There are plenty of inexpensive hosts offered that supply a decent service. WPEngine Geotarget
Nevertheless, what if you’re searching 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 web host, offering handled strategies that are fully optimized for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely inexpensive. Therefore, you’ll need to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to purchasing.
To help you out, we’re going to perform a thorough WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, assistance alternatives, performance capabilities, and whatever else you’ll need to know. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now one of the leading managed WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising 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 business has won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to pick WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, but these are difficult to quantify. Some features stand out when you search the user interface, nevertheless, that can offer you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to help you accelerate your WordPress website by providing 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 totality, and the total size of the page. It even includes historic information on your site’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can reduce page load.
You can develop your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating errors on your site by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it permits your developers to make substantial modifications to your website without impacting your customers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual relocation, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those usually restricted are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger efficiency issues and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has made alternatives available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 various strategies available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include unlimited data transfer. The strategies vary based upon:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some unique functions for WordPress users that many hosts do not use, or charge additional for. These special functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly create a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations consisting of newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine offers the most innovative and thorough 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 effective features might indicate a high knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right at home here, but otherwise you’ll need to invest a long time on the support site.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page loaded in just over two seconds. This is among the fastest responses we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service ought to use extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support site consists of videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with aid on deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the response was quick 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 combination of custom NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robot requests and offers load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based upon their location to enhance your website’s speed and decrease latency. You get this capability free of charge with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium rate 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 annually. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls listed below the guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and instantly finds and blocks potential attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to get rid of possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click restoration function to get you support and running rapidly. This hosting service safeguards your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with customer care by means of chat. The support team has an exceptional knowledge base and can assist you fix problems 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 strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or check brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you carry out in the staging area doesn’t affect your live site. This function enables developers to work on websites without interfering with the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature allows you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait for the client to include you to their WordPress site. As soon as finished, you can move the website to the customer or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you routinely develop websites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine only works with WordPress. From a company point of view, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and deal remarkable services in that area. However, this design locks out many individuals who might otherwise gain from 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 use third-party services for domain registration or email accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its prices 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 always upgrade your plan as your website grows. However, significant spikes in traffic during 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 answer depends on finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the very same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the rate. You can even get devoted hosting for the very same cost as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most notably, peace of mind. The supreme question 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 plan, you are typically paying for efficiency & not having to think excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the functions you’re getting- you actually do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and generally logging in often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My individual website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) handled more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a trusted VPS, you can certainly manage a lot more for much less. The website you are on manages more than 110,000+ sees 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 pay for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter plan.
They are fairly transparent about how they count sees, however it can still be quite a surprise for “little” site owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup plan, however quickly ended up with a custom plan.
And as mentioned previously that does not even include many of the functions you do not get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limitations on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional expenses & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the rate. You can’t utilize them to spread out the cost of your plan- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are aiming to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is an expensive option, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup bundle is one of the most basic plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 sees each month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets small websites and blog sites with this strategy, but we believe it might be overkill for many people in this classification. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any chances with uptime or need a warranty that your site can handle 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d suggest this choice to small companies, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great money and want assurances that absolutely nothing will change.
You can save $60 annually or two months totally free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 visits monthly.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten websites consisted of a while.
This plan is a fantastic entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you need to update. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will be available in useful if you have a complex concern that you need to deal with rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two 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 each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We suggest this choice for a fast-growing blog site or organization. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance.
You can save $580 or more months totally free with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical site or big organization, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Countless check outs monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will need to speak with a sales rep to get your customized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also uses proprietary support should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The company likewise has three information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by selecting to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine blocks destructive attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into website speed, however the guideline is that the more complicated your website is, the more complicated the options to speed ended up being.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text site with a couple of fundamental plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be fine with a budget friendly shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s normally additional plugins, custom-made style files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, types and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress setup.
However a slow website does not imply that you require a larger, much better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, but in some cases it’s more about caching specific resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Picture you are attempting to haul a trailer with a pickup. Envision your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you may just need to eliminate the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to stay quick as you grow. There are lots of solutions … but either you or a developer should implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually tailored servers with incredibly aggressive caching and much more sophisticated “stack” than a normal web host. They also have actually trained assistance who will go into your WordPress install and recognize the precise chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even allow caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have such a customized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform since their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers on WP Engine (who has a bloated 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 measures how rapidly the server returned enough data to begin loading the page.
It’s great to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how big or complicated the site 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 since you are totally free to concentrate on speed factors that you can easily control like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just provides an integrated CDN, however they likewise offer global information centers in case your audience is mainly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And since they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t need to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of a global CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will help your site load quick for customers 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 sites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Securing websites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of measures to safeguard WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an updated firewall program to block the most recent dangers.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can assist you recuperate 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 support for any concerns regarding security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Release your very first site.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both novices and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will find the assistance paperwork indispensable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all membership fees is distinct in the hosting industry.
It enables you to experiment with the service in a safe method.
Note: this choice is not readily available on custom hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is finest for you based on your goals, budget plan, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they use a fantastic service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They offer more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t want to worry about hosting concerns.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. So do a test set up and see what you think about their backend. Be sure to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.