Having a good host is absolutely paramount. Hosting shouldn’t be something you have to worry about on a daily basis — if ever the set it and forget it principle applies, it should apply to hosting. However, there are a vast amount of hosts to choose from and it’s often difficult to find the one that’s reliable, secure and fast.

This is where the WPShout WordPress Hosting Review comes in.

I want to compile an unbiased, unaffiliated and — most importantly — accurate view of which hosts are best for WordPress. Which ones have good support? Which ones have horrible uptime? I don’t know! And the only way I’m going to find out is with your help.

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Following on from Faster WordPress, which went up on Shout a couple of weeks ago, this post explores how to optimise WordPress for high traffic. We’ll take high traffic in a small blog context — 1,000 or so visits in a day, but exactly the same techniques apply to much larger traffic blogs.

The average WordPress theme isn’t optimised. Whilst it may claim to be or may in fact be to an extent, the nature of WordPress themes means they have to be able to fit in any situation and so they are never going to be as well optimised as a theme which has been designed specifically for a single purpose. I’m not saying don’t use an off-the-shelf theme, just you’ll need to customise it in order to get the best performance out of it.

This post shows how to make your site faster.

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Premium plugins have been around for a while now. They started off as a way for people to express their support for a plugin developer and over the past year have started to take off. GravityForms, PluginBuddy and CodeCanyon have all contributed to the rise to prominence. But where next for premium plugins? This post explores.

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Making WordPress run faster isn’t something that’s new — it’s something that has been discussed on WPShout before — but ever since it became a factor in Google’s algorithm a while ago, people have become concerned about it. To my mind, it’s something you should always be concerned about; making your site speedy is vital in ensuring visitors stay on your site for as long as possible.

In this post we’ll look at some ways of making WordPress faster. As a bit of an experiment, I’m using a load of screencasts in the place of writing – let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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A couple of months ago I put a Genesis child theme on ThemeGarden.com. It’s called Simplicity and it’s wonderfully minimalistic, easy to read and a joy to use. That’s the theme above; it’s beautifully minimalistic and just works on top of the Genesis framework. There is no set up whatsoever; it is quite literally plug and play. Simplicity supports all of the functions of the Genesis framework including page templates. You can see the demo here or purchase Simplicity for $9.99. If you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

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