There are plenty of low-cost hosts readily available that provide a decent service. WPEngine File Upload Size
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to have a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, offering managed plans that are totally enhanced for the platform. Obviously, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly low-cost. For that reason, you’ll want to know whether this hosting service deserves the cost prior to purchasing.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, assistance alternatives, efficiency capabilities, and whatever else you’ll require to understand. Let’s start!
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 one of the leading managed WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the increasing popularity 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 multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to select WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, assistance, and management, but these are tough to quantify. Some features stick out when you browse the interface, nevertheless, that can give you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool designed to help you accelerate your WordPress site 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 took to pack in its totality, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historic information on your website’s performance over the past six months and recommendations on how you can minimize page load.
You can establish your WordPress site 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 allows your designers to make comprehensive changes to your site without impacting your clients.
WP Engine has a thorough 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 generally restricted are plugins that have actually been noted to trigger efficiency concerns and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives readily available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just offers handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 various plans offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of unrestricted data transfer. The strategies differ based upon:
- 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 support
WP Engine includes some distinct functions for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not offer, or charge extra for. These special functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately produce a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge technologies consisting of newest PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most sophisticated and extensive handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is professional and well set out, but the powerful functions may imply a high learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be right in your home here, but otherwise you’ll require to invest a long time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page packed in just over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest actions we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service ought to provide extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support website consists of videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress functionality that numerous WordPress hosts don’t go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response fasted and the agent well-informed. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology make sure that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robot requests and provides load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website material to your visitors based on their place to increase your site’s speed and decrease latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s difficult to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium price for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with improved 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 listed below the guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your site and immediately detects and blocks potential attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to eliminate potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine immediately backups your site every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you support and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service protects your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, strength attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact 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 support for all plans other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or check new plugins and styles. Anything you perform in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This feature permits designers to work on sites without hindering the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function enables you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to await the client to include you to their WordPress site. When finished, you can transfer the website to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you regularly construct 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 viewpoint, it makes sense to focus on a single market and deal exceptional services because area. However, this model locks out many individuals who could otherwise gain from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll need 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 shown in its rates structure. You will be penalized for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limits. This might not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your website grows. Significant spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal company can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is costly. Is it worth the cost? The response depends on figuring out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the exact same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the price. You can even get dedicated hosting for the exact same cost as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, assurance. The ultimate concern is 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 spending for performance & not having to believe excessive about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the functions you’re getting- you really don’t get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will consider your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and usually logging in frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unneeded.
Numerous shared hosting servers can deal with the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the price. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ sees in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trustworthy VPS, you can definitely manage a lot more for much less. In fact, the site you are on handles more than 110,000+ sees each month with lots of space 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 strategy.
They are fairly transparent about how they count visits, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” site owners how quickly they can get into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, however rapidly ended up with a customized strategy.
And as pointed out previously that doesn’t even consist of many of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limits on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional costs & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably 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 rate. You can’t utilize them to spread out the expense of your strategy- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are seeking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is a pricey choice, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Start-up
The Startup plan is one of the most fundamental plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 gos to per month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets little sites and blogs with this plan, but we think it might be overkill for the majority of people in this category. You can get a far much better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or need an assurance that your site can manage 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this option to small companies, affiliate sites, and blogs making great money and want guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can save $60 per year or two months complimentary if you pay annually.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs monthly.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 websites included a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you require to update. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will can be found in convenient if you have an intricate issue that you require to solve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months complimentary with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale strategy as the best value alternative. This one expenses $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 sees each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We suggest this choice for a fast-growing blog or organization. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the assistance center.
You can conserve $580 or two months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or big service, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless gos to each month.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will have to speak to a sales representative to get your personalized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also uses proprietary support must 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 likewise has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by choosing to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks 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 complex your website is, the more complicated the services to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a primarily text site with a few fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be great with an affordable shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s generally extra plugins, customized style files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these functions integrated with good levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress installation.
A sluggish site does not mean that you need a larger, much better server. It does imply that you need to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, however in some cases it’s more about caching specific resources in a specific order and enhancing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Envision you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might just need to remove the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to remain quick as you grow. There are lots of options … however either you or a developer need to execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed concerns. They have actually tailored servers with extremely aggressive caching and even more sophisticated “stack” than a normal webhosting. They likewise have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and identify the exact chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even allow caching plugins on their installs since they have such a customized caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed 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, 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 filling the page.
It’s nice to have that sort 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 consumed about speed, you can get even much better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services given that you are complimentary 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 also offer global data centers in case your audience is primarily in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And given that they operate on Google Cloud, you do not have to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of an international CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will assist your site load quickly for consumers 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting sites is among the strong suits of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of procedures to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep track of an updated firewall software to obstruct the current threats.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recover your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website offers a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical support for any concerns relating to security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Launch your very first site.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with higher effectiveness.
Both beginners and experienced WordPress site owners will discover the assistance paperwork vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all subscription charges is unique in the hosting industry.
It enables you to check out the service in a safe method.
Note: this alternative is not readily available on customized hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is best for you based upon your objectives, budget plan, resources & habits.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they provide a fantastic service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unequaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t wish to fret about 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. So do a test set up 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.