There are plenty of cheap hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Account
However, what if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to have a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, using managed plans that are completely optimized for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly inexpensive. Therefore, you’ll want to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct a comprehensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key functions, assistance choices, efficiency capabilities, and whatever else you’ll require to know. Let’s start!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading managed WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the increasing appeal of WordPress.
WP Engine is Headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in San Antonio (Texas), London (England), Limerick (Ireland), Brisbane (Australia), and Kraków (Poland).
The business has actually won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to pick WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, assistance, and management, but these are tough to quantify. Some features stand apart when you search the interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to help you speed up your WordPress site by using meaningful metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, the length of time it required to load in its totality, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historic information on your website’s performance over the past six months and recommendations on how you can reduce page load.
You can develop your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating mistakes on your website by making changes to a copy of your site prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make comprehensive changes to your website without impacting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably uncommon relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those normally limited are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to trigger efficiency problems and security holes. For crucial features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made alternatives readily available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only provides managed WordPress hosting. There are five various plans available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of limitless data transfer. The strategies differ based upon:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some unique features for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not offer, or charge extra for. These special features consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly produce a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge innovations consisting of latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and extensive handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is professional and well laid out, but the powerful features may imply a steep learning curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right in the house here, however otherwise you’ll need to spend a long time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page loaded in simply over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web just a little behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service should use additional value through its support, and WP Engine provides. The assistance website includes videos and posts of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response was quick and the representative experienced. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site filling speed is a leading priority, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom-made NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and offers load balancing, giving your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site material to your visitors based on their place to boost your site’s speed and reduce latency. You get this capability for free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why people continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, roughly four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with improved SLA, which translates to a little under an hour of downtime each year. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls below the assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your website and instantly spots and obstructs possible attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to remove prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine immediately backups your site every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you back up and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service secures your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Phenomenal Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact customer care through chat. The support group has an excellent knowledge base and can assist you resolve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all strategies other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or check new plugins and themes. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This feature permits developers to deal with websites without disrupting the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature enables you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You do not need to await the customer to add you to their WordPress website. Once finished, you can move the site to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you regularly develop websites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are utilizing any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you are out of luck. WP Engine only deals with WordPress. From a business point of view, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and offer extraordinary services because area. Nevertheless, this design locks out many people who could otherwise gain from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your email account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll require to look in other places. You’ll have to use third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its prices structure. You will be punished for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limits. This might not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly update your strategy as your website grows. However, substantial spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal company can cost you significant excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The response depends on finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the exact same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the cost. You can even get dedicated hosting for the very same price as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, comfort. The supreme question is how much these things deserve to you.
Plans and Pricing
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
With a WP Engine strategy, you are typically spending for efficiency & not needing to believe excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s pricing based upon the functions you’re getting- you truly don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and typically visiting frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the cost. My individual website a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a dependable VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on manages more than 110,000+ visits per month with plenty of space left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, e-mail, RSS apps, etc with an InMotion VPS. I pay for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter plan.
They are fairly transparent about how they count sees, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” website owners how quickly they can get into the $290 each month tier. I have a client who began with the Startup plan, but quickly wound up with a customized strategy.
And as mentioned earlier that does not even include much of the functions you do not get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra costs & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test sites, you need to factor those into the rate. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your plan- specifically if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are seeking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is an expensive choice, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup plan is the most standard plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 sees monthly.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this plan, however we believe it might be overkill for most people in this category. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any opportunities with uptime or need an assurance that your site can manage 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d suggest this option to small businesses, affiliate websites, and blog sites making great cash and desire guarantees that nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 each year or 2 months free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing companies and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
Ten websites consisted of a while.
This plan is an excellent entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you need to update. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will can be found in handy if you have a complicated problem that you need to deal with rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the best value choice. This one expenses $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs monthly.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We advise this alternative for a fast-growing blog site or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance.
You can conserve $580 or two months free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical site or big service, the Custom strategy may be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of gos to monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will need to speak with a sales rep to get your personalized quote depending on your requirements. This plan also uses proprietary assistance should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network facilities.
The business also has three information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by choosing to host your site on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into site speed, however the general rule is that the more complex your site is, the more intricate the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a few basic plugins and a few small images, you’ll be fine with a budget friendly shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s normally extra plugins, custom-made theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress installation.
But a sluggish website doesn’t imply that you need a larger, better server. It does mean that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as basic as getting a more powerful server, but in some cases it’s more about caching certain resources in a specific order and optimizing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Envision you are attempting to transport a trailer with a pickup truck. Envision your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might simply require to eliminate the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires help to remain quick as you grow. There are lots of options … however either you or a developer should execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed concerns. They have personalized servers with extremely aggressive caching and even more sophisticated “stack” than a normal webhosting. They also have trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress set up and identify the precise chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs because they have actually such a personalized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated theme, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how quickly the server returned enough data to begin filling the page.
It’s great to have that type of speed right out of the box- and have it stay that way no matter how huge or complicated the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services given that you are free to concentrate on speed factors that you can easily manage like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only provides an integrated CDN, but they also offer global data centers in case your audience is primarily in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And because they work on Google Cloud, you do not have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include an international CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will help your website load fast for customers around the world by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An approximated 78% of hacked websites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing sites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of steps to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an upgraded firewall software to block the current threats.
All websites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recuperate your website in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website provides a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical assistance for any concerns relating to security.
They offer webinars on security.
They publish security standards and lists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Introduce your first website.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with higher performance.
Both newbies and skilled WordPress website owners will find the support documentation important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership charges is special in the hosting industry.
It allows you to try the service in a safe way.
Note: this option is not offered on customized hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is best for you based upon your goals, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a terrific service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress website developers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t wish to worry about hosting problems.
If managed hosting is a suitable for you- then go take a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make sure to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.