There are lots of low-cost hosts available that provide a good service. WPEngine Export Database
However, what if you’re trying to find 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 webhosting, providing managed strategies that are totally enhanced for the platform. Of course, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t precisely inexpensive. You’ll want to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost prior to making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to carry out a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, assistance options, performance capabilities, and whatever else you’ll require to understand. Let’s start!
WP Engine Video Review
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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 business owner 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 numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are tough to measure. Some functions stick out when you search the user interface, nevertheless, that can give you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to assist you accelerate your WordPress site by offering meaningful 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 entirety, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical information on your site’s performance over the past six months and recommendations on how you can reduce page load.
You can establish your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment before making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make extensive modifications to your website without affecting your customers.
WP Engine has a comprehensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those typically restricted are plugins that have actually been noted to trigger efficiency problems and security holes. For crucial functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made options readily available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just offers managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 various plans offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of limitless data transfer. The plans vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some distinct features for WordPress users that the majority of hosts don’t provide, or charge extra for. These unique features consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately develop a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Innovative innovations including newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most advanced and extensive handled WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is expert and well laid out, however the effective features might indicate a high knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be right at home here, however otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the assistance site.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page loaded in simply over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest actions we’ve tested, with rival Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service ought to provide additional worth through its support, and WP Engine provides. 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 do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction was quick and the representative well-informed. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If site packing speed is a top priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of customized NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot demands and provides load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site material to your visitors based upon their area to boost your website’s speed and lower latency. You get this capability for free 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 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 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 assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your site and automatically spots and blocks possible attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to get rid of potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine immediately backups your website every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you support and running rapidly. Finally, this hosting service secures your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care by means of chat. The support group has an outstanding knowledge base and can help you fix issues 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 plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or check new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t affect your live website. This feature enables designers to work on sites without hindering the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function permits you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You do not have to wait for the client to add you to their WordPress website. Once completed, you can transfer the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you frequently construct websites 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 service perspective, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and offer exceptional services in that location. This model locks out lots of people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll require to look in other places. You’ll need 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 prices structure. You will be punished 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. Substantial spikes in traffic throughout product launches or seasonal organization can cost you substantial overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The response lies in finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the rate. You can even get committed hosting for the exact same price as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most significantly, assurance. 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 strategy, you are usually paying for efficiency & not having to think too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based on the features you’re getting- you actually do not get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and normally logging in often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Lots of shared hosting servers can deal with the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the price. My individual site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) managed more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trustworthy VPS, you can certainly manage a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on handles more than 110,000+ sees per month with a lot 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 plan.
They are fairly transparent about how they count gos to, however it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup plan, however rapidly wound up with a custom-made plan.
And as discussed earlier that doesn’t even include a lot of the features you do not get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires extra costs & technical execution 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 have to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your strategy- especially if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are seeking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your site files- WP Engine is a pricey alternative, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Start-up
The Startup package is one of the most standard strategy and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 check outs each month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets small sites and blog sites with this strategy, but we believe it may be overkill for the majority of people in this classification. You can get a far much better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not want to take any possibilities with uptime or require a guarantee that your website can manage 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d advise this alternative to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good cash and desire guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 each year or 2 months totally free if you pay annually.
Growth
The development plan targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 monthly. 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 organization, and it might be a while prior to you require to upgrade. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will can be found in helpful if you have an intricate concern that you require to resolve rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale strategy as the very best worth option. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We suggest this choice 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.
You can conserve $580 or 2 months free with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical site or big service, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of gos to per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to talk to a sales rep to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy also uses exclusive assistance must something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The business also has three information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by picking to host your site on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that enter into site speed, but the guideline is that the more intricate your website is, the more complicated the options 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 couple of fundamental plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be great with a cost effective shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s usually extra plugins, custom theme files, great deals of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these features combined with good levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress installation.
But a sluggish website doesn’t mean that you need a bigger, better server. It does indicate that you require to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, however often it’s more about caching certain resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Envision you are trying to haul 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 may just need to get rid of the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs help to stay quick as you grow. There are a lot of options … however either you or a developer need to execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed issues. They have tailored servers with very aggressive caching and even more advanced “stack” than a normal webhosting. They likewise have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress install and recognize the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even enable caching plugins on their installs because they have such a customized caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still succeed on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients 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 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 intricate the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get back at much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services considering that you are complimentary to focus on speed aspects that you can quickly manage like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just provides an integrated CDN, but they also provide global data 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 work on Google Cloud, you don’t need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include a worldwide CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will assist your site load fast for clients all over 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is among the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several steps to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an upgraded firewall software to block the current threats.
All websites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recover your website in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site 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 concerning security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists for designers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Introduce your very first website.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both beginners and experienced WordPress website owners will discover the assistance documents indispensable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all subscription costs is unique in the hosting market.
It enables you to try out the service in a risk-free method.
Keep in mind: this choice is not available on customized hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is best for you based upon your objectives, budget plan, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they provide an excellent service with a strong item. As a handled WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They provide more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that do not wish to worry about hosting issues.
If managed hosting is a suitable for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. So do a test install and see what you think of their backend. Make certain to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.