer you better plans.
During the last 5 years and 19k licenses, we have encountered and fixed a lot of hosting situations. We decided to find, test and recommend a reliable, excellent hosting alternative for the small to midsize companies.
To help you out, the following post will give you an inside view with Inmotion Hosting, a company rated as a top WordPress Hosting provider on Wpbeginner.com.
Since we heard a lot of good news about Inmotion Hosting we were thrilled when they offered a free account and let us test their WP-2000S WordPress hosting pack.
click here for an exclusive Inmotion Hosting offer
All of their managed WordPress hosting plans include the following hosting features:
- Unlimited email accounts and bandwidth
- Automatic WordPress updates
- Free and no downtime website transfer
- Free automatic daily backups
- Advanced server caching
- SSH, FTP, and PhpMyAdmin Access
The Wp-2000s plan comes with:
- 80GB disk space,
- supports 2 websites at no additional cost
- a suitable number of monthly visitors of approx 50,000. The number is not a limit, but only a reference point.
Once you sign up for an account, you get access to the Account Management Panel. There are 2 sections: Manage my account and your Website management section.
Since you sign up for a WordPress Package, you will also receive your WordPress admin details.
Next, we will elaborate our experience with inmotionhosting.com – admin panel applied on our most complex theme WP Residence theme.
First, we have uploaded the theme, and after activation, we have installed the following plugins: Visual Composer, Ultimate addons, Revolution Slider and EWWW image optimizer.
Since this is a fresh new site without content, we have decided to use our demo content for testing. First, we have uploaded into this demo the 2300+ listings we have in demo3.wpresidence.net.
We ended up with a site having 2300 listings, a typical number of large real estate websites and the perfect environment for testing. The result was that Inmotion hosting server was stable and responsive.
However, the loading times were good but not great. And this happened because we did not activate the caching system and no optimization actions were performed. As a side note, in Inmotion Hosting Cpanel there is a Cache Manager section.
Because we wanted to use our cache plugin, during the import of the 2300 listings we have deactivated this option. The Inmotion cache is on by default so make sure is off while you are building the website.
Next, we have taken the following optimization steps:
– Images were optimized using the Eww image optimizer plugin that is included with the WP Residence theme installation.
– We chose to show only 70 pins on the map. Remember that a high number will increase the response time and server load. Our advice is to experiment with your site and see what number fits best.
– We added into the htaccess file the code from Advanced – Site Speed – Enable Browse Cache:
– We used the minified version of the CSS and js
– Made sure we don’t have missing images
– Installed WpRocket cache plugin (no particular settings were made here – Just checked the minify HTML )
You can still improve the site speed by
– Activating lazy load from WpRocket (is not working well in all situation)
– Signing up on Cloudflare
– Disabling the slider in property cards (will load fewer images)
– Working with http://inmotionhosting.com Cache
Testing the Results
We did the loading test on the home page with 3 tools:
1. Pingdom website speed test: we got a 1,25 loading time for a page size of 2.4 Mb
2. Gtmetrix: 3.9 sec load with grade B of optimization.
We got B grade because we used Google Maps on the page. And since google maps images and data are stored on Google servers they cannot be cached or optimized. If you use the theme with another option like theme slider or an image instead of Gmaps you will get a score close to A and 3 sec to load.
3. Page speed insights: Same things as on Gtmetrix. Using Google maps will lower your optimization score and site speed.
Our conclusion
If you are a small to a midsize company that has a few hundred listings WP-2000S hosting pack is all you need. The hosting solution is fast, reliable and at $10.95 per month, the offer is more than convenient.
And if your business grows and you need increased facilities Inmotion Hosting offers 4 more WordPress dedicated packs for your use.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this article are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you we may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
