There are plenty of inexpensive hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Auto Update
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll want to have a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, offering managed plans that are totally optimized for the platform. Obviously, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t precisely cheap. Therefore, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost before purchasing.
To help you out, we’re going to carry out an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, support options, performance abilities, and whatever else you’ll require to understand. Let’s begin!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now one of the leading managed WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress hosting due to the increasing popularity 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 actually won numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are hard to measure. Some features stand apart when you search the interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool created to help you speed up your WordPress website by using significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, the length of time it required to fill in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historic data on your site’s performance over the past six months and recommendations on how you can decrease page load.
You can develop your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment before making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating errors on your website by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it permits your developers to make comprehensive modifications to your website without affecting your customers.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon relocation, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those generally restricted are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to trigger performance problems and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only provides handled WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include endless data transfer. The plans vary based upon:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom plan includes dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some unique functions for WordPress users that most hosts do not use, or charge additional for. These unique functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately produce a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations including latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and comprehensive managed WordPress hosting functions.
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, however the effective functions might suggest a steep learning curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll require to invest a long time on the support website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page filled in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest reactions we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web only somewhat behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service need to use extra value through its assistance, and WP Engine provides. The support site consists of videos and articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts do not go 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 plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If website filling speed is a leading priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human demands over robotic requests and uses load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides website material to your visitors based on their area to improve your site’s speed and lower latency. You get this capability totally free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, roughly 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further 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 guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your site and automatically discovers and obstructs possible attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to get rid of prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine automatically backups your site every day and has a one-click remediation feature to get you support and running rapidly. Finally, this hosting service secures your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact client care by means of chat. The assistance group has an excellent knowledge base and can help you solve issues rapidly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or check brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you perform in the staging area doesn’t affect your live website. This feature allows developers to deal with sites without disrupting the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function allows you to develop a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to await the customer to add you to their WordPress website. Once finished, you can move the website to the customer or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you routinely 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 just works with WordPress. From an organization point of view, it makes sense to focus on a single market and deal remarkable services because area. This model locks out numerous people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your email account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll need to look elsewhere. 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 shown in its prices structure. You will be punished for surpassing your plan’s visitor limits. This might not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your website grows. However, significant spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal service can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other way 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 handle the same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the price. You can even get dedicated hosting for the same cost as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, comfort. The ultimate 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 plan, you are typically paying for efficiency & not having to think too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based on the functions you’re getting- you truly don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally logging in frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unnecessary.
Numerous shared hosting servers can handle the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the price. My personal website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with fundamental caching) managed more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trusted VPS, you can definitely deal with a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on handles more than 110,000+ gos to monthly with lots 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 plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count sees, but it can still be rather a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup plan, but rapidly ended up with a custom-made strategy.
And as pointed out previously that does not even include a number of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. 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 implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test sites, you have to factor those into the rate. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your plan- especially if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are seeking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your site files- WP Engine is a costly choice, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Start-up
The Startup plan is one of the most basic plan and will set you back $25 monthly. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 visits each month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets small sites and blogs with this strategy, however we believe it might be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not want to take any opportunities with uptime or need a guarantee that your website can handle 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this alternative to small businesses, affiliate websites, and blogs making good money and want assurances that nothing will change.
You can save $60 each year or 2 months totally free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The development plan targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 visits per month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 websites consisted of a while.
This plan is a fantastic entry point for a growing business, and it might be a while before you need to upgrade. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will come in useful if you have an intricate problem that you need to resolve rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or 2 months complimentary with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale strategy as the very best worth option. This one costs $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits per month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We advise this choice for a fast-growing blog or business. 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 annual pre-paid billing.
Custom-made
If you have a mission-critical site or big service, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of visits each month.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will need to talk to a sales rep to get your individualized quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy also uses exclusive assistance must something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The business also has 3 information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by choosing to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs harmful attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into site speed, however the guideline is that the more complicated your site is, the more intricate the solutions to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text site with a few basic plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be great with an inexpensive shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s typically additional plugins, custom style files, great deals of images, widgets, ads, types and more.
All these functions integrated with good levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress installation.
However a slow website does not mean that you require a larger, better server. It does indicate that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, however often it’s more about caching specific resources in a certain order and enhancing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Envision you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s meaningless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might simply require to remove the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires assistance to remain fast as you grow. There are a lot of options … but either you or a developer should execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed issues. They have actually customized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and a lot more innovative “stack” than a common web host. They also have trained support who will enter into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even enable caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have actually such a customized 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 extra work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated style, additional 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 rapidly the server returned enough data to start loading the page.
It’s great to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how huge or intricate the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get even much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services because you are complimentary to concentrate on speed aspects that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only supplies an integrated CDN, however they likewise supply global information 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 precisely that. And since they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t have to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include a global CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will assist your site load fast 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 company. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing websites is one of the fortes of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous measures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall to block the most recent risks.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recover your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site offers a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical support for any concerns regarding security.
They provide webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and lists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies 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 site.
Handle your hosting account with higher performance.
Both novices and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will discover the assistance paperwork invaluable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership fees is special in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try out the service in a risk-free way.
Note: this choice is not available on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but what is best for you based upon your objectives, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they use a terrific service with a solid item. As a handled WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They use more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unequaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic sites that do not want to worry about hosting problems.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. So do a test set up and see what you think about their backend. Be sure to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.