There are lots of cheap hosts offered that provide a decent service. WPEngine Inc
What if you’re looking 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, providing managed strategies that are fully optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly cheap. For that reason, you’ll need to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to purchasing.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct a thorough WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, assistance choices, performance capabilities, and everything else you’ll require to understand. Let’s start!
WP Engine Video Review
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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 business owner Jason Cohen started 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 community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are difficult to quantify. Some functions stand apart when you search the interface, however, that can offer you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to help you speed up your WordPress website by providing significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how rapidly your page rendered, how long it took to load in its whole, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historic information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can decrease 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 humiliating mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it permits your developers to make substantial changes to your website without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a comprehensive list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably uncommon relocation, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those normally limited are plugins that have actually been noted to trigger performance problems and security holes. For crucial functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made options offered that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of unlimited information transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan consists of 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 offer, or charge extra for. These unique features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately create a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Innovative innovations consisting of most current PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most sophisticated and detailed handled 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 functions might imply a high learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll need to spend a long time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page filled in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web just a little behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service ought to offer extra value through its assistance, and WP Engine provides. The support website consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress functionality 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 action was quick and the agent experienced. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s combination of custom NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robot demands and uses load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides website content to your visitors based upon their area to boost your website’s speed and reduce latency. You get this ability for 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 cost 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 warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine monitors all the traffic going to your site and immediately finds and blocks potential attacks. Additionally, the hosting service automatically updates and patches the WordPress core to get rid of prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you support and running quickly. This hosting service protects your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Phenomenal Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with client care by means of chat. The assistance team has an outstanding knowledge base and can help you solve problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or evaluate brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This feature allows developers to work on websites without hindering the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature enables you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait for the customer to add you to their WordPress site. When completed, you can move the site to the customer or host the website on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you routinely construct 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 works with WordPress. From a business viewpoint, it makes sense to focus on a single market and offer remarkable services in that location. However, this design locks out lots of people who might otherwise gain 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 elsewhere. You’ll have 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 pricing structure. You will be punished for surpassing your plan’s visitor limits. This might not be a problem if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your plan as your website grows. Significant spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal organization can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in figuring out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the very same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the rate. You can even get devoted hosting for the same cost as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, comfort. The supreme 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 strategy, you are normally spending for performance & not having to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s pricing based on the features you’re getting- you actually don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and generally logging in often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Numerous shared hosting servers can manage the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with basic caching) handled more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on manages more than 110,000+ visits 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 pay for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter strategy.
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 the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup strategy, however quickly ended up with a customized strategy.
And as mentioned earlier that doesn’t even consist of a lot of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limitations on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs additional expenses & technical implementation 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 rate. You can’t utilize them to spread out the expense of your plan- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are wanting to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your site files- WP Engine is an expensive option, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Startup
The Startup bundle is the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 each month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 sees each month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets small sites and blog sites with this plan, however we think it may be overkill for most people in this category. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not want to take any chances with uptime or require an assurance that your site can manage 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this option to small companies, affiliate websites, and blog sites making good cash and want guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can save $60 annually or two months free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing companies and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 visits per month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a great entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while before you require to update. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will can be found in handy if you have a complicated issue that you need to solve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale strategy as the best value choice. This one costs $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits per month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We recommend this option for a fast-growing blog or organization. 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 free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical site or large company, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of sees per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will need to speak with a sales associate to get your personalized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also uses exclusive support needs to something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The company also has 3 information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by selecting to host your website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into website speed, however the rule of thumb is that the more complex your site is, the more complex the services to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mostly text site with a couple of fundamental plugins and a few small images, you’ll be fine with a budget friendly shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s generally additional plugins, customized 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 installation.
But a sluggish site doesn’t imply that you require a bigger, much better server. It does suggest that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, however sometimes it’s more about caching particular resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Envision you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Picture your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you may just require to get rid of the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs assistance to stay quickly as you grow. There are a lot of solutions … but either you or a designer need to execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed issues. They have actually personalized servers with very aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a normal webhosting. They likewise have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and determine the exact chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even enable caching plugins on their installs because they have actually such a customized caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still do well on their platform since their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my customers on WP Engine (who has a puffed up theme, extra scripts, a lot of uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how quickly the server returned enough information to begin filling the page.
It’s nice to have that kind of speed right out of the box- and have it stay that way no matter how big or complex 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 considering that you are free to focus on speed factors that you can easily manage like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an integrated CDN, however they likewise offer worldwide information centers in case your audience is mostly 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 given that they run on Google Cloud, you don’t have to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of a worldwide CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will assist your site load quickly for clients all over the world by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An approximated 78% of hacked sites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting sites is among the strengths 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 updated firewall program to block the latest dangers.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recuperate your website in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website provides a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical support for any questions regarding security.
They offer webinars on security.
They release security standards and lists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Launch your first website.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both newbies and skilled WordPress website owners will find the support documents important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership costs is special in the hosting industry.
It enables you to check out the service in a risk-free way.
Keep in mind: this option is not offered 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 upon your goals, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer an excellent service with a solid item. As a handled WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They use more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website developers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t want to worry about hosting problems.
If managed hosting is a suitable for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make certain to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.