There are plenty of inexpensive hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Add User
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, providing managed plans that are fully enhanced for the platform. Obviously, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly cheap. You’ll desire to understand whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct a thorough WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, assistance alternatives, efficiency capabilities, and everything 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 one of the leading handled WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising 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 company has won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, however these are difficult to measure. Some features stand out when you search the interface, nevertheless, that can offer you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to help you speed up your WordPress site by providing meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, the length of time it took to load in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even includes historic information on your website’s performance over the past six months and suggestions on how you can decrease page load.
You can establish your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating errors on your site by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it permits your developers to make substantial changes to your site without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably unusual relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those usually restricted are plugins that have been noted to trigger performance issues and security holes. For important functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses handled WordPress hosting. There are five various strategies available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include endless information transfer. The strategies vary based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan consists of dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some distinct features for WordPress users that many hosts don’t use, or charge extra for. These special functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly develop a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge technologies including latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and thorough handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is professional and well set out, however the powerful functions might mean a high knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be right in the house here, however otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the support site.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page packed in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service must offer extra worth through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support site consists of videos and articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with assistance on much deeper WordPress performance that numerous WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the response was quick and the representative educated. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If site packing speed is a top concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robot requests and uses load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides website material to your visitors based upon their location to boost your website’s speed and decrease latency. You get this capability totally 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 price for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, roughly 4 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 annually. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls listed below the assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your website and instantly spots and blocks possible attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and patches the WordPress core to get rid of potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you back up and running quickly. This hosting service safeguards your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Phenomenal Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with customer care via chat. The assistance team has an outstanding knowledge base and can assist you resolve problems rapidly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or check new plugins and themes. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This feature allows developers to deal with websites without disrupting the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature allows you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to await the client to include you to their WordPress site. When completed, you can move the website to the customer or host the website on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you regularly build sites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you are out of luck. WP Engine only works with WordPress. From a service perspective, it makes sense to focus on a single market and deal remarkable services in that area. This design locks out numerous people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your email account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll require to look in other places. You’ll need 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 pricing structure. You will be punished for exceeding your plan’s visitor limits. This might not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always upgrade your plan as your website grows. However, significant spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal organization can cost you substantial overage 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 paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get dedicated hosting for the exact same rate as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. The ultimate question is how much these things deserve to you.
Plans and Pricing
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With a WP Engine plan, you are generally spending for efficiency & not having to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices based on the features you’re getting- you actually don’t get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and usually visiting frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Lots of shared hosting servers can deal with the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My personal site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with standard caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a dependable VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on handles more than 110,000+ visits per month with a lot of space delegated spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, email, RSS apps, etc with an InMotion VPS. I spend for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count gos to, but it can still be rather a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can get into the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup strategy, however quickly wound up with a custom-made strategy.
And as discussed previously that doesn’t even include a lot of the features you do not get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limitations on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional costs & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to spread out the cost of your plan- especially if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are aiming to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is a costly choice, especially compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Startup
The Startup bundle is the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 gos to each month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets small sites and blog sites with this plan, however we think it might be overkill for the majority of people in this classification. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or need a warranty that your site can deal with 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d recommend this option to small companies, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good cash and want assurances that nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 annually or two months totally free if you pay every year.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing companies and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten websites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while prior to you require to upgrade. With this strategy, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will come in helpful if you have a complicated problem that you need to fix rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or 2 months complimentary with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale plan as the best worth alternative. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 sees each month.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We advise this choice for a fast-growing blog site or service. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the support center.
You can save $580 or 2 months free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
Finally, if you have a mission-critical website or big business, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless visits each month.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to talk to a sales rep to get your personalized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan likewise uses exclusive support ought to 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 company also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by choosing to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into website speed, however the general rule is that the more complex your site is, the more complex the services to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text site with a few standard plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with an inexpensive shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually additional plugins, custom-made style files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, forms and more.
All these features integrated with good levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
However a sluggish website doesn’t suggest that you need a bigger, better server. It does imply that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, however sometimes it’s more about caching specific resources in a specific order and enhancing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Imagine you are attempting to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may just require to eliminate the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs assistance to remain fast as you grow. There are a lot of services … however either you or a developer should implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually customized servers with very aggressive caching and much more advanced “stack” than a normal webhosting. They likewise have trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and identify the specific chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even allow caching plugins on their installs because they have such a customized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still succeed on their platform because their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my customers on WP Engine (who has a bloated theme, extra scripts, a lot of 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 information to begin loading the page.
It’s nice to have that type of speed right out of package- and have it remain that way no matter how big or complicated the site 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 might get with other services given that you are free to focus on speed aspects that you can easily manage like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only supplies an integrated CDN, but they also supply international data centers in case your audience is mostly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And since they work on Google Cloud, you do not need to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of a worldwide CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will help your website load quickly for consumers worldwide by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An approximated 78% of hacked sites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Protecting websites is among the strong points of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous measures to secure WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall program to obstruct the latest hazards.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recuperate your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site provides a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical support for any questions regarding security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Introduce your first site.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with higher effectiveness.
Both beginners and skilled WordPress site owners will discover the support documentation vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all subscription costs is special in the hosting market.
It allows you to check out the service in a safe way.
Keep in mind: this alternative is not offered on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, however what is finest for you based upon your objectives, budget plan, resources & habits.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a terrific service with a strong item. As a handled WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They provide more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unmatched for smart DIYers, WordPress website developers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t want to worry about hosting concerns.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go take a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. So do a test install and see what you consider their backend. Make certain to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.