There are lots of low-cost hosts readily available that offer a decent service. WPEngine Glassdoor
Nevertheless, what if you’re searching for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that 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 completely optimized for the platform. Obviously, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely inexpensive. You’ll desire to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct a comprehensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key functions, assistance options, performance capabilities, and whatever else you’ll need to know. Let’s begin!
WP Engine Video Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcpf7ULveLk
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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 entrepreneur Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a requirement 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 actually won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to choose WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are difficult to measure. Some features stand out when you browse the interface, however, that can offer you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to assist you accelerate your WordPress website by offering significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, how long it required to pack in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical information on your website’s efficiency over the past 6 months and recommendations on how you can decrease page load.
You can develop your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid embarrassing errors on your site by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make extensive modifications to your site without affecting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those normally restricted are plugins that have been noted to cause efficiency concerns and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made options available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only uses managed WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include endless information transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan includes dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some special features for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not use, or charge additional for. These unique features consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly develop a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge innovations including latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most advanced and detailed handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is expert and well set out, but the effective features may indicate a high learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be right in your home here, however otherwise you’ll need to invest some time on the support website.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page packed in simply over two seconds. This is among the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service ought to provide extra value through its support, and WP Engine provides. The support site consists of videos and articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with assistance on much deeper WordPress functionality that numerous WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the action fasted and the representative 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 does well in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and uses load balancing, giving your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides site material to your visitors based upon their place to boost your website’s speed and reduce latency. You get this ability totally free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why people continue to pay a premium price for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, approximately four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced SLA, which equates to a little under an hour of downtime annually. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls below the guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your website and instantly discovers and obstructs prospective attacks. Additionally, the hosting service immediately updates and patches the WordPress core to remove possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you support and running quickly. This hosting service protects your website 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 consumer care through chat. The assistance team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you resolve problems rapidly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your site’s live version and make changes or check brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This feature allows designers to work on websites without interfering with the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function enables you to build a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to await the customer to include you to their WordPress website. As soon as finished, you can transfer the site to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you frequently build websites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you are out of luck. WP Engine only deals with WordPress. From a business point of view, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and deal extraordinary services because area. Nevertheless, this model locks out many individuals who could 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 site host, you’ll require to look in other places. 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 punished for exceeding your plan’s visitor limits. This may not be a problem if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always upgrade your strategy as your website grows. However, considerable spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal service can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other method 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 handle the exact same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the rate. You can even get devoted hosting for the very same price as WP Engine. What you are truly spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most significantly, assurance. The ultimate concern is 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 typically paying for efficiency & not having to think too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based on the features you’re getting- you really don’t get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will consider your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and typically logging in frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unneeded.
Lots of shared hosting servers can deal with the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the cost. My personal site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with basic caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can certainly manage a lot more for much less. The site you are on manages more than 110,000+ sees per month with plenty of room left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, email, 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 gos to, however it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 monthly tier. I have a client who began with the Startup strategy, however quickly ended up with a custom strategy.
And as pointed out earlier that doesn’t even include much of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra costs & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you need to factor those into the cost. You can’t utilize them to spread out the cost of your plan- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are aiming to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is an expensive option, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Start-up
The Startup package is the most standard plan and will set you back $25 monthly. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 sees monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
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 much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or require a warranty that your site can deal with 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d recommend this option to small companies, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good money and desire guarantees that nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 per year or two months free if you pay annually.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 gos to per month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 websites included a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing business, and it might be a while before you need to upgrade. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will come in helpful if you have a complex issue that you need to resolve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the best worth alternative. This one costs $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits per month.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We recommend this alternative for a fast-growing blog or service. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the assistance center.
You can save $580 or more months complimentary with annual pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical site or large organization, the Custom strategy may be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of gos to per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will have to talk to a sales rep to get your individualized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also uses proprietary assistance ought to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The company also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by picking to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into site speed, but the general rule is that the more complicated your site is, the more complex the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a primarily text site with a couple of standard plugins and a few small images, you’ll be great with an economical shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually additional plugins, customized theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these features integrated with good levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress installation.
A slow website doesn’t imply that you require a bigger, much better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, but in some cases it’s more about caching certain resources in a particular order and enhancing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Imagine you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling 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 quickly as you grow. There are lots of options … but either you or a developer need to execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed issues. They have tailored servers with very aggressive caching and much more sophisticated “stack” than a common web host. They likewise have trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even enable caching plugins on their installs since they have such a tailored caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well 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 theme, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how rapidly the server returned enough information to begin filling the page.
It’s nice to have that kind 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 even better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services since you are free to concentrate on speed factors that you can quickly manage like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just offers an integrated CDN, however they likewise provide global data centers in case your audience is primarily 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 since they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include an international CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website load quick for customers worldwide 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 websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing sites is among the strong points of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of procedures to protect WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall software to obstruct the current 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 assistance for any concerns regarding security.
They provide webinars on security.
They publish security standards and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Introduce your first website.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater performance.
Both beginners 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 subscription charges is unique in the hosting industry.
It allows you to try the service in a risk-free way.
Keep in mind: this choice is not readily available on custom 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, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they provide a great service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t want to worry about hosting issues.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go check out WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. So do a test set up and see what you consider their backend. Be sure to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.