If you are a WordPress speed fanatic who always looking to speed up your WordPress site, this post is exactly for you. When it comes to blazing fast WordPress site, it boils down to a few critical factors such as hosting solution, cache plugin configuration and having a bloat-free WordPress theme.
You can find my write up on configuring a WordPress cache plugin correctly and even my top choice for a bloat-free WordPress theme … but I had never ever talked about WordPress hosting. More specifically, managed hosting vs control panels.
I’m just like you. I love tweaking my blogs to make it loads faster. Here’s an example of my WordPress service blog, WPMaven.net.
It takes 807 ms to load (according to Pingdom Tools, click here for the result) and while I know this is some stats many would love, I decided to go deeper to see if there is anything else I could do to make my site loads even faster.
And I came across WordPress hosting panels.
What Is WordPress Hosting Panel?
If you do a quick search on Google for “WordPress hosting panel”, you will find tutorials such as how to login to cPanel or your WordPress wp-admin.
A WordPress hosting panel is the backend system of your web hosting solution that gives you advanced features and tools to have full control of your WordPress site. Yes, this includes performing backups, staging and even, making your WordPress site faster.
A WordPress hosting panel is not similar to cPanel. It is often an optimized backend system that is configured specially for WordPress.
Journey Towards Finding A Reliable Control Panel
I started checking through Facebook Groups and other forum related with WordPress and control panels. My journey had brought me to GridPane, RunCloud and Closte. For your information, Closte is a managed WordPress hosting solution just like Kinsta. MPMaven.net is hosted on Kinsta Business plan.
Among GridPane and RunCloud, I decided to head over to GridPane simply because it is more powerful and has better reviews. I migrated one of my live sites to GridPane and my journey in discovering which is better started.
If you are looking for a detailed comparison between GridPane, RunCloud, Closte and Kinsta, you can find a nice write up here.
Managed Hosting vs Control Panels
This is a tough comparison to make. No two websites operate the same and therefore, it really boils down to how your site is being setup.
If you are looking for a hand-free and powerful hosting solution, I recommend you to head over to managed hosting route. For example, managed hosting solution such as Kinsta makes it really easy for you to manage your WordPress site. As a matter of fact, you don’t have to worry about performance, security and backups. At anytime you need any help, just hit the live chat and support would be there under 30 seconds or less.
On the other hand, WordPress hosting panels such as GridPane offers you more flexibility, control and advanced setup to make your WordPress even more powerful. This option may not be the best for you if you are a blogger. However, a WordPress developer will find GridPane a better solution for clients.
