There are plenty of cheap hosts available that provide a decent service. WPEngine Multisite
However, what if you’re searching for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll wish to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, using handled strategies that are totally optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly inexpensive. Therefore, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense before buying.
To assist you out, we’re going to perform a thorough WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, assistance options, performance abilities, and everything else you’ll need to know. Let’s get started!
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 handled WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a requirement 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 company has won numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, assistance, and management, however these are difficult to measure. Some features stand out when you browse the interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to assist you speed up your WordPress site by providing meaningful metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how rapidly your page rendered, for how long it required to pack in its whole, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historical data on your website’s performance over the past six months and suggestions on how you can reduce page load.
You can develop your WordPress website 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 site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your developers to make extensive modifications to your website without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly 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 crucial functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives readily available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses handled WordPress hosting. There are five different plans available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of unlimited data transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some special functions for WordPress users that many hosts don’t offer, or charge additional for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly produce a copy of your site for screening
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Innovative technologies consisting of newest PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most advanced and extensive 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 expert and well set out, but the effective functions might imply a steep knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right in your home here, but otherwise you’ll need to spend some time on the support website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page packed in simply over two seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve tested, with rival Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service ought to offer additional worth through its support, and WP Engine provides. The support site includes videos and posts of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts don’t go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction was quick and the representative knowledgeable. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation make sure that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robotic demands and uses load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based upon their location to increase your site’s speed and reduce latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why people continue to pay a premium price for this service. WP Engine guarantees 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 improved SLA, which translates to a little under an hour of downtime annually. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls listed below the assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your website and automatically finds and blocks possible attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service instantly updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine immediately backups your site every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you back up and running rapidly. This hosting service protects your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Sensational Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact consumer care through chat. The support group has an exceptional knowledge base and can help you solve issues rapidly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support 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 do in the staging area doesn’t affect your live site. This feature allows designers to deal with sites without disrupting the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature enables you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You do not need to wait on the client to include you to their WordPress website. As soon as completed, you can move the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality saves time if you regularly construct websites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are utilizing 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 sense to concentrate on a single market and offer exceptional services in that location. However, this design locks out many people who might otherwise take advantage of WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your email account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll require to look elsewhere. You’ll need 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 rates structure. You will be penalized 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. Nevertheless, significant spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal service can cost you significant overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is costly. Is it worth the cost? The answer lies in finding out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the very same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the price. You can even get committed hosting for the same price as WP Engine. What you are truly spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most significantly, peace of mind. The ultimate concern 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 generally spending for performance & not having to believe excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based on the features you’re getting- you really don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and typically visiting regularly), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Lots of shared hosting servers can deal with the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the price. My personal website a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with basic caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trusted VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on handles more than 110,000+ gos to per month with plenty of space left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, email, 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 relatively transparent about how they count gos to, but it can still be rather a surprise for “small” website owners how rapidly they can enter the $290 monthly tier. I have a client who began with the Startup strategy, but quickly wound up with a customized plan.
And as discussed previously that does not even include a lot of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs additional expenses & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly 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 price. You can’t use them to expand the expense of your strategy- specifically if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your set up 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, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Start-up
The Startup bundle is one of the most fundamental strategy and will set you back $25 each month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 check outs each month.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets little sites and blogs with this plan, but 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 do not wish to take any chances with uptime or require a warranty that your site can handle 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this choice to small businesses, affiliate websites, and blog sites making good money and desire guarantees that nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 annually or two months complimentary if you pay each year.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing companies and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
Ten sites included a while.
This plan is a great 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 support in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will come in helpful if you have a complicated concern that you require to deal with rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the best worth option. This one expenses $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to monthly.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We recommend this choice for a fast-growing blog site or company. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance center.
You can conserve $580 or two months totally free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom-made
Finally, if you have a mission-critical website or large organization, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Countless visits monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will need to speak with a sales associate to get your customized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also provides proprietary assistance must something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The business likewise has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by picking to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into site speed, however the guideline is that the more intricate your website is, the more complicated the services to speed become.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a couple of standard plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with a budget-friendly shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually extra plugins, custom theme files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these features integrated with decent levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress installation.
But a slow website doesn’t indicate that you need a larger, much better server. It does suggest that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as basic as getting a more powerful server, but sometimes it’s more about caching particular resources in a certain order and enhancing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture you are attempting to transport a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might just need to eliminate the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires aid to stay quickly as you grow. There are plenty of options … but either you or a designer need to implement them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed issues. They have actually tailored servers with extremely aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a common webhosting. They also have actually trained support who will go into your WordPress install and determine the precise chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even enable caching plugins on their installs since they have such a personalized 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 bloated 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 start filling the page.
It’s nice to have that type of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or intricate 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 totally free to focus on speed factors that you can easily manage like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an incorporated CDN, but they also provide worldwide information centers in case your audience is primarily 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 since they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t need to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include an international CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will assist your site 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 websites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing sites is among the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous procedures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall to block the current threats.
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 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 concerns 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 supplies webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Release your first site.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both beginners and skilled WordPress website owners will find the support documents vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all subscription costs is distinct in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try the service in a risk-free way.
Note: this option is not offered on custom 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 on your objectives, spending plan, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer an excellent service with a strong product. As a handled WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that do not wish to worry about hosting concerns.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go check out WP Engine’s strategies 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. Make certain to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.