Both the traffic demands and the technology used to host personal websites differ. As you might guess from our site title, we mostly offer advice on WordPress specifically. If you’re newly looking into a personal website on WordPress, you’re in the right space. If you’re in a hurry, here’s my twelve-second answer for “what’s the best WordPress web hosting for a personal website”:

In the Quick Guide we’ll use WP Security Audit Log to keep an activity log of what’s happening on our WordPress site. Activity logs are a chronological list of records of what logged in users did on your WordPress sites and multisite networks. A WordPress activity log a vital part of site security and management because in them, you can find a user log full of information about user logins—from where they logged in and when, what content they have created, published, modified and deleted, what user profile and WordPress settings changes other administrators have done, and much more.

Along the journey of understanding WordPress, most people start with a similar situation. They talk to a more tech-savvy person they know, that young lady tells them they need a “WordPress website.” Then they’re Googling desperately, trying to find out how they get “a WordPress.” The idea of “WordPress hosting” is nowhere on your radar and doesn’t quite make sense at that point. If that’s precisely you, welcome. If that approximates your experience, please share your exact story with us in the comments. 🙂

Free web hosting for WordPress—it’s an appealing idea, regardless if you want a site for personal expression, a business, or something else. Who wouldn’t want free WordPress hosting? WordPress hosting is one of the most expensive things about having a WordPress site, and getting hosting for less is an understandable and admirable plan to save money.

Backing up any data you care about is a super-important procedure. You just never know when your hard drive (or SSD) will suddenly stop working, either from normal failure or from a freak accident. And while you should trust that your web host has your back on data backups for your website, a second line of defense is always a good idea. That’s where UpdraftPlus comes it—it provides a relatively easy and totally free WordPress backup.

Most web hosts limit the amount of storage they’ll allow an individual hosting account. When you begin to run into these hosting disk space limits, your best bet is to find and remove large files from your hosting account that you’re no longer using. This week’s video tutorial explains how to find and remove large files from a cPanel hosting account. We focus specifically on the cPanel software suite because it’s an extremely common choice of hosting interface, especially for shared hosts.

A few months back, we were asked what we thought about WordPress.com’s Business Plan. It now allows people to bring their own plugins and themes, so it’s newly relevant to us and our readers, they said. They were right.

WordPress plugins can cause all kinds of errors: 500 internal server errors, PHP parse errors (also called syntax errors), errors that simply whitescreen your entire site, and more.

With WordPress 4.9, you now get a warning when you’re about to make a change in the file editors in the WordPress back-end. (For those not following, I’m talking about the editor that you can find at Appearance > Editor, or Plugins > Editor on most WordPress sites.) This is great first-step, and does end one of arguments for disallowing editing of files in the WordPress admin side of the site. That is: people won’t know what that they could break their site when they make changes on those pages.

Here’s what I learned about making our site even faster.