There are plenty of inexpensive hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Git Push
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll wish to have a look at our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, offering managed strategies that are completely optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely low-cost. Therefore, you’ll need 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 essential functions, assistance alternatives, performance capabilities, and everything else you’ll require to understand. 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 handled WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising 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 multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, support, and management, but these are tough to quantify. Some features stick out when you search the user interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to assist you speed up your WordPress site by offering meaningful metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, for how long it required to pack in its entirety, and the total 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 reduce page load.
You can develop 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 enables your designers to make substantial changes to your site without impacting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those normally limited are plugins that have been noted to cause performance problems and security holes. For crucial features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made options readily available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides managed WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies include unrestricted information transfer. The plans vary based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan consists of dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some special features for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not offer, or charge additional for. These unique functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly develop a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations consisting of most current PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine provides the most sophisticated and detailed managed WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is professional and well laid out, however the effective features may suggest a steep knowing curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right in your home here, however otherwise you’ll need to spend a long time on the support website.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page filled in simply over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service should use additional worth through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance website includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with assistance on deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the reaction was quick and the agent knowledgeable. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If site filling speed is a leading concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of custom NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation guarantee that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robot requests and provides load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website material to your visitors based upon their place to increase your website’s speed and decrease latency. You get this capability totally free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium rate 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 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 assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your website and instantly detects and blocks potential attacks. Additionally, the hosting service automatically updates and patches the WordPress core to remove possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine immediately backups your website every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you support and running quickly. Finally, this hosting service secures your site 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 client care via chat. The support team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you fix problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance 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 enables you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or test brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t impact your live site. This feature allows developers to deal with sites without interfering with the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function enables you to develop a site from your WP Engine account. You do not have to wait on the customer to include you to their WordPress website. When finished, you can transfer the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality saves time if you regularly build websites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are utilizing any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine just deals with WordPress. From a business viewpoint, it makes sense to focus on a single market and offer extraordinary services because area. This model locks out numerous people who might 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 site host, you’ll need to look elsewhere. 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 shown in its prices structure. You will be penalized for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limitations. This might not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can always upgrade your strategy as your website grows. Substantial spikes in traffic throughout product launches or seasonal service can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in determining what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the price. You can even get committed hosting for the same rate as WP Engine. What you are actually paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. The supreme concern is just how much these things deserve to you.
Plans and Pricing
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
With a WP Engine plan, you are generally spending for performance & not having to believe too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based on the features you’re getting- you really do not get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally visiting often), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unnecessary.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My individual website a shared hosting plan 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 reputable VPS, you can definitely manage a lot more for much less. The site you are on handles more than 110,000+ gos to 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 plan.
They are fairly transparent about how they count gos to, but it can still be quite a surprise for “little” website owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup plan, but quickly ended up with a custom-made strategy.
And as discussed earlier that doesn’t even consist of many of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limitations on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional expenses & technical implementation 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 rate. You can’t use 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 seeking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your site files- WP Engine is a pricey option, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Start-up
The Startup plan is one of the most standard plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 gos to monthly.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website included.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this strategy, but we believe it may be overkill for the majority of people in this category. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t want to take any opportunities with uptime or require a warranty that your site can manage 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d advise this choice to small businesses, affiliate websites, and blog sites making great money and want guarantees that nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 annually or two months complimentary if you pay each year.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 visits per month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 sites included a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing business, and it might be a while prior to you require to upgrade. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will be available in handy if you have an intricate problem that you need to solve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or more months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale strategy as the best value alternative. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to per month.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We recommend this alternative for a fast-growing blog site or company. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the assistance center.
You can save $580 or 2 months totally free with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
Finally, if you have a mission-critical site or large company, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of sees monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will need to speak to a sales associate to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy likewise provides proprietary assistance must something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The company also has 3 data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by choosing to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine obstructs destructive attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into site speed, however the general rule is that the more complex your website is, the more complex the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a mainly text website with a few fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with a cost effective shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually extra plugins, custom-made theme 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 installation.
But a sluggish site doesn’t imply that you need a bigger, better server. It does mean that you need to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, however in some cases it’s more about caching certain 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 truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may just require to get rid of the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to remain fast as you grow. There are a lot of solutions … but either you or a developer must execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a typical web host. They also have trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress install and recognize the precise chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs because they have actually such a personalized caching setup.
The interesting 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 clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, extra scripts, a lot of 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 begin loading the page.
It’s good to have that sort of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or intricate 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 since you are totally free to concentrate on speed factors that you can easily control like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only provides an incorporated CDN, but they likewise provide international data 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 since they work on Google Cloud, you do not need to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include a worldwide CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will assist your website load quick for customers around the globe 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 updated.
Securing websites is one of the strong points of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The company takes numerous measures to secure WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall program to obstruct the current risks.
All websites are backed up 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 assistance for any questions relating to security.
They offer webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Introduce your first site.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both beginners and experienced WordPress site owners will discover the assistance documentation important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all subscription charges is unique in the hosting market.
It allows you to try out the service in a safe method.
Keep in mind: this alternative is not available on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is finest for you based upon your goals, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a terrific service with a strong product. As a handled WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t want to stress over hosting issues.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go check out WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. Do a test install and see what you believe of their backend. Be sure to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.