There are lots of inexpensive hosts offered that provide a decent service. WPEngine Logo
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to take a look at our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, providing handled plans that are totally optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly inexpensive. You’ll desire to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential features, assistance options, performance capabilities, and everything else you’ll require to know. Let’s get started!
WP Engine Video Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcpf7ULveLk
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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 entrepreneur Jason Cohen began 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 business has actually won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to pick WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, assistance, and management, however these are hard to measure. Some functions stand apart when you search the interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool designed to help you accelerate your WordPress website by using meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, for how long it took to pack in its entirety, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historic information on your site’s performance over the past six months and suggestions on how you can minimize page load.
You can establish your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid embarrassing errors on your website by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make extensive modifications to your website without impacting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those usually limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger efficiency concerns and security holes. For important functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only provides managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 various plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of unlimited information transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan includes dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some special functions for WordPress users that many hosts do not provide, or charge extra for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately create a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations including latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most innovative and extensive handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is expert and well set out, however the powerful features might suggest a high knowing curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll need to spend a long time on the assistance site.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page filled in simply over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest responses we’ve checked, with rival Liquid Web only slightly behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service need to use extra worth through its support, and WP Engine provides. The assistance website consists of videos and articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with help on deeper WordPress performance that numerous WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response was quick and the agent well-informed. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website packing speed is a leading concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation guarantee that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robotic requests and uses load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides site material to your visitors based on their area to improve your site’s speed and reduce latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s difficult to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium price 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 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 assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your website and instantly finds and blocks potential attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to remove possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration function to get you back up and running quickly. This hosting service safeguards your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact client care by means of chat. The assistance group has an exceptional knowledge base and can assist you resolve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or evaluate new plugins and styles. Anything you perform in the staging area doesn’t affect your live website. This feature allows designers to deal with sites without interfering with the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature permits you to construct a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to await the customer to include you to their WordPress website. When completed, you can transfer the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you routinely 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 a service viewpoint, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and offer extraordinary services because area. However, this model 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 website host, you’ll require 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 punished for exceeding your plan’s visitor limitations. This might not be a problem if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your strategy as your website grows. However, significant spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal company can cost you substantial overage 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 spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the rate. You can even get devoted hosting for the exact same price as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most significantly, 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 plan, you are usually paying for performance & not needing to believe too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s pricing based upon the functions you’re getting- you truly don’t get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and typically logging in regularly), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unneeded.
Lots of shared hosting servers can deal with the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My individual website a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) managed more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trustworthy VPS, you can definitely manage a lot more for much less. The site 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 spend for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter strategy.
They are fairly transparent about how they count check outs, but it can still be quite a surprise for “little” site owners how rapidly they can get into the $290 monthly tier. I have a client who started with the Startup plan, however rapidly ended up with a custom-made plan.
And as discussed earlier that doesn’t even consist of a lot of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limitations on local media storage. Anything above the limits needs additional expenses & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably 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 cost. You can’t use them to spread out the cost of your plan- specifically if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are wanting to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is a costly option, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup bundle is one of the most standard plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 sees per month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website included.
WP Engine targets small sites and blog sites with this plan, however we believe it might be overkill for most 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 guarantee that your site can handle 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d suggest this choice to small companies, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great money and desire guarantees that nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 each year or two months complimentary if you pay yearly.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 gos to per month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten sites included a while.
This plan is a fantastic entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while before you need to upgrade. With this strategy, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will be available in helpful if you have a complicated issue that you need to deal with quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months complimentary with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale plan as the very best value option. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 sees monthly.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites included.
We suggest this alternative for a fast-growing blog or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the support center.
You can conserve $580 or more months free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom-made
If you have a mission-critical site or large business, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of visits monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to speak with a sales representative to get your individualized quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy likewise uses proprietary assistance should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The company also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by picking to host your website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs malicious attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into site speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your site is, the more complicated the services to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a primarily text website with a few fundamental plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be great with an inexpensive shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s normally additional plugins, custom-made theme files, great deals of images, widgets, ads, types and more.
All these features combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
A sluggish website does not imply that you need a larger, better server. It does imply that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as simple as getting a more effective server, however in some cases it’s more about caching certain resources in a specific order and enhancing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture you are attempting to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Envision your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may just need to remove the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs help to remain fast as you grow. There are plenty of solutions … but either you or a designer need to execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed issues. They have tailored servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a typical web host. They likewise have trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress set up and identify the exact chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs since they have such a tailored caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still succeed on their platform since their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients 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 data to begin filling the page.
It’s nice to have that type 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 consumed about speed, you can get back at much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services since you are free to concentrate on speed aspects that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an incorporated CDN, however they also offer worldwide data centers in case your audience is mainly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And given that they operate on Google Cloud, you do not have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include a worldwide CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will help your site load quickly for customers 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 websites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing sites is one of the fortes of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The company takes numerous steps to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall program to block the most recent hazards.
All sites 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 site 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 relating to security.
They offer webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Release your very first website.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both newbies and skilled WordPress website owners will find the assistance paperwork vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all subscription charges is unique in the hosting industry.
It enables you to check out the service in a safe way.
Keep in mind: this option is not offered on custom hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is finest for you based upon your goals, spending plan, resources & routines.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they provide a great service with a solid item. As a managed WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They provide more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic websites that do not wish to worry about hosting problems.
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 warranty. So do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make sure to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.