There are plenty of inexpensive hosts available that provide a good service. WPEngine Discount
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll wish to have a look at our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, offering handled plans that are completely enhanced for the platform. Of course, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely cheap. You’ll want to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to carry out an extensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, support options, performance capabilities, and whatever 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 one of the leading managed 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 increasing 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 company has won numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to pick WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, support, and management, however these are hard to quantify. Some features stand apart when you search the user interface, however, that can provide you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool created to assist you accelerate your WordPress website by providing significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how quickly your page rendered, the length of time it required to load in its entirety, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historic information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and suggestions on how you can minimize page load.
You can establish your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating mistakes on your website by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your designers to make substantial modifications to your site without affecting your customers.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those usually limited are plugins that have actually been noted to trigger efficiency concerns 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 handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of unlimited information 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 support
WP Engine includes some distinct features for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not offer, or charge extra for. These special features consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly create a copy of your site for screening
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations consisting of latest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and thorough handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is expert and well laid out, however the powerful features may suggest a high knowing curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll need to spend some time on the support website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page filled in simply over two seconds. This is among the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web only slightly behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service need to provide extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support site includes videos and posts of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress functionality that numerous WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the action fasted and the agent knowledgeable. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website loading speed is a leading priority, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation guarantee that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robotic requests and uses load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides site content to your visitors based upon their area to enhance your website’s speed and reduce latency. You get this capability free of charge with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s hard 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 four 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 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 discovers and blocks possible attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service automatically updates and spots the WordPress core to eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine immediately backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you back up and running quickly. Lastly, this hosting service safeguards your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, strength efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with consumer care by means of chat. The support team has an outstanding knowledge base and can help you fix problems rapidly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your site’s live version and make changes or check new plugins and themes. Anything you perform in the staging area does not impact your live website. This feature allows developers to work on sites without hindering the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function allows 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 completed, you can move the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you routinely build websites 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 only works with WordPress. From a service point of view, it makes sense to focus on a single market and offer exceptional services because area. This model locks out numerous individuals who might otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your email account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll need to look somewhere else. You’ll need 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 pricing structure. You will be punished for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limits. This might not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your site grows. However, substantial spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal company can cost you substantial excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is costly. Is it worth the expense? The answer depends on finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the exact same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get committed hosting for the very same price as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most significantly, comfort. The ultimate concern 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 plan, you are usually paying for performance & not needing to believe too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s pricing based upon the features you’re getting- you actually do not get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will consider your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally logging in often), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Many shared hosting servers can handle the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the price. My personal website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with basic caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour duration 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 handles more than 110,000+ gos to per month with plenty of room left to 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 plan.
They are fairly transparent about how they count gos to, however it can still be rather a surprise for “little” site owners how quickly they can get into the $290 per month tier. I have a client who started with the Startup strategy, but rapidly ended up with a custom-made plan.
And as pointed out previously that doesn’t even consist of a number of the features you do not 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 requires additional expenses & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you need to factor those into the cost. You can’t utilize them to expand the cost of your plan- especially if you are hitting your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are wanting to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your site files- WP Engine is a pricey alternative, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup package is one of the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 sees per month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets small websites and blogs with this strategy, however we believe it might be overkill for the majority of 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 need a guarantee that your website can handle 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d recommend this alternative to small businesses, affiliate websites, and blogs making good money and desire guarantees that absolutely nothing will change.
You can save $60 each year or more months free if you pay every year.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs monthly.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 websites included a while.
This plan is a great entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while before you need to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in convenient if you have a complex problem that you need to solve rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the very best worth choice. This one costs $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 sees per month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We recommend this alternative for a fast-growing blog site or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the support.
You can conserve $580 or more months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or big organization, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of sees per month.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will have to talk to a sales associate to get your customized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy likewise provides exclusive assistance should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The company 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 website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that enter into site speed, but the general rule is that the more intricate your site is, the more complex the services to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a primarily text website with a few standard plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be fine with a cost effective shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually additional plugins, custom-made theme files, lots of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these features combined with decent levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress installation.
A slow site doesn’t indicate that you require a bigger, better server. It does imply that you require to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting a more powerful server, but in some cases it’s more about caching certain resources in a certain 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 much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might simply need to get rid of the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires assistance to remain quickly as you grow. There are lots of options … but either you or a designer need to implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and much more advanced “stack” than a normal webhosting. They likewise have actually trained assistance who will go into your WordPress set up and recognize the precise chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even enable caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have actually such a tailored 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 one of my customers on WP Engine (who has a bloated style, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how rapidly the server returned enough information to begin packing the page.
It’s good to have that sort of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or intricate 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 because you are totally free to concentrate on speed aspects that you can easily control like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an incorporated CDN, however they likewise supply global data centers in case your audience is mainly 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 since they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t have to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include a worldwide CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will help your site load quickly 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 websites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is among the strengths of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The company takes several measures to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep track of an updated firewall program to obstruct the latest dangers.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recover 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 concerns concerning security.
They offer webinars on security.
They release security standards and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Launch your first site.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with greater effectiveness.
Both novices and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will discover the assistance paperwork vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership costs is distinct in the hosting industry.
It allows you to try the service in a risk-free way.
Keep in mind: this choice is not offered on custom-made hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is finest for you based on your objectives, budget, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they provide a great service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unequaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic websites that do not wish to stress over hosting problems.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. So do a test install and see what you think of their backend. Make sure to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.