There are plenty of cheap hosts available that provide a good service. WPEngine Cron
However, what if you’re trying to find more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll want to take a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, providing managed plans that are totally optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t precisely low-cost. You’ll want to understand whether this hosting service is worth the cost prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, support choices, efficiency capabilities, and everything else you’ll need to know. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading handled WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial entrepreneur 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 offices in San Antonio (Texas), London (England), Limerick (Ireland), Brisbane (Australia), and Kraków (Poland).
The business has actually won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to choose WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, but these are difficult to measure. Some functions stand apart when you search the user interface, however, that can offer you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to assist you accelerate your WordPress website by offering significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, how long it took to fill in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and suggestions on how you can reduce page load.
You can establish your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid embarrassing mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your designers to make substantial changes to your website without affecting your customers.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably uncommon move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those normally restricted are plugins that have actually been noted to trigger performance issues and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made options readily available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides handled WordPress hosting. There are five various strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of unlimited data transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority support
WP Engine consists of some special features for WordPress users that most hosts don’t use, or charge additional for. These special features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly develop a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Innovative innovations consisting of newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most advanced and detailed handled WordPress hosting functions.
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, but the powerful features may imply a high learning curve for inexperienced 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 spend a long time on the support website.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page filled in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve tested, with competitor Liquid Web only slightly behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service ought to provide extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support website includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with assistance on much deeper WordPress functionality that lots of WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the action fasted and the representative knowledgeable. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website filling speed is a leading concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology make sure that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robotic demands and offers load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based on their place to improve 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 efficiency, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, approximately four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted SLA, which equates to a little under an hour of downtime per year. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls below the guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine monitors all the traffic going to your website and automatically finds and obstructs prospective attacks. In addition, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to remove possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine automatically backups your site every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you back up and running quickly. This hosting service safeguards your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact customer care through chat. The support team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you fix problems rapidly. You get 24/7 phone support for all strategies other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or evaluate new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area does not impact your live website. This feature enables designers to deal with sites without hindering the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function enables you to develop a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait on the client to include you to their WordPress site. Once finished, you can move the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you routinely construct sites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine just deals with WordPress. From an organization point of view, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and deal remarkable services because location. This model locks out numerous people who might otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll require to look somewhere else. You’ll have to use third-party services for domain registration or email 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 limitations. This might not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can always upgrade your strategy as your site grows. Considerable spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal service can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is costly. Is it worth the expense? The answer depends on determining what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the very same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the cost. You can even get devoted hosting for the same rate as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, peace of mind. The supreme question is how much these things are worth 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 performance & not having to think too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices based upon the features you’re getting- you truly do not get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally visiting regularly), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Lots of shared hosting servers can manage the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My individual site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with fundamental caching) managed more than 15,000+ sees in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trusted VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on deals with more than 110,000+ gos to per month with plenty of space left to 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 fairly transparent about how they count gos to, however it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how rapidly they can get into the $290 per month tier. I have a client who began with the Startup strategy, but quickly ended up with a customized strategy.
And as pointed out earlier that does not even include much of the functions you do not get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limitations on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional expenses & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the rate. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your strategy- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are aiming to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is a costly choice, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup package is one of the most basic plan and will set you back $25 monthly. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 gos to per month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets small websites and blogs with this plan, however we think it might be overkill for the majority of people in this classification. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or need a guarantee that your site can manage 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d advise this choice to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great cash and want guarantees that nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 annually or two months free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 visits per month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you need to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in convenient if you have a complicated problem that you require to deal with rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the best worth alternative. This one costs $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits each month.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We advise 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 support.
You can save $580 or more months totally free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
Finally, if you have a mission-critical website or large business, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of check outs monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will need to speak to a sales rep to get your personalized quote depending on your requirements. This plan likewise uses proprietary support ought to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The business likewise has 3 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 destructive attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into website speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your site is, the more complex the services to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a mostly text site with a few fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be great with a budget-friendly shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually additional plugins, custom-made style files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress setup.
A slow site does not indicate that you need a bigger, better server. It does mean that you need to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, but often it’s more about caching certain resources in a certain order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup. Picture your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might just require to remove the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to stay quickly as you grow. There are plenty of services … but either you or a developer should execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed concerns. They have actually personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and a lot more sophisticated “stack” than a common webhosting. They likewise have actually trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress install and recognize the precise chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even allow caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have such a personalized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform because their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers on WP Engine (who has a bloated style, 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 begin loading the page.
It’s nice to have that sort of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how big or complex 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 may get with other services because you are complimentary to focus on speed factors that you can quickly control like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only supplies an integrated CDN, however they likewise supply global data centers in case your audience is mainly 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 considering that they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of a worldwide CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will assist your site load fast for customers around the globe by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An estimated 78% of hacked websites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is one of the strong suits of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The company takes numerous procedures to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall software to block the current risks.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recover your website 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 assistance for any concerns regarding security.
They provide webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Introduce your first website.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both newbies and skilled WordPress website owners will find the assistance documents vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership costs is special in the hosting industry.
It allows you to try out the service in a safe way.
Keep in mind: this choice is not readily available on custom hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but what is finest for you based upon your goals, budget, resources & routines.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a fantastic service with a solid item. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that do not wish to fret about hosting problems.
If handled 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. Do a test set up and see what you believe of their backend. Make certain to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.