There are plenty of low-cost hosts available that supply a good service. WPEngine Htaccess
However, what if you’re trying to find 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, providing handled plans that are completely optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely inexpensive. You’ll want to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct a comprehensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial functions, support alternatives, performance capabilities, and everything else you’ll require to know. Let’s start!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading handled 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 company has actually 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 choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are difficult to quantify. Some features stick out when you browse the user interface, however, that can offer you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool developed to help you accelerate your WordPress website by using significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how quickly your page rendered, for how long it took to pack in its entirety, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical data on your site’s performance over the past 6 months and recommendations on how you can lower 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 humiliating errors on your website by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make substantial changes to your site without impacting your consumers.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those typically restricted are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to trigger efficiency concerns and security holes. For crucial features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made options available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just offers managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 different strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of endless data transfer. The strategies differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some unique 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 produce a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Innovative innovations including most current PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine uses the most advanced and extensive managed WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is professional and well laid out, but the powerful features might indicate a high knowing curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right at home here, but otherwise you’ll require to spend a long time on the assistance website.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page packed in simply over two seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve tested, with rival Liquid Web just a little behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service should provide extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance site includes videos and posts of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress performance that many WordPress hosts do not go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response was quick and the representative knowledgeable. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site filling speed is a top concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation guarantee that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and offers load balancing, giving your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website material to your visitors based on their place to boost your website’s speed and minimize latency. You get this ability free of charge with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why people 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 improved SLA, which translates 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 monitors all the traffic going to your site and immediately discovers and obstructs potential attacks. In addition, the hosting service instantly 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 feature to get you back up and running quickly. Finally, this hosting service secures your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care through chat. The assistance group has an excellent knowledge base and can assist you solve problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your site’s live version and make changes or evaluate brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not affect your live site. This function allows designers to deal with websites without disrupting the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature permits you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait on the customer to add you to their WordPress website. Once finished, you can transfer the site to the customer or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you regularly build sites 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 deals with WordPress. From a business point of view, it makes sense to focus on a single market and offer remarkable services because location. However, this model locks out many people who could otherwise take advantage of WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll need 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 strategy’s visitor limits. This may not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly update your strategy as your website grows. Considerable spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal business can cost you significant overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is costly. Is it worth the cost? The answer lies in determining what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get committed hosting for the exact same price as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most importantly, 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 strategy, you are generally spending for efficiency & not needing to believe excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the features you’re getting- you truly don’t get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will consider your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and typically logging in frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Numerous shared hosting servers can manage the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the rate. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ sees in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on handles more than 110,000+ visits per month with plenty of space 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 check outs, but it can still be quite a surprise for “small” website owners how quickly they can get into the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup plan, but rapidly ended up with a custom strategy.
And as discussed earlier that does not even consist of a number of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires extra expenses & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly 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 price. You can’t utilize them to expand the cost of your plan- especially if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are wanting to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your website files- WP Engine is a pricey alternative, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Startup
The Startup bundle is the most standard plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 visits each month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website included.
WP Engine targets little websites and blog sites with this plan, but we think it may be overkill for most people in this category. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not want to take any chances with uptime or require a warranty that your website can manage 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d suggest this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great cash and desire guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 annually or more months complimentary if you pay each year.
Growth
The development plan targets growing companies and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 gos to per month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
10 sites included a while.
This plan is an excellent entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you require to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone support in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will can be found in handy if you have an intricate issue that you require to fix quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or 2 months complimentary with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the very best worth option. This one costs $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 sees monthly.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We recommend this choice 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.
You can save $580 or more months totally free with annual pre-paid billing.
Custom-made
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical site or large company, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless check outs monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will need to speak to a sales associate to get your customized quote depending on your requirements. This plan likewise provides proprietary support needs to 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 business also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by choosing to host your site on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into site speed, however the general rule is that the more intricate 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 mostly text website with a few basic plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be fine with a budget-friendly shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s usually additional plugins, custom-made style files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these features integrated with good levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress setup.
But a slow website does not indicate that you require a larger, better server. It does indicate that you need to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as basic as getting a more powerful server, however in some cases it’s more about caching particular resources in a certain order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture 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 might just require to eliminate the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires assistance to remain quick as you grow. There are a lot of options … but either you or a designer need to implement them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed issues. They have actually personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and even more innovative “stack” than a normal webhosting. They likewise have actually trained support who will go into your WordPress install and identify the precise chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even enable caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have actually such a tailored caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed on their platform because their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, additional scripts, a lot of uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how rapidly the server returned enough information to start filling the page.
It’s good to have that type of speed right out of package- and have it remain that way no matter how huge 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 since you are complimentary to focus on speed factors that you can easily manage like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only supplies an incorporated CDN, but they likewise supply worldwide information 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 operate on Google Cloud, you do not have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of an international CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will help your site load fast for clients around the world 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 sites is among the strong suits of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several procedures to safeguard WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall software to block the current hazards.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can assist you recuperate your site 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 relating to security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Launch your very first site.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both beginners and experienced WordPress website owners will discover the support documentation important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all membership costs is special in the hosting market.
It allows you to experiment with the service in a risk-free way.
Note: this alternative is not readily available on custom-made 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 upon your objectives, budget plan, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they provide an excellent service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They use more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t wish to fret about hosting concerns.
If managed hosting is a suitable for you- then go take a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. So 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.