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.

Migrating WordPress sites is a common and annoying task. Whether that’s between two different remote web servers, between a development server and production, or from production to local, there are lots of directions you migration might flow. All-in-One WP Migration remains the tool of choice for most of here on WPShout most of the time. It’s certainly one of the best free ways to move a WordPress site.

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.

There are a lot of migration systems for WordPress. We’ve had lots of good experiences with All-in-One WP Migration. Some people swear by WP Migrate DB Pro. Others are partial to WP-CLI’s terminal-based systems. One of the few tools I’d never tried was Duplicator, but I recently did and I love it. I was very pleasantly surprised about a specific facet of it: I don’t need WordPress to get a new local copy of a remote WordPress site running on my local machine. You just pull down two files, put them in the same folder, and then you’re set. It’s great!

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.

There are lots of ways to migrate a WordPress site. Lots of plugins can do it. You can do it over simple (S)FTP. But the quickest way I know of is via rsync and WP-CLI. But that does come with an important proviso: you need to have access to a shell (via a simple local terminal or SSH) to both ends of the migration. And that’s often harder to do than the plugin or SFTP route. But if you’ve got that, this way is a great deal faster.