There are plenty of inexpensive hosts offered that provide a good service. WPEngine Cache Plugin
Nevertheless, what if you’re trying to find more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll wish to take a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, offering handled plans that are totally enhanced for the platform. Of course, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly low-cost. You’ll want to understand whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct a comprehensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential features, support alternatives, performance capabilities, and whatever else you’ll require to know. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re66PSKd7_E
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading handled WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising popularity of WordPress.
WP Engine is Headquartered in Austin, Texas with workplaces 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 contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to select WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, assistance, and management, but these are hard to measure. Some functions stand out when you search the user interface, however, that can provide you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool designed to help you accelerate your WordPress website by offering meaningful metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, for how long it took to fill in its whole, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historic information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can lower page load.
You can develop your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating errors on your website by making changes to a copy of your site prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it permits your designers to make comprehensive modifications to your site without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably uncommon move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those typically limited are plugins that have actually been noted to trigger performance problems and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made options readily available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 various strategies available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include endless information transfer. The strategies differ 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 assistance
WP Engine consists of some special features for WordPress users that a lot of hosts don’t offer, or charge additional for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly develop a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Innovative innovations consisting of latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and detailed 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 expert and well set out, however the effective functions may suggest a high knowing 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 invest a long time on the assistance site.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page packed in just over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest actions we’ve tested, with rival Liquid Web only a little behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service must offer additional worth through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support website includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress performance that numerous WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the response fasted and the representative well-informed. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If site packing speed is a leading concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom-made NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation make sure that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and offers load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site material to your visitors based on their location to boost your site’s speed and reduce latency. You get this ability free of charge with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why people continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted SLA, which translates to a little under an hour of downtime per 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 site and instantly detects and blocks potential attacks. In addition, the hosting service immediately updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you support and running quickly. Lastly, this hosting service protects your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care via chat. The assistance team has an outstanding knowledge base and can assist you solve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies except 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 variation and make changes or check new plugins and styles. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This function enables 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 develop a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait on the client to add you to their WordPress website. Once completed, you can transfer the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you regularly develop sites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are utilizing any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine just deals with WordPress. From a business point of view, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and deal extraordinary services because location. This design locks out lots of people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your website 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 shown in its prices structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limitations. This may not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your site grows. However, substantial spikes in traffic throughout product launches or seasonal service can cost you significant overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? 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 portion of the price. You can even get dedicated hosting for the very same price as WP Engine. What you are truly spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. The supreme concern 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 generally spending for efficiency & not having to think excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s pricing based on the features 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 upgraded and generally visiting frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Lots of shared hosting servers can manage the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the rate. My personal site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a reputable VPS, you can definitely manage a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on deals with more than 110,000+ check outs per month with lots of room 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 strategy.
They are fairly transparent about how they count visits, however it can still be quite a surprise for “little” site owners how rapidly they can get into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, but rapidly wound up with a customized strategy.
And as pointed out earlier that does not even consist of much of the features you don’t 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 needs extra costs & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably 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 price. You can’t utilize them to expand the expense of your strategy- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are wanting to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your site files- WP Engine is a pricey option, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup bundle is one of the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 each month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 visits monthly.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this strategy, however we believe it may be overkill for many people in this category. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t want to take any possibilities with uptime or require a warranty that your site can manage 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d recommend this alternative to small companies, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good money and desire assurances that nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 each year or more months free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 gos to monthly.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 sites included a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing business, and it might be a while prior to you need to upgrade. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will can be found in useful if you have a complex issue that you need to solve rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or more months complimentary with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale plan as the very best value choice. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 sees each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites included.
We recommend this alternative for a fast-growing blog or organization. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the assistance center.
You can conserve $580 or two months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or big company, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will need to speak to a sales associate to get your customized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also uses proprietary support needs to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The company also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by selecting to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks destructive attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into website speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more complex your website is, the more complex the options to speed become.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a few basic plugins and a few little images, you’ll be great with a cost effective shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s typically additional plugins, custom theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these features combined with good levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress installation.
But a slow website does not mean that you need a larger, much better server. It does mean that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting a more effective server, however sometimes it’s more about caching certain resources in a certain order and optimizing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Imagine you are attempting to transport a trailer with a pickup. Imagine your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you may just require to remove 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 options … but either you or a developer should execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually customized servers with incredibly aggressive caching and much more advanced “stack” than a normal web host. They also have actually trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs since they have such a tailored caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up theme, additional scripts, too many 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 information to start filling the page.
It’s nice to have that kind 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 consumed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services given that you are totally free to focus on speed aspects that you can easily manage like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only provides an incorporated CDN, however they also offer global information centers in case your audience is mostly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are attempting to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And given that they run on Google Cloud, you do not have to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of an international CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your site load fast for clients 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 sites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Securing websites is among the strong points of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous measures to protect WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an upgraded firewall to obstruct the current hazards.
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 offers 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 supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Release your first site.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater effectiveness.
Both newbies and knowledgeable WordPress site owners will discover the assistance documentation vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all subscription charges is unique in the hosting market.
It allows you to check out the service in a safe method.
Keep in mind: this choice is not available on customized hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is finest for you based upon your goals, spending plan, resources & habits.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer an excellent service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t wish to stress over hosting issues.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go take a look at 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. Make certain to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.