There are plenty of low-cost hosts offered that supply a good service. WPEngine Genesis Pro
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll wish to take a look at our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, using managed strategies that are completely enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely cheap. You’ll desire to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to perform a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, support options, efficiency capabilities, and whatever else you’ll require to understand. Let’s begin!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among 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 offices in San Antonio (Texas), London (England), Limerick (Ireland), Brisbane (Australia), and Kraków (Poland).
The company has won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to select WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, assistance, and management, but these are difficult to measure. Some features stand apart when you browse the interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to help you accelerate your WordPress site by using meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, the length of time it took to pack in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historic information on your website’s efficiency over the past 6 months and recommendations on how you can lower page load.
You can establish your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating errors on your site by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make comprehensive modifications to your website without impacting your customers.
WP Engine has an extensive 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 usually limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger efficiency concerns 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 only provides managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include unrestricted information transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan includes dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority support
WP Engine consists of some distinct functions for WordPress users that most hosts do not offer, or charge extra for. These unique functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly create a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge innovations including most current PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine provides the most sophisticated and extensive handled WordPress hosting features.
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 powerful functions might suggest a high knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the support website.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page loaded in just over two seconds. This is among the fastest actions we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web just a little behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service ought to offer additional worth through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support site includes videos and posts of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts do not go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response fasted and the representative well-informed. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If website filling speed is a top priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human demands over robotic demands and uses load balancing, providing your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website content to your visitors based on their location to enhance your website’s speed and minimize latency. You get this capability free of charge 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, roughly four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced 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 below the assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your website and instantly discovers and blocks potential attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to remove possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you support and running rapidly. This hosting service secures your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Sensational Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with client care by means of chat. The support group has an excellent knowledge base and can help you resolve issues rapidly. You get 24/7 phone assistance 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 site’s live version and make changes or test brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area does not affect your live website. This feature enables developers to deal with websites without disrupting the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function enables you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You do not need to wait on the customer to add you to their WordPress website. When completed, you can transfer the site to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you regularly develop sites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine only deals with WordPress. From a service point of view, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and deal extraordinary services in that area. This design 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 email account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll need to look elsewhere. You’ll have 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 rates structure. You will be punished for exceeding your plan’s visitor limitations. This may not be a problem if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always upgrade your plan as your website grows. Substantial spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal organization can cost you substantial 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 spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the exact same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the cost. You can even get committed hosting for the very same cost as WP Engine. What you are actually paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most significantly, 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 generally paying for efficiency & not needing to believe excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the functions you’re getting- you truly don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally visiting regularly), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Lots of shared hosting servers can deal with the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My personal website a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with basic caching) handled more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a dependable VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. In fact, the site you are on deals with more than 110,000+ visits monthly with lots 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 plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count sees, however it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how rapidly they can enter the $290 per month tier. I have a client who began with the Startup strategy, but rapidly ended up with a customized plan.
And as mentioned earlier that doesn’t even consist of many of the features you do not 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 extra expenses & 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 need to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your plan- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are looking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your website files- WP Engine is an expensive choice, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Startup
The Startup package is the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 sees monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this plan, but we believe it might be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or require a guarantee that your website can handle 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d advise this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good cash and desire assurances that nothing will change.
You can save $60 annually or more months complimentary if you pay each year.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing services and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 sees monthly.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while prior to you need to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will come in useful if you have an intricate concern that you require to resolve rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or more months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the very best value option. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs monthly.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We recommend this choice for a fast-growing blog or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance.
You can conserve $580 or more months free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical website or large service, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless visits per month.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will have to speak with a sales representative to get your personalized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy likewise uses exclusive support should something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The business also has 3 information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by selecting to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs destructive attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into website speed, however the guideline is that the more complex your website is, the more complicated the options to speed become.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mostly text website with a couple of basic plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be fine with an inexpensive shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s typically extra plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress setup.
A sluggish site doesn’t indicate that you need a larger, much better server. It does imply that you need to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, but in some cases it’s more about caching particular resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Picture you are attempting to transport a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you may simply need to remove the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires help to remain fast as you grow. There are a lot of services … however either you or a designer need to implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have personalized servers with extremely aggressive caching and even more sophisticated “stack” than a common webhosting. They also have actually trained assistance who will go into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even allow caching plugins on their installs because they have actually such a customized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform due to the fact that 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, a lot of uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how rapidly the server returned enough data to start 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 huge or complicated 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 considering that you are complimentary to concentrate on speed factors that you can easily manage like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only offers an incorporated CDN, but they also provide international 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 given that they work on Google Cloud, you don’t have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of an international CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will assist your site load fast for consumers worldwide 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. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is among the strong suits of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of procedures to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall software to obstruct the current hazards.
All websites are backed up 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 support for any questions regarding security.
They supply webinars on security.
They release security standards and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Launch your first site.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with greater effectiveness.
Both newbies and experienced WordPress website owners will find the support 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 market.
It enables you to experiment with the service in a safe method.
Note: this alternative is not offered on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, however what is finest for you based upon your objectives, budget, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a fantastic service with a solid product. As a handled WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website developers and/or high-traffic sites that do not wish to fret about hosting problems.
If handled 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 guarantee. 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.