There are a lot of cheap hosts readily available that provide a good service. WPEngine Leadership
What if you’re looking 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 webhosting, offering handled strategies that are completely optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly cheap. You’ll desire to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense before making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct an extensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, assistance options, performance abilities, 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 managed WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen began 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 workplaces in San Antonio (Texas), London (England), Limerick (Ireland), Brisbane (Australia), and Kraków (Poland).
The business has won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to select WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are difficult to measure. Some features stand out when you search the user interface, nevertheless, that can give you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to assist you accelerate your WordPress website by offering significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how quickly your page rendered, the length of time it took to fill in its totality, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historical data on your website’s performance over the past six months and recommendations on how you can minimize page load.
You can establish your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating mistakes on your website 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 comprehensive modifications to your website without impacting your clients.
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 set up. Those normally restricted are plugins that have been noted to trigger efficiency problems and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made options available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of unrestricted data transfer. The strategies differ based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some special features for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not use, or charge extra for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly produce a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Innovative technologies including latest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine provides the most innovative and thorough handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is expert and well laid out, but the effective features may imply a steep learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be right at home here, but otherwise you’ll need to invest some time on the support website.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page loaded in simply over two seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service need to use additional value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support site includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress functionality that lots of WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the action fasted and the representative experienced. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If site filling speed is a top priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology ensure that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and offers load balancing, offering your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides site material to your visitors based upon their area to boost your website’s speed and lower latency. You get this capability for free 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 ensures 99.95% server uptime, roughly 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced SLA, which equates 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 spots and obstructs potential attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you support and running rapidly. This hosting service secures your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care via chat. The assistance team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you solve issues rapidly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or evaluate brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you carry out in the staging area doesn’t affect your live site. This function permits designers to work on sites without disrupting the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function allows you to build a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait for the client to add you to their WordPress site. As soon as completed, you can transfer the website to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality saves time if you frequently develop websites 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 just works with WordPress. From an organization point of view, it makes sense to focus on a single market and offer extraordinary services in that area. Nevertheless, this model locks out lots of 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 website host, you’ll require to look in other places. You’ll have to use 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 surpassing your strategy’s visitor limitations. This might not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly update your plan as your website grows. Nevertheless, substantial spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal business can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is costly. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in determining what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the price. You can even get committed hosting for the exact same rate as WP Engine. What you are actually paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. The ultimate concern is how much these things deserve to you.
Plans and Pricing
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
With a WP Engine strategy, you are typically spending for performance & not having to believe excessive about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s pricing 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 anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and normally visiting often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unneeded.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the rate. My individual website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with basic caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reputable VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. The site you are on manages more than 110,000+ gos to 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 visits, but it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how rapidly they can enter into the $290 each month tier. I have a client who began with the Startup strategy, but rapidly wound up with a customized plan.
And as pointed out earlier that doesn’t even consist of many of the features 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 needs extra expenses & technical implementation 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 websites, you have to factor those into the price. You can’t utilize them to spread out the cost of your strategy- specifically if you are hitting your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are looking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your site files- WP Engine is a costly option, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup plan is one of the most standard strategy and will set you back $25 monthly. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 visits monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets little sites and blogs with this strategy, however we believe it may be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any chances with uptime or require a guarantee that your site can manage 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d recommend this choice to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making great cash and want assurances that absolutely nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 each year or 2 months complimentary if you pay annually.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing services and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 sees each month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while prior to you need to upgrade. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will be available in useful if you have a complicated concern that you need to solve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or 2 months complimentary with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the very best value option. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs each month.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 sites included.
We suggest this alternative for a fast-growing blog or service. 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 annual pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or big business, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless check outs each month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will need to talk to a sales representative to get your personalized quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy likewise uses proprietary support ought to something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The business likewise has 3 information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by selecting to host your website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs destructive attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into website speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your site is, the more complex the services to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a mainly text website with a couple of fundamental plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be great with an economical shared hosting strategy from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s normally additional plugins, customized style files, lots of images, widgets, ads, types and more.
All these functions combined with good levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress setup.
But a slow site doesn’t suggest that you require a larger, better server. It does indicate that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting a more effective server, but sometimes it’s more about caching certain resources in a specific order and enhancing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Imagine you are trying to carry a trailer with a pickup truck. Picture your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may simply require to eliminate the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires aid to remain quick as you grow. There are a lot of options … but either you or a designer should execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed concerns. They have tailored servers with incredibly aggressive caching and a lot more sophisticated “stack” than a normal webhosting. They likewise have actually trained assistance who will go into your WordPress set up and determine the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even enable caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have such a customized 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 additional work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, extra 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 data to begin packing the page.
It’s nice to have that sort of speed right out of the box- and have it stay that way no matter how huge or complicated the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get even better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services since you are complimentary to concentrate 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 offers an integrated CDN, however they also offer global information centers in case your audience is mainly 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 since they work on Google Cloud, you don’t have to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a worldwide CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website load quickly for consumers 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 sites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting sites is among the strong suits of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous procedures to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall program to block the current dangers.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore 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 assistance for any questions relating to security.
They provide webinars on security.
They publish security standards and lists 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 discover how to:.
Launch your first website.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both novices and skilled WordPress website owners will find the support documentation important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership charges is unique in the hosting market.
It enables you to experiment with the service in a risk-free way.
Keep in mind: this alternative is not available on customized hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but what is best for you based on your goals, budget plan, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they use a great service with a strong product. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for smart DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that do not wish to stress over hosting concerns.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go check out WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. So do a test install and see what you think of their backend. Be sure to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.