There are plenty of low-cost hosts available that supply a good service. WPEngine Network Solutions
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll wish to take a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, 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 precisely cheap. You’ll want to understand whether this hosting service is worth the cost prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to perform a comprehensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, assistance alternatives, efficiency abilities, and everything else you’ll require to understand. Let’s get started!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading handled WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising 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 company has won numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to select WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, however these are hard to quantify. Some functions stand out when you browse the interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool designed to assist you accelerate your WordPress website by providing significant 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 totality, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historic information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can reduce 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 before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make comprehensive changes to your website without impacting your consumers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those typically limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger efficiency problems and security holes. For important functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made options available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only uses handled WordPress hosting. There are five different plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of unrestricted information transfer. The strategies vary based upon:
- number of WordPress sets up
- 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 most hosts don’t use, or charge extra for. These special functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately create a copy of your site for screening
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations including most current PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine provides the most advanced and comprehensive managed WordPress hosting functions.
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 functions may imply a steep knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll need to invest a long time on the support website.
In our screening, the default WordPress home page filled in just over two seconds. This is among the fastest responses we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web only somewhat behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service should provide extra worth through its support, and WP Engine provides. The assistance website includes videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with assistance on deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the action was quick and the representative experienced. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If website packing speed is a leading priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robotic demands and offers load balancing, giving your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website material to your visitors based upon their area to increase your site’s speed and lower latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why people continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted SLA, which translates to a little under an hour of downtime annually. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls below the guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and automatically spots and blocks prospective attacks. In addition, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to remove prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine automatically backups your site every day and has a one-click remediation feature to get you support and running rapidly. This hosting service safeguards your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with customer care by means of chat. The assistance group has an exceptional knowledge base and can assist you solve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your website’s live variation and make changes or test new plugins and styles. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This feature enables developers to work on sites without hindering the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature permits you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait for the customer to include you to their WordPress website. As soon as finished, you can move the website to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you frequently develop 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 service perspective, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and offer remarkable services in that location. Nevertheless, this model locks out lots of people who might 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 website host, you’ll need to look elsewhere. 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 rates structure. You will be penalized for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limits. This may not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly update your plan as your website grows. Substantial spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal business can cost you significant excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? The response lies in determining what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the very same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the cost. You can even get committed hosting for the same price as WP Engine. What you are actually paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, comfort. The supreme 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 strategy, you are typically paying for performance & not needing to think too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s pricing based on the features you’re getting- you truly do not get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and usually visiting regularly), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Numerous shared hosting servers can handle the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My personal site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) handled more than 15,000+ sees in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on handles more than 110,000+ sees per month with plenty of space left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, email, RSS apps, etc with an InMotion VPS. I pay for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter plan.
They are fairly transparent about how they count sees, however it can still be rather a surprise for “little” site owners how rapidly they can enter the $290 per month tier. I have a client who began with the Startup strategy, but rapidly wound up with a custom strategy.
And as mentioned previously that does not even consist of a number of the functions you do not get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limitations on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires extra expenses & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test sites, you have to factor those into the rate. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your strategy- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are wanting to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your site files- WP Engine is a costly choice, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Start-up
The Startup plan is one of the most basic plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 check outs monthly.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One website included.
WP Engine targets small websites and blog sites 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 want to take any possibilities with uptime or need a warranty that your site can manage 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d advise this choice to small companies, affiliate websites, and blog sites making good money and desire assurances that nothing will change.
You can save $60 annually or two months free if you pay each year.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing companies and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 sees each month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 websites consisted of a while.
This plan is a terrific entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will can be found in convenient if you have a complex problem that you require to resolve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months complimentary with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale plan as the very best value alternative. This one expenses $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs monthly.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We advise 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 free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical website or large business, the Custom strategy may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will need to speak with a sales rep to get your personalized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also provides exclusive assistance must something fail.
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 data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by picking to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into website speed, but the guideline is that the more complicated your website is, the more complex the services to speed ended up being.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text site with a couple of standard plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be great with a budget friendly shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s usually extra plugins, custom theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these functions combined with good levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
A sluggish website doesn’t mean that you require a larger, much better server. It does suggest that you need to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, however in some cases it’s more about caching certain resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to carry a trailer with a pickup. Picture your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might simply need to eliminate the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs assistance to remain fast as you grow. There are plenty of options … but either you or a developer must implement them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually tailored servers with incredibly aggressive caching and a lot more sophisticated “stack” than a normal webhosting. They also have actually trained support who will enter 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 personalized caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still do well on their platform because their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my customers 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 determines how quickly the server returned enough information to start loading the page.
It’s great to have that type of speed right out of package- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or complicated the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services considering that you are complimentary to focus on speed elements that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an incorporated CDN, however they likewise supply international data centers in case your audience is mainly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are attempting to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And because they operate on Google Cloud, you do not need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a global CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will assist your site load fast for clients all over 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting sites is one of the strong suits of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several procedures to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep track of an updated firewall software to obstruct the current risks.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can assist you recover your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website 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 concerns regarding security.
They provide webinars on security.
They release security standards and lists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Release your first website.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with higher performance.
Both beginners and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will discover the assistance paperwork important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all membership fees is distinct in the hosting market.
It enables you to try the service in a risk-free method.
Keep in mind: this option is not offered on customized 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, budget plan, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they provide a terrific service with a solid item. As a handled WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unequaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site 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 assurance. Do a test install and see what you believe of their backend. Be sure to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.