When it comes to selecting a WordPress hosting provider, there are many factors to consider, including the quality and cost of its services. So often by going with the cheaper alternative, quality is sacrificed. The ToolTester Network learned this the hard way when they switched their site from WP Engine to a bargain WordPress host in an attempt to reduce costs.
“A couple of months ago we thought we could save a bit of money, as we had a lot of overcharges due to a traffic increase,” said Robert Brandl, founder and owner of WebsiteToolTester, a site that helps beginners create their own website by reviewing website builders and providing free resources to get them started.
“We rebuilt the website with another [WP Engine] competitor, did some testing and painfully had to realize that the servers were loading slower and that their support was not as responsive as [WP Engine’s],” he added.
Brandl said The ToolTester Network moved its sites back to WP Engine, and noticed immediate improvement.
“Luckily WP Engine doesn’t count bot traffic anymore, which saves a lot of money and makes staying a no-brainer,” he said adding, “the whole managing process has become a lot smoother too. Our developer is very happy about the staging area, the easy site cloning, as well as the responsive support. I would have to bribe him if I ever wanted to leave WP Engine.”
Brandl said other providers couldn’t match WP Engine’s level of service.
“The safety net of daily backups is another benefit, because things go wrong with our rather complicated configuration (lots of plugins) from time to time,” he said. “We also appreciate the inbuilt CDN and Sucuri protection, alongside daily automated backups and responsive support that knows WordPress.”
The ToolTester Network also uses WP Engine GeoIP, a technology that allows WordPress site owners to serve dynamic web content to different users depending on their geographic location. GeoIP grants the ability to show, hide, or change content based on its relevance to a specific location by country, city, zip code, and more. With GeoIP, sites can serve visitors content tailored to the viewer’s specific currency, time zone, language, localized tax, shipping information, and more.
GeoIP allows the ToolTester Network to be more scalable, as the international site runs in five (soon to be six) languages, Brandl explained.
“It has been huge for us,” said Brandl. “I recently checked the impact of this on our German website and noticed that we generate a lot more conversions for Swiss customers after we started to show local pricing. While the October increase for our German visitors was 7.06 percent, our Swiss subgroup rose by 28.33 percent.”
“We’ve only started using this new tool, but it looks extremely powerful,” Brandl confirmed.
The Tool Tester Network at work
Want to learn more about GeoIP? Download the GeoIP eBook here.
Are you using Hreflang with GeoIP?
Hi Thomas, we are using the WPML plugin that generates the Hreflang tags on our site. So no, we don’t use GeoIP for that. Hope that helps!