There are a lot of low-cost hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Architecture
However, what if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll wish to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, using managed plans that are completely optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly inexpensive. You’ll want to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost prior to making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct an extensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, support choices, performance abilities, and whatever else you’ll need to understand. Let’s get going!
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 business owner 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 won numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to select WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are hard to quantify. Some functions stick out when you search the user interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to assist you accelerate your WordPress site by using meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how rapidly your page rendered, for how long it took to pack in its totality, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historic data on your site’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can reduce page load.
You can establish your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid awkward 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 modifications to your website without affecting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those usually limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger performance concerns and security holes. For essential functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has made alternatives readily available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of unrestricted data transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some distinct functions for WordPress users that most hosts do not provide, or charge additional for. These special functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly create a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge innovations consisting of most current PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine provides the most advanced and detailed managed WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is expert and well laid out, however the effective features may imply a steep knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right in your home here, but otherwise you’ll require to spend a long time on the support site.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page filled in just over two seconds. This is among the fastest actions we’ve tested, with competitor Liquid Web only slightly behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service must offer extra worth through its assistance, and WP Engine provides. The support site consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with aid on deeper WordPress performance that numerous WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the response was quick and the representative well-informed. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If website packing speed is a leading priority, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robotic demands and provides load balancing, providing your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides website content to your visitors based upon their area to boost your website’s speed and lower latency. You get this capability for free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s difficult to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium rate for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, approximately four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted 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 monitors all the traffic going to your website and immediately spots and obstructs prospective attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to remove possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click restoration function to get you support and running rapidly. This hosting service secures your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with customer care through chat. The assistance group has an exceptional knowledge base and can help you fix issues rapidly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or test brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area does not impact your live website. This feature enables developers to deal with websites without interfering with the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function allows you to develop a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to await the customer to add you to their WordPress website. When completed, you can move the website to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you frequently build websites for customers.
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 works with WordPress. From an organization point of view, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and offer exceptional services in that location. However, this design locks out many people who might 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 website host, you’ll need to look in other places. You’ll need to use third-party services for domain registration or email accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is shown in its pricing 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 plan as your site grows. Significant spikes in traffic throughout product launches or seasonal company can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in finding out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the price. You can even get committed hosting for the very same rate as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, comfort. The ultimate question is just 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 plan, you are generally spending for efficiency & not having to believe too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s pricing based upon the functions you’re getting- you really do not get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally visiting frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Many shared hosting servers can deal with the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the rate. My individual website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with basic caching) managed more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a trusted 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 spend for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter strategy.
They are fairly transparent about how they count visits, however it can still be quite a surprise for “little” site owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 per month tier. I have a client who started with the Startup strategy, however rapidly ended up with a customized plan.
And as mentioned earlier that does not even consist of much of the features you do not get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional expenses & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the rate. You can’t utilize them to expand the expense of your plan- specifically if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are aiming to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your site files- WP Engine is an expensive alternative, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Start-up
The Startup plan is the most standard strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 sees each month.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One website included.
WP Engine targets small websites and blogs with this plan, but we think it may be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any opportunities with uptime or need a guarantee that your site can manage 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d advise this alternative to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making good cash and desire assurances that nothing will change.
You can save $60 per year or 2 months free if you pay every year.
Growth
The development plan targets growing services and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs monthly.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
10 sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you need to upgrade. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will come in useful if you have a complicated issue that you require to solve quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or two months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale strategy as the best value choice. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits each month.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We suggest this option for a fast-growing blog or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the support center.
You can save $580 or two months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or large service, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of sees monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will need to talk to a sales representative to get your individualized quote depending on your requirements. This plan also offers proprietary support needs to something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The company likewise has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by selecting to host your site on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into website speed, however the general rule is that the more complicated your site is, the more complex the options to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a primarily text website with a few basic plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be great with a budget-friendly shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s generally extra plugins, custom-made theme files, lots of images, widgets, ads, kinds and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress setup.
A slow site does not mean that you need a larger, much better server. It does suggest that you need to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as simple as getting a more effective server, however often it’s more about caching certain resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Imagine you are attempting to transport a trailer with a pickup truck. Envision your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may simply need to get rid of the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs help to remain fast as you grow. There are plenty of services … however either you or a developer need to execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have actually customized servers with extremely aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a normal webhosting. They likewise have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress install and recognize the exact chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even enable caching plugins on their installs since they have such a tailored caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed on their platform since their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated style, 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 information to begin filling the page.
It’s good to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how huge 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 since you are totally free to concentrate on speed factors that you can easily manage like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an incorporated CDN, but they likewise offer international data centers in case your audience is mostly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And since they work on Google Cloud, you do not have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a global CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will assist your website load quick 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing sites is among the fortes of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The company takes numerous steps to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall software to block the current threats.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recover your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site supplies 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 relating to security.
They offer webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Launch your very first site.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater effectiveness.
Both beginners and knowledgeable WordPress site owners will discover the assistance documentation invaluable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership charges is special in the hosting market.
It allows you to try out the service in a safe method.
Keep in mind: this choice is not readily available on customized hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, however what is best for you based on your goals, spending plan, resources & habits.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they provide a great service with a strong product. As a handled WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unequaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that do not want to fret about hosting problems.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go check out WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. Do a test set up and see what you believe of their backend. Be sure to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.