There are a lot of low-cost hosts available that provide a decent service. WPEngine Ipo
However, what if you’re searching for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, using managed strategies that are totally enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly cheap. You’ll desire 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 thorough WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, support options, performance abilities, and whatever else you’ll need to know. Let’s begin!
WP Engine Video Review
Sign up for a WP Engine plan and receive the Genesis Framework and 35+ StudioPress Themes free!
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 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 company has actually won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to select WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, support, and management, however these are hard to measure. Some functions stand out when you search the interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to assist you speed up your WordPress site by offering meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how rapidly your page rendered, the length of time it took to load in its totality, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical information on your site’s efficiency over the past 6 months and recommendations on how you can minimize page load.
You can develop your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid awkward errors on your site by making changes to a copy of your site prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your developers to make extensive changes to your website without affecting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those usually limited are plugins that have been noted to trigger efficiency problems and security holes. For essential functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 different strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include endless data transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some distinct features for WordPress users that the majority of hosts do not use, or charge extra for. These special features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately create a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Innovative technologies consisting of most current PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most advanced and detailed handled WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is expert and well set out, but the powerful functions might indicate 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 your home here, however otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the assistance site.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page loaded in just over 2 seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service must offer additional value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance site consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress performance that many WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction fasted and the representative well-informed. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If site loading speed is a leading priority, 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 quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and provides load balancing, offering your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides site content to your visitors based on their area to boost your site’s speed and reduce latency. You get this capability free of charge with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s difficult 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 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with improved 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 below the warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and instantly spots and obstructs potential attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service automatically updates and patches the WordPress core to get rid of potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click remediation feature to get you support and running quickly. Lastly, this hosting service protects your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with customer care via chat. The support team has an outstanding knowledge base and can help you resolve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or test new plugins and themes. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not affect your live site. This feature allows designers to deal with websites without interfering with the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function enables you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to await the client to include you to their WordPress site. As soon as finished, you can transfer the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you frequently construct sites 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 just deals with WordPress. From a business viewpoint, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and deal extraordinary 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 website host, you’ll require 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 prices structure. You will be penalized for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limits. This may not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your website grows. However, substantial spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal company can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? The answer depends on figuring out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the price. You can even get dedicated hosting for the exact same cost as WP Engine. What you are truly spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. 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 plan, you are normally spending for performance & not having to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s pricing based on the functions you’re getting- you truly do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and generally logging in regularly), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the price. 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 trusted VPS, you can definitely deal with a lot more for much less. The website you are on manages more than 110,000+ check outs 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 fairly 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 client who began with the Startup strategy, however quickly ended up with a customized strategy.
And as mentioned earlier that does not even consist of many of the features you do not get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limits on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional expenses & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably 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 rate. You can’t utilize them to expand the cost of your plan- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are aiming to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your website files- WP Engine is an expensive choice, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Start-up
The Startup plan is one of the most standard strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 check outs monthly.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets small websites and blogs with this plan, however we believe it may be overkill for the majority of people in this classification. 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 need a warranty that your website can handle 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d advise this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making great money and desire assurances that absolutely nothing will change.
You can save $60 annually or more months free if you pay annually.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing companies and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs per month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is an excellent entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while before you require to update. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will be available in handy if you have a complicated concern that you need to fix rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months complimentary with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the very best value choice. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 sees each month.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We recommend this alternative for a fast-growing blog site or organization. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the support.
You can save $580 or 2 months complimentary with annual pre-paid billing.
Custom-made
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical site or big service, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of sees per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will need to speak to a sales representative to get your individualized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also uses exclusive assistance should something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network facilities.
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 website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into site speed, however the general rule is that the more intricate your website is, the more complex the options to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a mainly text site with a few basic plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be fine with a budget friendly shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s generally additional plugins, custom-made theme files, great deals of images, widgets, ads, types and more.
All these features combined with good levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress installation.
A slow website doesn’t imply that you need a bigger, better server. It does imply that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting a more powerful server, however in some cases it’s more about caching particular resources in a specific order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Imagine you are attempting to transport 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 require to remove the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to remain quickly as you grow. There are a lot of services … however either you or a developer must implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed issues. They have tailored servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and even more sophisticated “stack” than a typical webhosting. They also have actually trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress set up and identify the precise chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even allow caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have such a personalized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed on their platform since their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers 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 quickly the server returned enough information to start packing the page.
It’s great to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or intricate the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get back at much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services because you are totally free to concentrate on speed elements that you can easily control like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just offers an integrated CDN, but they likewise supply international data centers in case your audience is mostly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are attempting to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And because they run on Google Cloud, you don’t have to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include a worldwide CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website 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 approximated 78% of hacked websites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is one of the strong suits of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of measures to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall software to obstruct the current risks.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can assist you recuperate your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site offers 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 developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Introduce your very first site.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with higher effectiveness.
Both novices and skilled WordPress site owners will find the assistance paperwork important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all subscription costs is special in the hosting market.
It allows you to try out the service in a risk-free method.
Keep in mind: this choice is not offered on custom-made 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 goals, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they provide a fantastic service with a solid item. As a handled WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t wish to fret about hosting issues.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go take a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. Do a test set up and see what you believe of their backend. Be sure to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.