How to Practice WordPress Without Hosting
You can run a WordPress site on any web host, but using a free web host with limited functionality is not recommended if you are planning on practicing or getting serious about website development. In this article, we’ll teach you how to practice creating a professional-looking website without having to pay for a premium host.
Use A CDN To Optimize Performance
One of the primary reasons why you should consider using a premium host is to take advantage of the features that are designed to increase the performance of your website. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a service that allows you to host your content (such as web pages, photos, and videos) on its servers, which are deployed all over the world. When a visitor requests a page from your site, the content is delivered from the nearest server, resulting in a faster page load time.
The benefit of using a CDN is two-fold. Firstly, it gives you the flexibility to test how your site performs from anywhere in the world, as you would with a cloud-based hosting service. Secondly, it offers some great features that make site management and optimization a lot easier. Let’s take a look at some of these features.
Set Up Caching And Prefetching
One of the features that make a CDN so useful is its built-in caching capability. When a visitor requests a page from your site, the content is not always loaded from the server that hosts the page. Sometimes, the page will be served from a nearby server, but in most cases, the content will be retrieved from a remote server that is closer to the visitor. That way, next time that the same visitor requests that same page, it will be served faster. So, to improve the performance of your website, you should set up your own web server with caching.
Prefetching is another great way to increase the performance of your site. In this case, your server will check to see if the content is already stored on the local machine before it retrieves it from the internet. This feature allows you to utilize more resources, as the remote server does not have to spend as much time serving your content to visitors. As you can see, caching and prefetching can greatly improve the performance of your site.
Geolocation For Better Targeting
Did you know that you can target specific content to specific regions using geolocation? For example, let’s say you have a store that sells soccer gear. If you serve content for this store to people in the United Kingdom, you will find that the geolocation settings in your Web server incorrectly assign the majority of the traffic to the UK to geographical locations in Europe. To fix this, you will need to set your geolocation settings to a more appropriate location.
It’s important to note here that when choosing a Web host for your site, you should always go for the one that offers some features that allow you to target your marketing efforts toward specific regions. For example, if you would like to target the U.S. market, you should look for a host that supports geolocation settings or uses U.S. based IP addresses. If your store is accessible worldwide, it would be best to choose a host that supports some form of global IP addressing.
One-Click Installations
One of the things that makes a CDN so useful is its plug-and-play feature. In most cases, you won’t have to worry about installing third-party apps or drivers to use the service. Simply insert a CD and connect to the internet to begin using the caching and prefetching features. In most cases, you will only need to set up a single domain name and you are good to go.
You can use free web hosts to build a professional-looking site, but the convenience that comes with a premium host makes it clear why you would want to use one.