Reason #1: Impatience?
If a website intended to display high-quality photography lives on a poor, slow or badly optimized hosting service, that means a poor visitor experience as the pages will usually load very slowly.
In short, we’re all getting more impatient now and with shorter attention spans so it’s essential that your image-heavy website is hosted on:
[a] an extremely fast hosting service, and,
[b] has a high-speed CDN (Content Delivery Network) serving up your images from a server location close to where your site visitor is and not where the site is originally hosted.
Those reasons are why legendary travel photographer Ken Kaminesky chose WPX Hosting: extreme speed at image handling AND free custom Content Delivery Network, serving from 26 end point locations around the world.
This has been Ken’s experience with WPX so far:
Reason #2: Quality?
You went to considerable trouble to take great images so naturally you don’t want to compromise on their quality online.
Having a very fast, robust host solves that issue as WPX’s custom CDN – as discussed above – handles that through sophisticated caching.
When influential blogger Matthew Woodward ran his last big independent speed test on this type of heavy image page (that was the actual test site used in his speed comparison, hosted on WPX, you can test the speed yourself) this is how WPX performed against the industry heavyweights using the GTMetrix test platform:
and here are the results from Pingdom Tools tests:
So isn’t WPX like, real expensive, when getting that speed and a CDN for my photography website? Well, you be the judge:
Reason #3: Options?
Notice how the Web is getting more and more competitive and pretty much every niche is getting saturated with more sites now?
And the reality for any of us online now is that we are not only competing with other sites or people in our niche but everyone now has so many options in terms of how they spend their time online: Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, shopping on Amazon, reading Kindle books etc.
It is gradually getting harder and harder to compete among all of that noise and options, almost regardless of your niche.
What I believe that means is that it has never been more critical to give visitors to your (photography) site the best possible experience when they do come – in terms of speed, quality and reliability.
One independent guy who measures all this stuff is Kevin Ohashi over at ReviewSignal.com.
In Kevin’s last big analysis, he found that WPX was basically the only hosting service that achieved the highest rating of ‘Top Tier’ in all entered categories.
Here’s what he had to say about WPX:
And when it comes to hosting options, you should be able to see that you no longer need to tolerate a poor hosting service for your photography site, if that is your current experience!
Reason #4: Audience?
As you might be able to tell from my photos on this page, I’m a massive dog (and cat) nut.
That’s why I set up my own nonprofit NGO helping vulnerable homeless, shelter and disabled dogs: Every Dog Matters (mainly funded by WPX).
And even though I took the photos on this page with my smartphone and accept that a professional photographer – which I am definitely not – could do way better, I am not trying to build an audience for my dog photography projects.
However, you probably are trying to grow your audience for your photography, mainly through your website.
That’s why high-quality, fast and reliable hosting should be extremely important to you.
You probably went to quite a bit of trouble to get people to your website with the hope of building your audience but if they arrive to a slow, clunky site, thanks to lousy hosting, it’s not great, is it?
One of the things I didn’t reveal earlier in Matt Woodward’s last two annual WordPress hosting comparisons was the support quality component.
You see, things can go wrong on a website – software conflicts, bad plugins, WP updates etc – and that’s why you need a great host that not only delivers killer page loading speed for your photography website but ALSO backs you up with top-notch support.
Here’s what Matt Woodward concluded in his last two tests about WPX’s support:
and in his last test:
And according to the independent live chat software used by WPX, Live Chat Inc (now just called ‘Live Chat’ apparently), WPX averages around 27 seconds response time, usually by an agent who can fix the problem for you, especially under our Fixed For You Guarantee:
You can also read what hundreds of verified, real (many long-term) WPX customers have said about our service quality here on Trustpilot.com:
Reason #5: Value?
Naturally, we all want value in whatever it is that we use or interact with, be it a restaurant, book, movie, conversation or website.
The value that your photography website (hopefully) offers is through spectacular images or unique visual angles or the capturing of amazing moments etc.
It’s exactly the same for WPX Hosting and it’s why it was built in the first place.
To emphasize the value that I believe WPX can provide you, here is how Matt Woodward’s value comparison unfolded in his last big independent comparison:
In short, whereas WPX does NOT charge for services like moving sites (to WPX), malware detection and removal plus email, many hosts can and do charge, sometimes a LOT, for those, many of which are (much) more expensive hosts than WPX.
Weird huh?
