There are plenty of inexpensive hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Custom Domain
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 evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, offering handled strategies that are completely optimized for the platform. Naturally, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly low-cost. For that reason, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense before buying.
To assist you out, we’re going to carry out an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential features, assistance choices, efficiency abilities, and whatever else you’ll need 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 entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need 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 factors to pick WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, assistance, and management, however these are difficult to quantify. Some functions stick out when you search the user interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool developed to help you accelerate your WordPress website by providing significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how quickly your page rendered, for how long it required to load in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historical data on your site’s efficiency over the past six months and suggestions on how you can lower page load.
You can establish your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid embarrassing errors on your site by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make substantial changes to your site without impacting your consumers.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those typically limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to cause performance issues and security holes. For crucial functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has made options available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers handled WordPress hosting. There are five various strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include unlimited data transfer. The strategies differ based upon:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some special features for WordPress users that most hosts don’t provide, or charge extra for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly produce a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge innovations consisting of newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most advanced and extensive handled WordPress hosting features.
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, but the powerful functions may mean a high learning curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right in your home here, however otherwise you’ll need to spend some time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page packed in simply over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve tested, with competitor Liquid Web just a little behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service need to use additional value through its support, and WP Engine provides. The assistance website consists of videos and articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with assistance on much deeper WordPress functionality that many 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 well-informed. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If website loading speed is a top priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of custom NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation make sure that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robotic demands and provides load balancing, giving your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website material to your visitors based upon their place to boost your website’s speed and reduce latency. You get this capability for 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 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 enhanced SLA, which equates 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 website and automatically identifies and blocks prospective attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and spots 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 repair feature to get you support and running quickly. Finally, this hosting service protects your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Phenomenal Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with client care through chat. The assistance group has an excellent knowledge base and can assist you solve problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans except 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 test new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area does not impact your live website. This feature enables designers to work on sites without disrupting the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature allows you to construct a website from your WP Engine account. You do not have to wait for the client to include you to their WordPress website. As soon as completed, you can move the site to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you frequently build websites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine only works with WordPress. From an organization point of view, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and deal exceptional services because location. However, this model locks out many individuals who might otherwise take advantage of 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 require to look somewhere else. You’ll have to utilize 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 limitations. This might not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly update your strategy as your site grows. Significant spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal company can cost you significant overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in figuring out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the exact same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get devoted hosting for the very same price as WP Engine. What you are truly spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, peace of mind. The supreme concern 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 usually spending for efficiency & not needing to think too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices based upon the functions you’re getting- you really don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally logging in often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the rate. My individual website a shared hosting strategy 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 dependable VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. The site you are on handles more than 110,000+ sees per month with plenty 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 plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count check outs, however it can still be rather a surprise for “small” site owners how rapidly they can get into the $290 per month tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup strategy, but rapidly wound up with a custom-made plan.
And as mentioned earlier that does not even consist of many of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limitations on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs 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 need to factor those into the price. You can’t utilize them to spread out 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 & provide your website files- WP Engine is a pricey choice, especially compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Start-up
The Startup plan is the most fundamental plan and will set you back $25 monthly. With this package, you get:.
25,000 gos to monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this plan, however we think it may be overkill for many people in this category. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any chances with uptime or need an assurance that your website can deal with 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d advise this option to small companies, affiliate websites, and blogs making great cash and desire guarantees that nothing will change.
You can save $60 annually or 2 months complimentary if you pay every year.
Growth
The development plan 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 plan is a fantastic entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while before you need to update. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in helpful if you have a complex concern that you require to solve quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or two months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale strategy as the very best value alternative. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites included.
We recommend this option for a fast-growing blog site 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 more months totally free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
Finally, if you have a mission-critical site or big company, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of gos to each month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will have to talk to a sales rep to get your personalized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also provides proprietary assistance needs to something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The company likewise has 3 data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by selecting 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 enter into website speed, but the guideline is that the more complicated your site is, the more complex the services to speed ended up being.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text site with a few fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with a cost effective shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s generally extra plugins, custom style files, great deals of images, widgets, ads, types and more.
All these features combined with good levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress installation.
A sluggish site doesn’t suggest that you need a bigger, much better server. It does mean that you need to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as simple as getting a more powerful server, but often it’s more about caching certain resources in a certain order and enhancing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Imagine you are trying to transport a trailer with a pickup truck. Picture your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might simply require to get rid of the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires help to remain quick as you grow. There are lots of options … however either you or a developer must implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed concerns. They have personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and even more advanced “stack” than a common webhosting. They also have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and recognize the precise chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even permit caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have actually such a personalized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still do well on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers 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 packing the page.
It’s nice to have that sort of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how big or intricate the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get even much better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services because you are free to focus on speed elements that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just offers an incorporated CDN, but they likewise 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 exactly that. And because they operate on Google Cloud, you do not have to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include a global CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website load quick for customers all over the world by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An estimated 78% of hacked sites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing websites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous steps to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an upgraded firewall software to block the latest dangers.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can assist you recuperate your website 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 questions relating to security.
They offer 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, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Introduce your first site.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both novices and experienced WordPress website owners will find the assistance paperwork indispensable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all subscription fees is distinct in the hosting industry.
It allows you to check out the service in a safe way.
Note: this choice is not readily available on custom hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is finest for you based on your objectives, budget, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they use a terrific service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They offer more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website developers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t wish to worry about hosting concerns.
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 warranty. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make sure to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.