Matt-RackX

There are a ton of good hosts around, for example at RackX we employ a number of server-side solutions to optimise performance as well as run everything in shared accounts from SSD. It makes a huge difference. Just take the time to do some research and be prepared to look beyond the typical “big” names

Well it is technically integrated via WHMCS Bridge however I agree, dumping a full site including new navbar INSIDE your main page content doesn't particularly give it a seamless look. I ended up ditching WHMCS altogether and hacking around in the WHMCS custom theme code so that the look and feel is consistent, then just have the two apps hosted in separate folders on the same domain and pass information between them. E.g. Having a "separate" client area. Works well enough. I think for a fully integrated and good looking solution you will most likely need a PHP programmer to rebuild your WP theme.

As I see it your options are 1) continue to learn about caching yourself and find a way through the issues you're having or 2) find a hosting provider who will not just host your site, but provide proactive management for it too. There are plenty out there, but obviously you will pay more. As the other posters have said though, a clean/efficiently put together WP site with a host already running optimizations for hosting Wordpress, shouldn't need a caching plugin as well.

Of course, you can do it this way, although for completeness my preference would be to have a copy of what the developer had been hosting in case I ever needed to refer back to it later.

You know, I'm in the UK too, but I think it was habit I picked up spending the best part of 10 years working with mainly Americans in investment banks. People say it ALL THE TIME. Now I barely even notice it

I have to agree with this. We've moved all of our Shared Hosting over to highly optimized servers now including CloudLinux with FScage, PHP7, MariaDB, SSD Raid Drives, NGINX reverse proxy in front of Apache and you know what? It's pretty stunning the page load and performance you can get out of a good shared hosting account that isn't oversold. We do monitor our clients DB usage and proactively reach out to them to help them optimize when we can see things might be getting a little out of control, but other than that, there is just no comparison in what some of our clients are now experiencing on sub $10 plans compared to a few years ago, or even today under some of the less respectable hosts.

Hi there Gemma. The process you need to follow is as follows: 1. Ask your developer for access to your hosted files. Whilst there are a number of ways they can choose to do this, most likely they will have an FTP server which you can login to using free FTP software such as the FileZilla client (think of it like browsing a folder on your PC, only the folder is stored on another computer). 2. Once you have those details, download all the files for your website to someone on your computer 3. Purchase your new web hosting (I'm going to give my company a little plug here, if you message me we can sort you out with a great deal on some new hosting) 4. On your new hosting, ensure you create your account and either a) link it directly to the domain you intend to use (don't need to transfer it over, just name it correctly) or b) after you have setup your account, create an 'Addon domain' named after your soon-to-be-used domain name. 5. Then deploy a new Wordpress instance to that domain. Note - until you update the domain nameservers the URL will not resolve when you type it in your address bar. 4. You can configure the Wordpress without the URL of your domain pointing at it as you describe, to get the content and design to your liking. 5. Once you are ready, login to whoever is your Domain Registrar (most likely the company you bought the domain through when you registered it). You will need to go into your domain registrar control panel and edit your domain 'Nameservers' to point at your new web hosting. The company you choose to go with when you buy the hosting can give you these details. 6. After 24-48 hours, the nameserver update will have propogated and you should be able to see your shiny new WP site when you visit the URL! Good luck with the migration and if I can of any help just shout me. Matt