Templ Review – Managed WordPress Hosting on top of Google Cloud

After working with several clients with a single mission to enhance their website speed, I figured out that the hosting and hosting provider plays a functional role.

In this Templ review, a managed hosting platform, I will talk about how you can take advantage of Google’s cloud infrastructure and get the top speed for your website.

What is Templ?

Templ is a managed hosting platform built on the top of Google Cloud, allowing you to host your website on the Google cloud infrastructure.

You organize all your WordPress sites on Google cloud in Templ, which offers top-notch performance and reliability.

Managed Hosting Plans on Templ

The pricing is very straightforward and depends on the number of sites you host and the amount of resources you need.

How to host your website on Templ?

1. Sign up on Templ for your free 14 days trial.

2. After signing up, you will enter into your dashboard. To quickly deploy a WordPress site, I will use the onboarding wizard and click on “Create Website Now!”

3. You are now required to type in the website name and choose the location of your website. You can see almost all the zones that you would usually see in Google Cloud Platform. Select a location nearest to your target audience.

4. Once you click “Continue,” the setup wizard will start the process. You may need to wait for up to 5 minutes.

5. Click on Continue to check the details of your fresh WordPress install on Google Cloud in Templ managed hosting platform.

Adding a domain to the Templ

The best part about the platform is that when you add a domain to the dashboard and point nameservers properly, you need not worry about the propagation and DNS management.

Put the website’s server IP in your DNS A records. If you have purchased your domain from GoDaddy, you can change A records from the DNS manager.

Change the domain of your newly created website.

Go to Websites >> Choose Website >> Edit website Details

Choose the domain and click on “Continue” at the end of the page.

In a few minutes, you should be able to open your WordPress site by typing the domain name in the address bar.

Templ Login and Speed Tests review

I could easily login to my WordPress site without tying the username and password. Isn’t it cool?

Yes, One-click login is yet another unique feature that the Templ platform has.

With the help of starter sites plugin, I quickly imported a demo website on my newly created WordPress site. Usually, the plugin is recommended for Astra Theme.

However, if you have any of the supported page builders installed, you can import available free sites no matter which theme you’re having on your WordPress Site.

I created a list of all SEO ready WordPress themes to kick-start your search and help you launch your website with optimizations.

Well, below is how my website looked after importing a starter site. It is enough to test the speed before optimization and after installing the Templ cache plugin.

Speed Test

To keep it short, straight and clear, I will test speed using GTmetrix only.

Here is what I achieved without even enabling the Templ caching.

Now is the time to activate caching on this site and see what happens next.

For caching, Templ has its pre-installed plugin (out of total four pre-installed plugins that come packed in every site you host with them).

Clicked “Activate,” and I am ready to test the optimization level. Before putting the URL in GTmetrix, I will make sure that the cache is working.

You can do that by using chrome dev tools.

Right click >> Inspect element >> Network >> click on the root domain name and check the response headers.

The speed test report after enabling the cache is pretty much identical to one without that.

WordPress Configurations and Defaults in Templ

I also checked the server-level optimization Templ has already done. However, you can see that in the screenshots, I will add a summary here first.

1. Database – 10.4.8-MariaDB
2. Server – Ubuntu 16.04
3. WordPress – v5.5
4. Image handler – iMagick
5. PHP memory limit – 256M
6. PHP version – 7.4

In a shared hosting plan, you won’t see such upgraded stats. Since Templ offers premium managed WordPress hosting, the configurations are set to host a resource-intensive application.

Undoubtedly, the above configuration is enough for you not to have any server-level issue with hosting and launching your website, no matter what type of project you build.

Templ Review Covering More Features

Indeed, you can not settle just for speed. You need more features to manage WordPress sites on a managed hosting platform. Backups, migrations, and staging are there, to name a few.

I had already created a staging environment before I installed the starter site. Attaching the screenshot below.

You can keep a staging site and one live website in your Templ panel for a 29$ per month plan.

Well, the option one-click migrate from staging to live, and vice versa is notable. You need not buy another plan to test a plugin before pushing it to the live website.

Just the smooth staging is not the end of features. Daily remote backups is yet another feature that will entice you more.

When you backup your website on a remote server, it does not consume space on your current server. Since it is stored on a backup server, it won’t tamper if your present server fails.

Indeed, you do not need an additional backup plan if you’re using a managed plan on Templ.

Templ Review: Pros and Cons

Pros

• In Templ, you make use of server-based caching instead of a slow PHP-based caching plugin
• Power of Google cloud makes your website much faster and performance-ready
• Free Migrations and one staging site
• Brotli compression along with Redis database caching
• One-click WordPress login right from your Templ dashboard

Cons

• At the time of this review, the platform uses php7.3
• The free bandwidth limit is less than other managed hosting providers

Also Read:

• Kinsta Vs Templ- the Best WordPress Hosting of 2021? – Find out which managed WordPress hosting is the best.
• Templ Coupons: Get $349 Discount on Hosting – You can try out Templ coupons to save on your purchase.

Recommendations & My Templ Review

There are multiple reasons why I moved some of my sites to Templ and wrote this Templ review. I have covered some points as follows:

1. No stress of managing a cloud server and encountering with various bugs
2. Instant support to fix anything in the WordPress (even to change your WordPress admin username)
3. Keep one staging website along with a live site to keep testing things on a staging environment
4. Pushing staging site to live-environment is super-easy

I hope this Templ review will help you in setting up the environment for your website. In case, you feel any difficulties please feel free to list them in the comment section. I’ll be happy to help.