I was recently introduced to WP Engine after going to WordCamp in NYC and all I have to say is I’ve been in love with it ever since. Here are some of the reasons why:

WP Engine Has Lightning Fast Performance

WP Engine caches everything on your site for you making your WordPress site incredibly fast. You don’t need any caching plugins whatsoever, because WP Engine takes care of all of that for you. Beyond that you can take advantage of their CDN for even extra site responsiveness and speed. Ultimately, WP Engine is scalable and ready for the extra traffic when you are.

Back-up, Security, WordPress Updates: WP Engine Has it All Covered

With WP Engine you don’t have to worry about updating WordPress, they will do it in the background for you.

I attended my first WordCamp in NYC earlier this summer and all I can say is it was a blast.

The development side of WordPress  does seem to have a steep learning curve, but that didn’t stop the WordPress organizers from providing informational sessions for attendees from all different levels and abilities. There was even a blogger and Pro Blogger track which I’m sure many appreciated. The best part of it all was the networking of course and I met many talented and helpful people along the way.

At Baruch College where WordCamp NYC 2012 was hosted did feel a bit crowded. Many of the classrooms were overflowing requiring some attendees to sit on the floor or stand out in the hallway. Surely this owes to the increasing popularity of WordCamp in New York City and elsewhere. In addition, it is a fairly cheap conference to attend so that may owe to the venue that was chosen. If you ask me I’d rather have a more crowded venue than some overly expensive hotel and conference fees any day of the week.

The best thing about WordCamp  is its a year around affair. There are local WordCamps in cities around the world. And you can catch

One of the features touted about the latest WordPress 3.2 release is that its lighter and faster.  So why is being lighter and faster important? Because having a lighter and faster website makes it easier for your blog visitors stick around. Just think about it, who likes slow websites anyway? If your site takes too long to load you run the risk visitors will quickly navigate to another site. So here are a couple of simple ways to optimize  WordPress.

Reduce Your Plugins

Yes we all love plugins and there are quite a number I can’t live without. But if you are trying to optimize WordPress you want to make sure you reduce them as much as possible. Why? Because  plugins have the potential to impact your blog performance. They will sometimes draw extra (http) requests as in the case of some social plugins. Personally I try not to go with more then 20 or 30 plugins but bit for some others that might even be too many.

If you have your own hosted WordPress blog it is very important to back up WordPress. It may not happen often but things can and do go wrong. Your host might fail, your WordPress installation could get hacked or you might have made an error and need to roll things back to the way they were before.  So just to be safe back it up. Its easy to do and doesn’t cost anything so there is no reason not to.

Here are some tools to make it easier and carefree:

WP-DBManager

Use this plugin to back up, restore and optimize your database. Optimizing is a great feature because it will help your WordPress blog run faster and more efficiently especially as your blog grows larger in size. You can schedule your backups and have them stored on server or emailed to you. Basically this is a set and forget type of solution I like. I’m sure you will too. Additional features include things like dropping and emptying tables are also available, but use these with extra caution and always use the backup feature first.

Easy for Beginners/New Bloggers and Those New To WordPress

For someone new to hosting and WordPress Dreamhost is the perfect place to start out. Their documentation and auto-installers make getting started with WordPress easy as pie and depending on your setup, you can have them automatically update your wordpress installation as upgrades become available. All the other common web hosting features are included in their shared hosting package.

Tech Support

Dreamhost’s customer service/tech support is also pretty good. They are available by the forums and email which is a lot more than I can say about some of the other providers and the wait isn’t that long at all. Online chat is also available but it costs extra if you are on a shared server. If you upgrade to their virtual private hosting, chat support is free.