How to Host Images for WordPress – Simple Solutions
More and more businesses are moving towards a digital strategy and embracing the power of content marketing. In fact, according to HubSpot Blogs research, 65% of businesses use content marketing to attract, engage, and convert customers. In addition, 86% of businesses use images in their content to engage audiences.
Whether you’re a creative professional or simply enjoy playing with images on social media, hosting your own images for your WordPress blog is a great way to get involved and harness the power of visual marketing.
In this tutorial, we’ll discuss the basics of hosting images for WordPress – including which hosting providers to choose, how to prepare your files for upload, and the benefits of hosting images on your own site.
Choosing A Hosting Provider
As with most areas of IT, there are numerous options for hosting providers – from the freebies to the super-premiums. However, not all hosting providers are created equal, and it’s important to do your research before committing. In this section, we’ll discuss some of the key considerations when choosing a hosting provider for your WordPress blog.
Features
As with any other aspect of your blog, you’ll want to make sure that you’re choosing a hosting provider that has the features that you need and will be beneficial to your blog. In addition to the basics such as a free domain and email services, you’ll also want to consider features such as dedicated IPs, advanced caching, and security measures. Let’s take a quick look at each of these elements and how they apply to you.
- Dedicated IPs
- Advanced Caching
- Security Measures
- Free Domain
Dedicated IPs
If you’re new to the world of web hosting, you’ll want to choose a provider that offers you dedicated IPs. A dedicated IP is essentially an IP address that is solely dedicated to your use. When people visit your site, their IP address is automatically redirected to the website you’re hosting on. This ensures that your IP is not shared with other customers and that your website experience is uninterrupted.
With a dedicated IP, you can also use security tools like HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security) to ensure that only secure connections are made to your site. This means no annoying redirects to other sites when someone tries to view your content.
Advanced Caching
If your site loads quickly and consistently exhibits great performance, you’ll want to choose a hosting provider that offers advanced caching. Cache is a term used to describe Internet storage which enables websites to load content faster for visitors. Hosts such as WP Engine and Joyent utilize advanced caching algorithms and content delivery networks (CDNs) to ensure that your site’s content is delivered from the closest server to your audience – resulting in improved load times and a more satisfying browsing experience.
The two major CDNs that we recommend you consider are Cloudflare and MaxCDN. Both of these CDNs offer impressive performance for very affordable prices. In addition to faster load times, having access to CDNs means that you can take advantage of Content Delivery Features, such as priority caching and GeoIP (geo-location based CDN) to ensure that your content is served from the closest server to your visitors.
Security Measures
Finally, we come to security measures. The last thing you want is for your blog to become worthless because of a security breach. When choosing a host for your WordPress site, it’s important to ensure that they have taken the necessary measures to ensure your content is safe from prying eyes. Many hosts, including Bluehost, offer some kind of security through obscurity by using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and Let’s Encrypt to generate secure certificates to encrypt your traffic. In addition, they may offer advanced protection through the use of Multi-Factor Authentication (2FA) or Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption which further enhances the security of your blog.
To summarize, keep in mind these key points when choosing a web host for your WordPress blog: