There are a lot of inexpensive hosts readily available that provide a decent service. WPEngine Image Optimization
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 webhosting, using handled strategies that are totally enhanced for the platform. Of course, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely inexpensive. Therefore, you’ll would like to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost prior to purchasing.
To help you out, we’re going to perform a comprehensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key functions, support options, efficiency abilities, and whatever else you’ll require to know. Let’s get started!
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 business in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising appeal 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 numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to select WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, support, and management, however these are difficult to measure. Some features stick out when you search the interface, nevertheless, that can offer you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to assist you speed up your WordPress site by using significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, how long it required to load in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historic information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can lower page load.
You can develop your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid embarrassing mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your designers to make comprehensive modifications to your site without impacting your customers.
WP Engine has a comprehensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual relocation, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those usually limited are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to trigger performance concerns and security holes. For important functions 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 only uses managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 various strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans 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, client success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some special functions for WordPress users that a lot of hosts don’t provide, or charge additional for. These special features consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately create a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge technologies consisting of latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine offers the most innovative and comprehensive managed WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is professional and well set out, however the effective features might suggest a steep 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 assistance site.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page filled in simply over two seconds. This is one of the fastest reactions we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web only a little behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service need to provide additional value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance website consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with help on deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response was quick and the agent knowledgeable. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If site loading speed is a leading priority, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s combination of custom NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation make sure that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot demands and provides load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based on their location to increase your website’s speed and lower latency. You get this capability free of charge with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why people continue to pay a premium cost 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 translates to a little under an hour of downtime per year. 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 website and instantly identifies and obstructs possible attacks. In addition, the hosting service immediately updates and patches the WordPress core to remove potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine immediately backups your website every day and has a one-click repair function to get you back up and running rapidly. This hosting service safeguards your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact customer care by means of chat. The support group has an exceptional knowledge base and can assist you fix problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all strategies except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables 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 does not impact your live site. This function permits developers to deal with sites without hindering the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature enables you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait for the client to include you to their WordPress site. As soon as finished, you can transfer the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you routinely 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 works with WordPress. From an organization perspective, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and deal extraordinary services in that 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 have to utilize third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its prices structure. You will be punished for exceeding your plan’s visitor limits. This might not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your website grows. However, significant spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal business can cost you substantial overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The response lies in finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the rate. You can even get committed hosting for the very same rate as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most notably, peace of mind. The ultimate concern 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 spending for performance & not having to think too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s pricing based on the features you’re getting- you truly do not get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will think about your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and usually logging in regularly), 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 rate. My personal website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard 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 handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on deals with 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 spend for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count sees, however it can still be rather a surprise for “little” website owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 each month tier. I have a client who began with the Startup strategy, but quickly ended up with a custom-made strategy.
And as pointed out earlier that doesn’t even consist of a number of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. 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 restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the price. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your strategy- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are seeking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is an expensive alternative, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup package is the most fundamental plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 check outs each month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets small sites and blog sites with this plan, but we believe it might be overkill for the majority of people in this classification. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any possibilities with uptime or require a guarantee that your site can manage 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this alternative to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great cash and desire guarantees that nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 each year or more months totally free if you pay annually.
Growth
The development plan targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 gos to monthly.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 websites included a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while prior to you require to upgrade. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will be available in helpful if you have a complex problem that you need to fix quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or 2 months free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the very best worth choice. This one costs $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits monthly.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We advise this alternative for a fast-growing blog or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance center.
You can conserve $580 or more months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
Finally, if you have a mission-critical site or large company, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will need to speak with a sales associate to get your tailored quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also offers proprietary support needs to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network facilities.
The company likewise has 3 data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by picking to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that enter into site speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your website is, the more complicated the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text site with a few basic plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be great with an affordable shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s generally additional plugins, custom-made theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, types and more.
All these features combined with decent levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress setup.
However a slow website doesn’t suggest that you require a bigger, better server. It does imply that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, but often it’s more about caching specific resources in a particular order and enhancing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to carry a trailer with a pickup truck. Envision your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may simply need to eliminate the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires assistance to stay quickly as you grow. There are lots of solutions … however either you or a designer should execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have actually personalized servers with extremely aggressive caching and much more advanced “stack” than a common webhosting. They also have trained assistance who will go into your WordPress set up and recognize the specific chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even enable caching plugins on their installs since they have actually such a personalized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still do well on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for one of 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 determines how rapidly the server returned enough information to begin loading the page.
It’s good to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or intricate the website 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 complimentary 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 only supplies an incorporated CDN, but they also provide global data centers in case your audience is mostly 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 because they work on Google Cloud, you don’t need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include a worldwide CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will help your site load fast for customers around the globe 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 websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is among the strong points of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of steps to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an upgraded firewall program to block the current risks.
All websites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can assist you recuperate 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 questions relating to security.
They offer webinars on security.
They publish security standards and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Introduce your very first website.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with higher performance.
Both beginners and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will discover the assistance documents vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all membership fees is unique in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try the service in a risk-free method.
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 finest overall, but what is best for you based upon your objectives, spending plan, resources & routines.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer an excellent service with a solid product. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They provide more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t wish to stress over hosting problems.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. 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.