There are plenty of cheap hosts offered that provide a good service. WPEngine Login
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll wish to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, offering handled strategies that are fully optimized for the platform. Naturally, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly low-cost. You’ll want to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct a comprehensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key functions, assistance options, performance capabilities, and whatever else you’ll need to understand. Let’s start!
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 one of the leading handled WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial entrepreneur 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 offices 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 reasons to pick WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, but these are difficult to quantify. Some functions stand out when you browse the user interface, nevertheless, that can give you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to help you accelerate your WordPress site by providing significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how quickly your page rendered, how long it took to pack in its entirety, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historic information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and suggestions on how you can minimize page load.
You can establish your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid embarrassing mistakes on your website by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your developers to make comprehensive modifications to your site without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those usually restricted are plugins that have been kept in mind to cause efficiency problems and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made options offered that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 various strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of unrestricted data transfer. The plans vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some special features for WordPress users that many hosts don’t offer, or charge extra for. These special functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly create a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies including latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most advanced and thorough managed WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is professional and well set out, however the effective functions might suggest a steep learning curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll require to spend a long time on the support website.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page packed in just over two seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web only slightly behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service should offer additional worth 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 functionality that many 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 assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If site loading speed is a top priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robot 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 location to enhance your site’s speed and lower latency. You get this ability totally free with all WP Engine plans.
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 4 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 each year. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls listed below the assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your website and instantly spots and obstructs possible attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service instantly updates and spots 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 support and running rapidly. This hosting service safeguards your website 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 contact client care via chat. The support team has an exceptional knowledge base and can assist you resolve issues rapidly. 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 site’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 permits designers to work on sites without disrupting the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature permits you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait for the client to add you to their WordPress site. Once completed, you can transfer the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you frequently develop websites for clients.
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 works with WordPress. From a service point of view, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and deal exceptional services because location. However, this model locks out many people who could otherwise gain 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 site host, you’ll need to look somewhere else. You’ll need to use third-party services for domain registration or email accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its rates structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limitations. This may not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your plan as your site grows. Nevertheless, considerable spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal business can cost you significant excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the cost? The response lies in determining what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the very same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the rate. You can even get devoted hosting for the exact same rate as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, 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 strategy, you are usually spending for efficiency & 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 really do not get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and normally visiting frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Lots of shared hosting servers can handle the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My individual site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a trustworthy VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on handles more than 110,000+ check outs monthly with a lot of space delegated 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 strategy.
They are fairly transparent about how they count sees, but it can still be quite a surprise for “little” website owners how quickly they can enter the $290 monthly tier. I have a client who started with the Startup plan, but quickly ended up with a customized strategy.
And as mentioned earlier that doesn’t even consist of a number of the functions you do not 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 implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test sites, you need to factor those into the price. You can’t utilize them to spread out the cost of your strategy- especially if you are hitting your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are seeking 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 choices.
Startup
The Startup package is the most basic plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 gos to monthly.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this plan, but we believe it may be overkill for most people in this category. You can get a far much better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t want to take any chances with uptime or require an assurance that your site can manage 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this alternative to small businesses, affiliate websites, and blog sites making great cash and want guarantees that nothing will change.
You can save $60 each year or 2 months totally free if you pay each year.
Growth
The development plan targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 sees each month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
Ten websites consisted of a while.
This plan is a great entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will come in helpful if you have an intricate issue that you need to deal with quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or 2 months free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the best value alternative. This one costs $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 sees monthly.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites included.
We advise this choice for a fast-growing blog site or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the support center.
You can save $580 or more months totally free with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical site or large business, the Custom strategy may 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 talk to a sales representative to get your individualized quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy likewise provides proprietary assistance must 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 information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by selecting to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine obstructs malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into site speed, however the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your site is, the more intricate the services to speed become.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mostly text site with a few basic plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be great with a budget-friendly shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s generally additional plugins, custom-made theme files, great deals of images, widgets, ads, kinds and more.
All these features integrated with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
A slow site does not imply that you need a bigger, better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, but often it’s more about caching certain resources in a certain order and enhancing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Imagine you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup. Envision your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may just require to remove the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires assistance to stay quickly as you grow. There are a lot of options … but either you or a designer should implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed issues. They have tailored servers with extremely aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a normal web host. They also have trained assistance who will go into your WordPress set up and determine the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even permit caching plugins on their installs because they have such a personalized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed 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 puffed up style, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how rapidly the server returned enough information to begin filling the page.
It’s nice to have that sort of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how big or complex 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 may get with other services given that you are complimentary to concentrate on speed aspects that you can easily control like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just offers an incorporated CDN, however they also offer international data 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 precisely that. And given that they work on Google Cloud, you don’t have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include a worldwide CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will help your site load quick 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing websites is among the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The company takes several procedures to safeguard WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep track of an upgraded firewall software to block the most recent dangers.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recover 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 assistance for any questions relating to security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Launch your first site.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with greater effectiveness.
Both novices and skilled 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 special in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try out the service in a safe method.
Note: this choice 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 upon your objectives, spending plan, resources & routines.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a terrific service with a solid item. As a managed WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They provide more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unequaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic sites that do not want to stress over hosting problems.
If managed hosting is a suitable for you- then go check out WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. So do a test set up and see what you think about their backend. Be sure to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.