There are lots of inexpensive hosts offered that offer a good service. WPEngine Customer Service
However, 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 evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, offering handled plans that are fully enhanced for the platform. Of course, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t precisely low-cost. For that reason, you’ll would like to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, support alternatives, performance abilities, and everything else you’ll need 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 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 workplaces 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 adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, support, and management, however these are hard to quantify. Some features stand apart when you browse the interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool created to help you accelerate your WordPress website by using meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how quickly your page rendered, the length of time it took to load in its whole, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historic information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can decrease 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 website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your designers to make substantial modifications to your website without affecting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably unusual move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those normally limited are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to cause efficiency issues and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include limitless information transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan consists of dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some special features for WordPress users that the majority of hosts do not provide, or charge additional for. These unique features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly produce a copy of your site for testing
- 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 provides the most innovative and comprehensive handled 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 powerful features may suggest a steep learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right in your home here, but otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page packed in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service ought to use extra worth through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support website includes videos and posts of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress functionality that numerous WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction was quick and the agent well-informed. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website packing speed is a leading concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation make sure that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and uses load balancing, offering your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based on their area to enhance your website’s speed and decrease latency. You get this ability free of charge with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced SLA, which translates to a little under an hour of downtime annually. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls listed below the guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your website and automatically finds and blocks possible attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service automatically updates and patches the WordPress core to get rid of prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you back up and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service protects your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, strength attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with customer care by means of chat. The assistance team has an exceptional knowledge base and can help you solve 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 plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or test brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you perform in the staging area doesn’t affect your live site. This feature allows developers to deal with websites without interfering with the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature enables you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You do not have to wait for the customer to add you to their WordPress website. As soon as finished, you can move the site to the customer or host the website on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you frequently construct sites 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 deals with WordPress. From a company perspective, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and offer exceptional services because location. This model locks out many individuals 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 site host, you’ll require to look elsewhere. You’ll have to utilize third-party services for domain registration or email accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is shown in its rates structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your plan’s visitor limits. This may not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly update your plan as your site grows. However, considerable spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal organization can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is costly. Is it worth the cost? The response depends on finding out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the exact same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the rate. You can even get dedicated hosting for the same cost as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, comfort. The supreme 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 normally paying for efficiency & not having to believe excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s prices based upon the features you’re getting- you truly don’t get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and typically visiting frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Numerous shared hosting servers can deal with the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the cost. My individual site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with standard caching) managed more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reputable VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on deals with more than 110,000+ visits per month with lots of room delegated spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, email, 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 relatively transparent about how they count gos to, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” website owners how rapidly they can enter into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup strategy, however quickly ended up with a custom plan.
And as discussed earlier that doesn’t even consist of a number of the functions 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 needs additional expenses & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly 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 utilize them to expand the cost of your plan- especially if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are aiming to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is an expensive alternative, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Start-up
The Startup bundle is the most standard plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 check outs monthly.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets small websites and blog sites with this strategy, but we think it may be overkill for most people in this category. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not want to take any opportunities with uptime or require a warranty that your website can manage 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d recommend this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making great cash and want assurances that nothing will alter.
You can save $60 each year or 2 months free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing companies and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 sees monthly.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 sites included a while.
This plan is a terrific entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while before you require to upgrade. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will come in useful if you have a complex concern that you require to deal with rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or more months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the best worth alternative. This one expenses $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 sees per month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We advise this alternative 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 conserve $580 or more months free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or large service, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Countless gos to per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will have to talk to a sales associate to get your personalized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also provides proprietary assistance ought to something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine attains 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 get better site speeds by picking to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs destructive attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into site speed, however the guideline is that the more complicated your site is, the more complex the services to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a mainly text site with a few standard plugins and a few little images, you’ll be great with an economical shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s typically additional plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these features combined with good levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress installation.
But a sluggish site doesn’t indicate that you need a bigger, better server. It does suggest that you need to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as simple as getting a more powerful server, however often it’s more about caching specific resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture you are attempting to haul a trailer with a pickup. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining 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 needs aid to remain quick as you grow. There are plenty of solutions … however either you or a developer must execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have customized servers with very aggressive caching and much more sophisticated “stack” than a common web host. They also have trained support who will go into your WordPress install and determine the exact chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even allow caching plugins on their installs since they have actually such a customized caching setup.
The fascinating 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 customers on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, additional scripts, too many uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how quickly the server returned enough data to start loading the page.
It’s good to have that type of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how huge or complex the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get even better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services considering that you are complimentary 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 provides an integrated CDN, however they likewise provide international data centers in case your audience is mainly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are attempting to get top speeds without tinkering 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 plans consist of a worldwide CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your site load quickly for customers around the globe 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. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Securing sites is among the fortes of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of measures to safeguard WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall to obstruct the latest dangers.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recuperate your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website provides 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 offer webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and lists for designers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Launch your very first site.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with higher effectiveness.
Both novices and experienced WordPress site owners will discover the support documentation indispensable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership fees is unique in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try out the service in a safe way.
Note: this alternative is not readily available on customized 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 objectives, budget plan, resources & practices.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a terrific service with a strong item. As a handled WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that do not wish to worry about hosting issues.
If managed 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 warranty. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Be sure to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.