There are lots of low-cost hosts offered that provide a good service. WPEngine Nginx Config
However, 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, using managed plans that are completely optimized for the platform. Obviously, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely low-cost. Therefore, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense before buying.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct an extensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, support options, efficiency capabilities, and everything else you’ll need 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 business in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the increasing popularity 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 contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to select WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, support, and management, but these are hard to quantify. Some functions stick 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 created to help you speed up your WordPress website by providing significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, how long it required to pack in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historic data on your website’s performance over the past six months and suggestions on how you can decrease page load.
You can develop your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid awkward mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your designers to make substantial changes to your site without impacting your clients.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual relocation, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those typically limited are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to cause efficiency concerns and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made options offered that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just offers handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 different strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include unrestricted information transfer. The strategies vary based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan consists of dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority support
WP Engine consists of some special functions for WordPress users that many hosts don’t use, or charge additional for. These special functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly create a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies including most current PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine provides the most innovative 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 professional and well set out, but the effective functions might imply a steep 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, however otherwise you’ll need to invest a long time on the assistance website.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page loaded in simply over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service should offer extra value through its assistance, and WP Engine delivers. The support website consists of videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with aid on deeper WordPress performance that many WordPress hosts do not go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response was quick and the representative knowledgeable. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site filling speed is a top priority, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of customized NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robotic requests and provides load balancing, offering your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based upon their location to increase your website’s speed and minimize latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals 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 further increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted SLA, which translates to a little under an hour of downtime per year. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls listed below the warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your site and instantly identifies and blocks possible attacks. In addition, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to remove possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click repair function to get you back up and running rapidly. This hosting service protects your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Sensational Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact consumer care by means of chat. The assistance group has an excellent knowledge base and can assist you solve problems rapidly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or evaluate brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you perform in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This function permits developers to work on sites without interfering with the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature permits you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You do not need to await the client to include you to their WordPress website. As soon as completed, you can move the website to the customer 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 utilizing any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you are out of luck. WP Engine just deals with WordPress. From a service point of view, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and deal extraordinary services because location. This design locks out many people who could otherwise benefit 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 elsewhere. You’ll have to utilize third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its pricing structure. You will be penalized for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limitations. This might not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your strategy as your site grows. Considerable spikes in traffic during item 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 answer lies in finding out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the exact same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the rate. You can even get dedicated hosting for the exact same rate as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, comfort. The ultimate concern is just 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 think too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a 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 of your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and usually logging in frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unneeded.
Numerous shared hosting servers can handle the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the cost. My personal site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with standard caching) handled more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a dependable VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. In fact, the site you are on manages more than 110,000+ visits monthly with plenty of space delegated 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 strategy.
They are relatively transparent about how they count sees, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” site owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 per month tier. I have a client who started with the Startup plan, however rapidly wound up with a custom plan.
And as pointed out previously that doesn’t even include a lot of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limitations on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional costs & 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 have to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your strategy- especially if you are hitting your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are aiming to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is an expensive option, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Start-up
The Startup package is one of the most fundamental strategy and will set you back $25 each month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 gos to monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this strategy, however we think it may be overkill for many people in this classification. You can get a far much 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 deal with 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d recommend this choice to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making great money and want guarantees that absolutely nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 each year or 2 months totally free if you pay every year.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 gos to each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
Ten websites consisted of a while.
This plan is a terrific entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this strategy, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will be available in useful if you have an intricate concern that you require to fix rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale plan as the best worth alternative. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 sees each month.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We advise 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 assistance center.
You can conserve $580 or two months totally free with annual pre-paid billing.
Custom
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical site or big company, the Custom strategy 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 have to speak with a sales associate to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy also provides proprietary assistance must something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The business likewise has three information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by choosing to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into website speed, but the general rule is that the more complex your website is, the more complicated the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a mostly text website with a few basic plugins and a few small images, you’ll be great with a budget friendly shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s normally additional plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, ads, kinds and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress installation.
However a slow website does not indicate that you require a bigger, much better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, however in some cases it’s more about caching specific resources in a certain order and optimizing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Envision you are trying to carry a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may just require to eliminate the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to stay fast as you grow. There are lots of services … however either you or a developer must execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed issues. They have personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and even more innovative “stack” than a typical webhosting. They also 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 allow caching plugins on their installs because they have actually such a customized caching setup.
The intriguing 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 one of my clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, additional scripts, too many 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 information to begin loading the page.
It’s good to have that sort of speed right out of package- and have it remain 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 even better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services considering that you are complimentary to concentrate on speed elements that you can quickly control like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an integrated CDN, however 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 tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And considering that they work on Google Cloud, you do not need to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include an international CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website load quick for consumers around the globe 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. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing sites is among the strong points of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous measures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep track of an upgraded firewall to block the most recent risks.
All websites 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 supplies 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 supply webinars on security.
They publish security standards and lists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Release your very first site.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both novices and knowledgeable WordPress site 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 special in the hosting market.
It allows you to try the service in a risk-free method.
Note: this alternative is not offered on custom-made hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, however what is finest for you based on your goals, spending plan, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a terrific service with a solid product. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They provide more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unmatched for smart DIYers, WordPress website developers and/or high-traffic websites that do not want to stress over hosting problems.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. So do a test set up and see what you consider their backend. Be sure to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.