WordPress started life as a simple blogging platform, but since its inception in 2003, has grown to become the most popular Content Management System (CMS) in the world. It is currently used by 37% of websites globally, and has an estimated 64% market share of all websites built using a CMS.
WordPress is open source and based on PHP and MySQL, and its flexibility means it can support any level of experience, allowing users to easily customise their builds. The high level of individual control available via WordPress has helped to make it the CMS of choice for over 455 million sites, with a user base that encompasses digital giants like Time Magazine, right down to tiny local businesses.
It’s also behind 67% of Nimbus-hosted sites via our managed WordPress hosting, which means we’re well-versed in the challenges of managing multiple sites at once, as well as the best ways to keep your WordPress builds speedy and secure.
A CMS suitable for everyone
Coding experience is not necessary in order to build a site in WordPress, but our WordPress hosting for developers gives them the ability to write and implement their own themes – so it’s popular with creatives of all experience levels. Standard features include an auto-save, baked-in search function, and post scheduler. It has a template-based design, which determines site structure at the individual page level – but for bigger design decisions, a vast library of themes and plugins allows WordPress sites to be entirely customised.
There are an estimated 31,000 themes, and over 55,000 plugins. These range from the useful – spam protection Akismet – to the useless – unicorn-graphic generator Cornify. When setting up your first WordPress site you’ll find that, after choosing your domain and purchasing web hosting, installing themes and plugins is the next order of business.
Whatever the purpose of your WordPress builds, the themes and plugins you select will have a huge effect not only on both the visuals of the site, but also its functionality. That includes the speed it runs at, and also how secure it is. Our dedicated agency WordPress hosting allows site owners to run faster client websites, with 88% of customers saying their sites run faster after switching to Nimbus.
There are an estimated 31,000 themes, and over 55,000 plugins.
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Our website hosting platform is full of tools to make managing your client portfolio easier than ever.Solving security and speed issues
Speed and security are two of the biggest concerns for any developer. Compromise on either one, and no matter how beautiful your site, you won’t be able to attract or maintain many visitors. Slow sites are penalised in search engine rankings – and users have little patience for them, either, with one in four choosing to abandon pages if forced to wait longer than 4-6 seconds.
And if you suffer security issues? 41% of users would choose not to return. Thankfully, in WordPress, mitigating the risks of both security breakdowns and slow-loading pages begins with relatively simple actions. Actions like ensuring your themes and plugins are all up-to-date. The only problem? With a growing client portfolio, remembering which themes and plugins are installed where across your website empire is tricky, and regularly taking the time to monitor and update outdated elements eats into valuable dev time.
That’s why we’ve developed WordPress Tools – a simple, clear view over all of your WordPress sites that cuts the risk of missing an update, and therefore protects you from the potential security breaches and slow-running pages caused by outdated plugins and themes. Read our guide to find out why updating WordPress is important.
WordPress management, made easy
With so many moving parts, no one could blame you for losing track of the plugins and themes you have installed over your WordPress portfolio. Unfortunately, doing so is potentially dangerous. That’s because WordPress and its plugins are open source, so hackers will often study the code to find vulnerabilities.
These vulnerabilities are patched in regular updates – which is why ensuring that you are running the most up-to-date versions of everything across your sites is vital to ensure their continued security. On the Nimbus platform, we’ve made it easy to get complete visibility over your WordPress versions, themes and plugins – so you never have to worry about missing a crucial security backdoor.
Our WordPress Tools dashboard lists every plugin installation you’ve made on your sites, and it will even flag which ones need updating. And those updates? You can do them all in just one click.
Find, test, activate, maintain, update and deactivate the selection of themes you use on your server, anytime you like, from one server-level view. The platform will do the work for you by scanning the sites on your server, and then listing every theme and its versions, for fast (and easily digestible) information. That’s covered with all the sites you’re already managing – but what about the ones you have yet to build?
Any developer will know that putting together a WordPress site to their exacting standards can mean a lot of waiting around for installations to complete – and also a lot of repeating steps if they have a favourite set-up of themes and plugins that they return to again and again. That’s why we developed our WordPress Recipes tool. Simply allocate any themes and plugins you like to a group, and give that group a name. Then, the next time you’re putting together a new build, implementing your standard recipe is the matter of one click.
Take pressure from your devs and get launch-ready in no time – which means faster results for your clients, and a team where everyone’s happy.
Support you can rely on
Even the biggest WordPress geeks among us will inevitably encounter an issue at some stage. Whether it’s with an incompatible PHP version, or a failed server backup – these headaches are not just concerning for your clients, they also eat into your valuable time. Time you could be using to deliver even bigger and better things.
Hosting with Nimbus means you don’t just get access to our time-saving platform packed with WordPress Tools, though – it also means you can rely on the support of our UK-based friendly team. Which means that when you encounter an issue, you can be confident that a team of techies are at your side, working to ensure that everything will soon be back to normal.
So that’s a platform full of easy-to-use WordPress Tools, packed with shortcuts to cut down your build time and help you stay on top of your site security; a dashboard that gives you complete server-level visibility; and a support team with a reputation for solving whatever problem comes their way. Manage your WordPress sites, protecting their speed and security, and maintain the superhero-level service your clients are used to – it’s simpler than ever before.
