There are a lot of low-cost hosts readily available that provide a decent service. WPEngine Global Edge Security
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 review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, offering handled strategies that are fully enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t precisely low-cost. You’ll desire to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct a comprehensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, support alternatives, efficiency capabilities, and whatever else you’ll require to know. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading managed WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner 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 company has won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to pick WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, assistance, and management, but these are difficult to measure. Some functions stand apart when you browse the user interface, however, that can offer 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 significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, how long it took to load in its totality, and the total size of the page. It even includes historic data on your website’s performance 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 prior to making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid awkward errors on your website 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 affecting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those normally restricted are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger efficiency issues and security holes. For crucial features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made alternatives offered that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. There are five various strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies include limitless data transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some special functions for WordPress users that many hosts do not offer, or charge extra for. These unique features consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly create a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Innovative technologies consisting of newest PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine provides 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 user interface is expert and well laid out, but the powerful functions might mean a steep learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right at home here, however otherwise you’ll require to spend some time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page packed in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web just a little behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service must offer additional worth through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance website includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with assistance on deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts don’t go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the reaction fasted and the agent well-informed. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If site packing speed is a leading concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robotic requests and offers load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site material to your visitors based upon their place to enhance your website’s speed and reduce latency. You get this ability for free 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 cost for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, approximately four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted 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 below the assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your website and automatically spots and obstructs possible attacks. Additionally, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to get rid of potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration function to get you support and running quickly. Finally, this hosting service safeguards your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact consumer care via chat. The support team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you fix 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 permits you to clone your site’s live version and make changes or test new plugins and styles. Anything you perform in the staging area does not affect your live site. This function permits designers to work on sites without hindering the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function enables you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You do not have to wait for the customer to include you to their WordPress site. When finished, you can move the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality saves time if you regularly develop websites 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 just deals with WordPress. From a company perspective, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and deal exceptional services because area. This design locks out numerous people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll require to look in other places. You’ll need 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 prices structure. You will be punished for exceeding your plan’s visitor limits. This might not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your strategy as your website grows. However, considerable spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal company can cost you substantial overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in figuring out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the very same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the cost. You can even get dedicated hosting for the very same cost as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. The supreme question 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 usually paying for performance & not having to think too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the functions you’re getting- you really do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will consider your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally logging in regularly), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unneeded.
Numerous shared hosting servers can deal with the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the cost. My individual website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with fundamental caching) managed more than 15,000+ sees in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a reputable VPS, you can certainly manage a lot more for much less. The website you are on handles more than 110,000+ visits per month with plenty of room 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 relatively transparent about how they count gos to, but it can still be quite a surprise for “small” website owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup plan, however rapidly wound up with a customized strategy.
And as mentioned previously that does not even include many of the features you do not get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on local media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra costs & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test sites, you need to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your plan- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are seeking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your website files- WP Engine is a costly alternative, especially compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Start-up
The Startup bundle is the most standard plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 visits monthly.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets little websites and blog sites with this strategy, however we think it might be overkill for many people in this category. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t want to take any opportunities with uptime or require an assurance that your site can handle 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this option to small businesses, affiliate websites, and blogs making great money and desire assurances that absolutely nothing will change.
You can save $60 annually or two months complimentary if you pay each year.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing services and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
10 websites included a while.
This plan is an excellent entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you need to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will come in handy if you have a complex concern that you require to resolve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or more months complimentary with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale plan as the best worth option. This one expenses $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to monthly.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We recommend this option 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 support center.
You can save $580 or 2 months free with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical website or big organization, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of sees monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will have to speak with a sales associate to get your tailored quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also provides proprietary assistance ought to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The company likewise has 3 data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by selecting to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks destructive attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into site speed, but the guideline is that the more complicated your site is, the more intricate the services to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a couple of basic plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with a cost effective shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually extra plugins, custom-made style files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, forms and more.
All these features integrated with decent levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress setup.
However a sluggish website doesn’t imply that you need a larger, much better server. It does imply that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as simple as getting a more effective server, however often it’s more about caching certain resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Imagine you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup. Imagine your trailer keeps getting 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, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires help to remain fast as you grow. There are a lot of services … but either you or a developer should execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually customized servers with incredibly aggressive caching and a lot more sophisticated “stack” than a common webhosting. They also have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress install and determine the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have actually such a personalized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still do well on their platform because their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, additional scripts, too many uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how rapidly the server returned enough data to begin filling the page.
It’s great to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it stay 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 much better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services because you are free to focus on speed aspects that you can quickly control like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just offers an integrated CDN, but they likewise provide international data centers in case your audience is mostly 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 given that they run on Google Cloud, you do not need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a global CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will assist your website load fast for clients 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 websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is among the strengths of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous steps to safeguard WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an updated firewall software to obstruct the current dangers.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can assist you recover 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 concerns concerning security.
They offer webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Introduce your very first website.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with greater effectiveness.
Both beginners and skilled WordPress website owners will discover the support paperwork important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership costs is special in the hosting market.
It allows you to check out the service in a risk-free way.
Note: this option is not readily available on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is best for you based on your objectives, budget, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they provide an excellent service with a solid product. As a handled WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t want to fret about hosting concerns.
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 assurance. Do a test install and see what you think of their backend. Be sure to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.