There are lots of inexpensive hosts readily available that provide a good service. WPEngine Decode 2021
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll wish to have a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, using managed plans that are completely optimized for the platform. Naturally, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly cheap. For that reason, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service deserves the cost prior to purchasing.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct a comprehensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, support options, efficiency abilities, and everything else you’ll need to understand. Let’s get started!
WP Engine Video Review
Sign up for a WP Engine plan and receive the Genesis Framework and 35+ StudioPress Themes free!
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 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 business has won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to pick WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, but these are hard to quantify. Some functions stand out when you search the interface, nevertheless, that can give you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to help you speed up your WordPress site by using significant 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 totality, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical information on your website’s performance over the past six months and recommendations on how you can minimize page load.
You can develop 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 permits your developers to make extensive changes to your site without impacting your clients.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those generally restricted are plugins that have been noted to cause performance issues and security holes. For crucial functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 various strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of limitless data transfer. The plans differ based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some special functions for WordPress users that most hosts don’t offer, or charge additional for. These unique features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly create a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge technologies including newest PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine provides the most innovative and extensive 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, but the effective functions may mean a steep learning curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right in your home here, however otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the assistance site.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page filled in simply over two seconds. This is one of the fastest reactions we’ve checked, with rival Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service need to offer extra value through its assistance, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance website consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with assistance on deeper WordPress functionality that lots of WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response fasted and the agent educated. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s combination of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robotic demands and uses load balancing, providing your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based on their location to boost your site’s speed and minimize latency. You get this capability for free with all WP Engine strategies.
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 guarantees 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted SLA, which translates to a little under an hour of downtime annually. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls below the warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and instantly detects and obstructs prospective attacks. Additionally, the hosting service automatically updates and patches the WordPress core to remove potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine automatically backups your site every day and has a one-click restoration function to get you back up and running rapidly. This hosting service secures your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with consumer care via chat. The support team has an exceptional knowledge base and can assist you fix problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or test new plugins and styles. Anything you perform in the staging area does not affect your live site. This feature enables developers to work on websites without interfering with the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function enables you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait for the customer to include you to their WordPress website. Once finished, you can move the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you frequently build websites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you are out of luck. WP Engine just deals with WordPress. From a company perspective, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and deal extraordinary services because area. However, this design locks out many individuals who could 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 elsewhere. You’ll need 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 pricing structure. You will be punished for exceeding your plan’s visitor limitations. This might not be a problem if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your plan as your site grows. Significant spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal organization can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the expense? The answer depends on finding out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the very same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the cost. You can even get devoted hosting for the very same cost as WP Engine. What you are truly spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, assurance. The supreme question is just 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 strategy, you are typically paying for efficiency & not having to think excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices based on the features you’re getting- you really do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will consider your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and generally logging in frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Numerous shared hosting servers can handle the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) handled more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a dependable VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on handles 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 spend for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count visits, however it can still be rather a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, but rapidly ended up with a custom-made strategy.
And as discussed earlier that does not even include a lot of the functions you do not get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limitations on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires extra expenses & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test websites, you need to factor those into the price. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your strategy- especially if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are seeking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is a costly option, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Start-up
The Startup bundle is the most standard strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 gos to each month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website included.
WP Engine targets little websites and blog sites with this strategy, but we believe it might be overkill for most people in this classification. 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 guarantee that your website can deal with 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this alternative to small businesses, affiliate websites, and blogs making good cash and desire guarantees that nothing will change.
You can save $60 per year or more months totally free if you pay each year.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing services and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 visits each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
Ten sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is an excellent entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in useful if you have a complicated concern that you need to fix rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or more months complimentary with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the best value option. This one expenses $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 sees monthly.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We advise this alternative for a fast-growing blog or service. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the support center.
You can conserve $580 or 2 months complimentary with annual pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or large business, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of sees per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will need to speak with a sales representative to get your tailored quote depending on your requirements. This strategy likewise provides proprietary assistance needs to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network facilities.
The business likewise has three information 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 market.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into site speed, but the guideline is that the more complicated your website is, the more complicated the solutions to speed become.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a couple of basic plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be great with a cost effective shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s normally additional plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these features integrated with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress installation.
However a sluggish website doesn’t indicate that you require a larger, much better server. It does imply that you need to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, however sometimes it’s more about caching specific resources in a certain order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Picture you are attempting to carry a trailer with a pickup. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may simply require to get rid of the emergency brake, install 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 plenty of options … however either you or a developer need to execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed concerns. They have tailored servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and a lot more innovative “stack” than a normal web host. They likewise have actually trained support who will go into your WordPress set up and recognize the precise chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs because they have such a tailored caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform since their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my customers on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how quickly the server returned enough data to begin filling the page.
It’s nice to have that type of speed right out of the box- and have it stay that way no matter how big or complex the site 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 might get with other services because you are totally free to focus on speed elements that you can quickly manage like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only supplies an incorporated CDN, but they also offer worldwide 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 exactly that. And since they run on Google Cloud, you don’t have to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include an international CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will help your site load quickly 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting sites is one of the strengths 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 collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an upgraded firewall program to block the latest dangers.
All sites 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 website 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 relating to security.
They offer webinars on security.
They release 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, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Release your very first website.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both novices 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 subscription costs is special in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try out the service in a safe method.
Keep in mind: this choice is not readily available on custom-made hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is best for you based on your objectives, budget plan, resources & routines.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they use a great service with a solid product. As a managed WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t wish to stress over hosting concerns.
If managed hosting is a suitable for you- then go check out WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make certain to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.