Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are providing companies with countless opportunities to develop new and better services for their customers. As a forward-thinking web host, eukhost has moved quickly to embrace AI in order to deliver new and innovative solutions for website owners. One area we have implemented these solutions is in our WordPress Hosting and in this post, we look at the benefits AI-powered WordPress hosting brings.
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Automated updates
Updating software is crucial for WordPress website owners. As the world’s most popular website building platform, it offers a very big target for cybercriminals to attack. One of the main ways hackers break into and infect websites is through vulnerabilities in outdated software. Today, they use bots to scour the internet looking for sites with these vulnerabilities and, once identified, they will target those sites.
What makes WordPress websites particularly susceptible to these attacks is that rather than being a single piece of software, they are composed of many different types of software working together: WordPress core, theme and a plethora of plugins. While WordPress core now updates to the latest version automatically, themes and plugins generally do not. With so many plugins being used (there are almost 60,000 in the WordPress repository alone) failure to update even one can leave a website at risk. To understand the scale of the threat, security plugin developer, Wordfence, has a WordPress vulnerability list stretching to nearly 1000 pages.
Unfortunately, too many website owners don’t update themes and plugins as soon as an update is released, leaving their site wide open. Thanks to AI, eukhost is now able to provide WordPress users with the easiest of solutions, a smart updater. Quite simply, it automatically updates your software as soon as a new version is released.
Of course, aside from removing vulnerabilities, the updater also ensures that your plugins and themes have the latest features and remain compatible with the latest version of WordPress – all without you having to lift a finger.
Take your WordPress experience further, read: What WordPress Can Do for You in 2024
AI-enabled security patching
Besides updating plugins and themes, AI is also used to ensure your WordPress core software remains free of vulnerabilities. You can now automatically apply security patches to your WordPress core software, configure your patching level and control how patches are applied.
AI security advisor
While it is vital to keep your website and data secure, putting the right measures in place can be challenging. Our WordPress Hosting plans now come with a built-in Security Advisor that will not only check your site for security issues but, crucially, will also implement the appropriate measures to fix them. To make this easy, everything can be done in just a couple of clicks. For those who want to implement robust security from the get-go, we even provide a 1-click WordPress hardening tool that handles everything for you.
AI-enhanced firewalls
To defend your server from web attacks, malware, vulnerability exploitation and other forms of threat, eukhost WordPress Hosting uses the powerful Imunify360 application firewall. This advanced firewall uses a combination of cloud heuristics and artificial intelligence to detect new threats. Using threat information from across the internet and analysing traffic for suspicious patterns, it immediately blocks potential threats to prevent them from reaching your server. At the same time, it can detect if a user violates security rules, and if this happens, it will block access to the user’s IP address.
Is your site ranking in search results? Read: Hosting with SEO in Mind: Essential Features to Consider
Smart PHP updates
PHP, the computer language used to create WordPress websites, is regularly updated. Newer versions tend to be faster and enable coders to develop increasingly more sophisticated and functional websites. As developers like to take advantage of new versions as soon as they are released, it means that older versions of PHP may no longer support new versions of WordPress core, themes or plugins. If you don’t update, it means your site may run slower than it needs to and it might have to use older software with outdated features and potential vulnerabilities. Old versions of PHP may also have security vulnerabilities of their own.
To avoid these issues, our WordPress Hosting plans include a smart PHP updater that automatically applies the latest PHP versions. This ensures you can benefit from faster performance, stronger security and ongoing compatibility with the newest WordPress features.
Are you up to date with security? Read: Web Hosting Security: Future Trends and Best Practices
WP Accelerated
The other disadvantage to WordPress websites being made up of a range of different software, is that it can impact performance. The more plugins you use and the bigger they are, the more data your website will need to send when loading on users’ browsers. This can slow down loading and response times, especially during busy periods.
To improve performance, eukhost WordPress Hosting now features WP Accelerated, an AI-supported suite of WordPress optimisation tools that carry out a range of functions designed to help your website load and respond quickly – even during your busiest periods. WP Accelerated features include using a combination of Apache and NGINX and pre-caching, static, full-page caching and mobile-optimised caching. In addition, it uses the fast and secure HTTP/2 transfer protocol, minimises code, implements lazy loading, optimises and cleans up your database, and optimises images and cron jobs.
WP Accelerated uses AI to automatically apply 80% of web performance best practices to your website, ensuring that it is firing on all cylinders right from the outset. However, it also has its own dashboard from which you can configure individual settings, enabling you to boost performance even more, for instance, you can integrate a CDN. Additionally, WP Accelerated uses monitoring data to automatically identify any performance issues on your server. If issues are found, it offers diagnostic advice enabling you to fix them – often with just a single click.
Conclusion
While WordPress is an outstanding platform with which you can develop highly sophisticated, professional websites, its Achilles heel is its combination of core, theme and plugin software that can make it vulnerable to cyberattacks and perform slowly. While WordPress hosting has always been the best option for dealing with these issues, advances in AI and other technologies mean that choosing AI-powered managed WordPress hosting is now the best option for those seeking robust security and blistering performance.
For more information about our AI-powered, managed WordPress Hosting plans, visit our WordPress Hosting page.
