There are lots of low-cost hosts readily available that provide a decent service. WPEngine Flywheel
Nevertheless, what if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to take a look at our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, offering managed strategies that are fully enhanced for the platform. Obviously, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly inexpensive. You’ll want to understand 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 crucial functions, support options, efficiency capabilities, and whatever else you’ll need to understand. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading managed WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need 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 actually won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, but these are tough to quantify. Some features stick out when you search the user interface, however, that can provide you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to assist you accelerate your WordPress site by offering significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, for how long it took to pack in its totality, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historical data on your website’s performance over the past 6 months and suggestions on how you can lower page load.
You can develop your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make comprehensive changes to your website without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those generally limited are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to cause performance concerns and security holes. For crucial functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives readily available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only uses managed WordPress hosting. There are five various strategies available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of endless data transfer. The strategies differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some unique functions for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not offer, or charge additional for. These unique features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately develop a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge technologies including latest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most innovative and extensive 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 expert and well set out, but the powerful features may indicate a steep learning curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the support site.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page filled in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service should offer additional value through its support, and WP Engine provides. The assistance site consists of videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with assistance on much deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts do not go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the action was quick and the agent knowledgeable. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If site loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human demands over robot demands and uses load balancing, providing your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides site content to your visitors based on their place to improve your website’s speed and lower latency. You get this capability 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 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 improved SLA, which translates 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 monitors all the traffic going to your website and instantly finds and blocks potential attacks. In addition, the hosting service instantly updates and patches the WordPress core to remove prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click remediation feature to get you back up and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service protects your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, strength efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with consumer care by means of chat. The assistance group has an excellent knowledge base and can help you resolve 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 enables you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or evaluate brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This feature permits designers to work on sites without hindering the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function enables you to construct a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait on the customer to add you to their WordPress website. As soon as completed, you can move the site to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you routinely build sites 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 service viewpoint, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and deal 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 e-mail account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll need 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 penalized for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limitations. This might not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your strategy as your website grows. Nevertheless, considerable spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal organization can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the cost? The response lies in figuring out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the price. You can even get committed hosting for the very same rate as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most significantly, comfort. 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 spending for efficiency & not having to believe too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices 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 updated and usually visiting frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unnecessary.
Lots of shared hosting servers can handle the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the cost. My individual website a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) managed more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a reputable VPS, you can certainly manage a lot more for much less. The site you are on deals with more than 110,000+ visits per month with plenty of space left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, e-mail, RSS apps, etc with an InMotion VPS. I spend for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter strategy.
They are relatively transparent about how they count check outs, but it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how rapidly they can enter the $290 each month tier. I have a client who began with the Startup plan, however rapidly wound up with a custom strategy.
And as discussed earlier that does not even consist of a lot 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 needs extra costs & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test sites, you have to factor those into the price. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your plan- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are aiming to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is a pricey alternative, especially compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Startup
The Startup bundle is the most fundamental strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 visits each month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website included.
WP Engine targets little sites and blogs with this plan, however we believe it might be overkill for many people in this category. 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 warranty that your site can handle 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d recommend this alternative to small companies, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good cash and want assurances that nothing will alter.
You can save $60 per year or two months complimentary if you pay every year.
Growth
The development plan targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 visits monthly.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 sites included a while.
This strategy is an excellent entry point for a growing business, and it might be a while prior to you need to update. With this strategy, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in handy if you have a complicated issue that you need to resolve quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or more months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale plan as the best value alternative. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We suggest this option for a fast-growing blog site or organization. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the support center.
You can save $580 or 2 months complimentary with annual pre-paid billing.
Custom-made
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical website or large organization, the Custom strategy may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to speak with a sales rep to get your tailored quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also offers exclusive support ought to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The business likewise has three information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by selecting to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that enter into website speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your site is, the more complicated the solutions to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a mainly text site with a few fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be great with an inexpensive shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s typically extra plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, ads, kinds and more.
All these features integrated with decent levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress setup.
However a slow site doesn’t imply that you need a bigger, better server. It does indicate that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as basic as getting a more powerful server, but sometimes it’s more about caching particular 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 truck. Picture your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might just 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 aid to stay quick as you grow. There are plenty of options … but either you or a developer should implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed concerns. They have customized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and much more sophisticated “stack” than a common webhosting. They also have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress install and identify the exact chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even enable caching plugins on their installs since they have such a personalized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers on WP Engine (who has a bloated style, additional 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 packing the page.
It’s good to have that sort of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how huge or complex the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services because you are complimentary to concentrate on speed elements that you can quickly control like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just provides an incorporated CDN, but they also provide global information 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 exactly that. And considering that they run on Google Cloud, you don’t need to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include an international CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website load fast for customers around 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 company. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Protecting websites is one of the strong points of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous steps to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall software to obstruct the most recent threats.
All websites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recover your website in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site supplies 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 offer webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Introduce your first website.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with higher performance.
Both newbies and experienced WordPress website owners will find the assistance documentation invaluable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all membership costs is distinct in the hosting industry.
It allows you to check out the service in a safe way.
Note: this option is not readily available on customized hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is finest for you based on your goals, budget plan, resources & routines.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they use a terrific service with a solid product. As a handled WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unequaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t wish to stress over hosting issues.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go check out WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. Do a test set up 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.