There are plenty of low-cost hosts available that provide a good service. WPEngine Increase Upload Size
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, offering managed plans that are completely enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly cheap. For that reason, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense before purchasing.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial functions, support options, performance capabilities, and everything else you’ll need to understand. 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 handled WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the increasing 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 company has won multiple 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 less expensive WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, support, and management, however these are tough to quantify. Some functions stick out when you browse the interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to assist you speed up your WordPress website by offering significant metrics on efficiency.
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 total size of the page. It even includes historic information on your site’s performance over the past 6 months and suggestions 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 embarrassing mistakes on your website by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your developers to make extensive changes to your site without affecting your customers.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably unusual relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those normally limited are plugins that have actually been noted to cause efficiency issues and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just offers managed WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies include unlimited information transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some unique functions for WordPress users that most hosts do not offer, or charge additional for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately produce a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies including newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine provides the most sophisticated and comprehensive 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 imply a steep 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 some time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page filled in just over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service ought to provide extra worth through its assistance, and WP Engine delivers. The support site consists of videos and articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress performance that many WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction was quick and the agent experienced. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If site filling speed is a leading concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom-made NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation make sure that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robotic requests and uses load balancing, providing your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides site material to your visitors based on their area to increase your website’s speed and reduce latency. You get this capability totally free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s tough 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, approximately four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted SLA, which equates 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 monitors all the traffic going to your website and automatically finds and obstructs prospective attacks. Additionally, the hosting service automatically updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click remediation feature to get you back up and running rapidly. This hosting service safeguards your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with consumer care through chat. The support team 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 assistance on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your site’s live version and make changes or check brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This function enables designers to work on websites without interfering with the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature allows you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You do not need to wait for the customer to add you to their WordPress site. As soon as finished, you can transfer the website to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality saves 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 an organization perspective, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and offer exceptional services because area. This model locks out numerous people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll require to look in other places. You’ll have to utilize third-party services for domain registration or email 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 may not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always update your strategy as your website grows. However, substantial spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal organization can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? The response depends on figuring out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the exact same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the price. You can even get devoted hosting for the exact same price as WP Engine. What you are really spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most significantly, peace of mind. The ultimate 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 usually paying for performance & not needing to think too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s pricing based upon the functions you’re getting- you actually do not get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and typically logging in frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unnecessary.
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 fundamental caching) handled 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 definitely deal with a lot more for much less. The website you are on deals with more than 110,000+ sees per month with plenty of room 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 gos to, however it can still be rather a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can get into the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, however quickly ended up with a custom-made plan.
And as discussed earlier that doesn’t even consist of a number of the functions you do not 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 extra expenses & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test sites, you need to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to expand the expense of your strategy- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are aiming to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your website files- WP Engine is a costly option, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup package is one of the most fundamental plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 sees per month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets little sites and blogs with this strategy, however we believe it might be overkill for many people in this classification. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or require a guarantee that your website can handle 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d suggest this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making good money and desire guarantees that absolutely nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 annually or 2 months free if you pay annually.
Growth
The development plan targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten websites included a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while before you require to upgrade. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will can be found in convenient if you have a complex problem that you need to fix rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or more months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale plan as the best worth option. This one costs $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to per month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites included.
We advise this choice for a fast-growing blog site 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 two months complimentary with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical website or big company, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of visits per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will have to talk to a sales rep to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy also provides proprietary assistance must something fail.
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 3 information 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 market.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into website speed, but the guideline is that the more complicated your website is, the more complicated the options to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a primarily text site with a couple of basic plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with an economical shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s usually additional plugins, customized theme files, lots of images, widgets, ads, types and more.
All these functions combined with good levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress installation.
But a sluggish site does not imply that you need a bigger, better server. It does suggest that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, however often it’s more about caching particular resources in a specific order and optimizing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Imagine you are attempting to carry a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might just require 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 aid to stay quickly as you grow. There are lots of options … but either you or a designer need to implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed concerns. They have personalized servers with incredibly aggressive caching and a lot more sophisticated “stack” than a typical webhosting. They likewise have trained support who will enter into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even allow caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have actually such a personalized caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated 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 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 better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services since you are free to concentrate on speed elements that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just offers an incorporated CDN, however they also supply worldwide information 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 given that they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of an international CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will assist your site load quick for consumers 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Protecting websites is among the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The company takes several procedures to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an upgraded firewall to obstruct the most recent threats.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can assist you recuperate your website in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website offers 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 guidelines and lists for developers and engineers.
If your site 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 find out how to:.
Release your very first site.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater performance.
Both novices and experienced WordPress website owners will find the assistance documentation invaluable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all subscription charges is unique in the hosting industry.
It allows you to check out the service in a safe method.
Note: this option is not available on customized hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is finest for you based upon your objectives, budget, resources & habits.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer an excellent service with a strong product. As a handled WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unequaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website developers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t want to fret about hosting issues.
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 guarantee. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make certain to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.