There are a lot of inexpensive hosts offered that supply a good service. WPEngine Genesis
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, providing managed strategies that are fully enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely inexpensive. Therefore, you’ll want to know whether this hosting service deserves the expense prior to making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, support options, performance abilities, and whatever else you’ll require to understand. Let’s get started!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading handled WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising appeal 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 won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to pick WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, support, and management, however these are tough to quantify. Some features stand out when you search the user interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to help you accelerate your WordPress website by providing significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how rapidly your page rendered, for how long it required to fill in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical information on your site’s efficiency over the past 6 months and suggestions on how you can decrease 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 website by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make substantial changes to your website without impacting your customers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively uncommon relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those usually limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger performance issues and security holes. For essential functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made options readily available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of limitless data transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom plan includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some special features for WordPress users that most hosts do not provide, or charge additional for. These special functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately create a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations consisting of latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine uses the most innovative and detailed handled WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is expert and well laid out, however the powerful features may imply a high knowing curve for unskilled 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 require to invest a long time on the support site.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page packed in just over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest actions we’ve tested, with competitor Liquid Web only somewhat behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service ought to offer extra worth through its support, and WP Engine provides. The support website includes videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress performance that numerous WordPress hosts don’t go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the response fasted and the representative experienced. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site filling speed is a leading concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation make sure that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and uses load balancing, providing your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website content to your visitors based upon their location to enhance your site’s speed and lower latency. You get this capability totally free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s difficult to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, roughly 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 per 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 immediately detects and blocks potential attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click remediation feature to get you back up and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service protects your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Sensational Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care via chat. The support team has an exceptional knowledge base and can help you fix issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all strategies other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or test brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t affect your live site. This function permits developers to work on websites without hindering the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature enables you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait on the client to add you to their WordPress site. As soon as finished, you can transfer the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you regularly develop sites for clients.
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 business viewpoint, it makes sense to focus on a single market and deal extraordinary services in that location. Nevertheless, this design locks out many people who might otherwise take advantage of WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your email account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll require to look somewhere else. 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 exceeding your strategy’s visitor limitations. This might not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your plan as your site grows. Substantial spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal service can cost you significant excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? The response lies in finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage 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 actually spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most importantly, 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 plan, you are generally paying for efficiency & not needing to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the features you’re getting- you truly do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will consider your website’s health anyway (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 handle the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My personal website a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) handled more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. The site you are on deals with more than 110,000+ sees per month with plenty 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 check outs, but it can still be rather a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can enter the $290 monthly tier. I have a client who began with the Startup strategy, but quickly ended up with a customized plan.
And as discussed previously that doesn’t even consist of a lot of the features you don’t 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 extra expenses & technical application 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 price. You can’t utilize them to expand the expense of your plan- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are wanting to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is an expensive choice, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup plan is one of the most standard strategy and will set you back $25 each month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 gos to per month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets little sites and blogs with this plan, however we think it may be overkill for the majority of 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 opportunities with uptime or require an assurance that your site can deal with 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d recommend this alternative to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great cash 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 businesses and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
Ten websites included a while.
This plan is a great entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while before you require to upgrade. With this strategy, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will be available in helpful if you have an intricate issue that you need to resolve rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or more months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale strategy as the very best value alternative. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We advise this alternative for a fast-growing blog site or company. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance.
You can save $580 or two months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or big organization, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless gos to per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will need to speak with a sales associate to get your personalized quote depending on your requirements. This plan also uses proprietary support must something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network facilities.
The company also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by selecting to host your website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into site speed, however the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your site is, the more intricate the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a mainly text site with a few basic plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be great with a cost effective shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s normally additional plugins, custom-made theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, forms and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
A slow website does not indicate that you require a bigger, much better server. It does suggest that you need to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, however sometimes it’s more about caching particular resources in a specific order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Imagine you are attempting to transport 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 may simply need to get rid of the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs assistance to remain fast as you grow. There are a lot of options … but either you or a designer must execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have actually personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and much more advanced “stack” than a typical webhosting. They also have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and determine the specific chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even allow caching plugins on their installs because they have such a tailored caching setup.
The fascinating 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 clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up theme, additional scripts, a lot of uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how quickly the server returned enough information to start packing the page.
It’s nice to have that sort of speed right out of package- and have it remain that way no matter how big or complex the site 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 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 only offers an integrated CDN, however they also provide international data centers in case your audience is mainly 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 considering that they run on Google Cloud, you don’t have to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include a global CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will help your website load fast for consumers around the globe by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An estimated 78% of hacked websites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The company takes a number of procedures to protect WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep track of an upgraded firewall to obstruct the most recent dangers.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can assist you recuperate your site 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 support for any questions concerning security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security standards and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Launch your very first website.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both beginners and experienced WordPress site owners will find the assistance documentation invaluable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all subscription costs is special in the hosting market.
It enables you to experiment with the service in a risk-free method.
Note: this choice is not readily available on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is finest for you based upon your goals, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer an excellent service with a strong item. As a handled WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They provide more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic sites that do not want to worry about hosting issues.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go take a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make sure to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.