There are a lot of low-cost hosts readily available that offer a good service. WPEngine Ohsting
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll want to take a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, providing handled plans that are completely optimized for the platform. Naturally, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly 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 conduct a comprehensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, assistance options, efficiency abilities, and everything else you’ll need to know. 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 managed WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial entrepreneur 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 company has won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, but these are hard to measure. Some features stand out when you search the interface, however, that can offer you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to help you accelerate 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 fill in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historical data on your site’s performance over the past six months and recommendations 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 website by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make extensive modifications to your site without impacting your customers.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively uncommon move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those generally limited are plugins that have been noted to cause performance concerns and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has made options readily available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of unrestricted information transfer. The plans vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some distinct features for WordPress users that most hosts don’t offer, or charge extra for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly create a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies including newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and comprehensive managed WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is expert and well set out, but the powerful features may imply a steep knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right in the house here, but otherwise you’ll require to invest a long time on the assistance site.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page loaded in just over two seconds. This is one of the fastest reactions we’ve tested, with rival Liquid Web only a little behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service must use additional value through its support, 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 much deeper WordPress performance that numerous WordPress hosts don’t go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction fasted and the representative well-informed. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If site loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology ensure that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robotic demands and uses load balancing, offering your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides site content to your visitors based upon their location to improve your site’s speed and minimize latency. You get this capability totally free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium rate for this service. WP Engine guarantees 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 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 site and automatically identifies and blocks potential attacks. In addition, the hosting service immediately updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine immediately backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you back up and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service safeguards your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact consumer care through chat. The support team has an excellent knowledge base and can assist you resolve problems 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 enables you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or test brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This function allows designers to work on websites without disrupting the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function permits you to build a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait on the client to add you to their WordPress site. Once completed, you can move the site to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you frequently construct sites 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 just works with WordPress. From a business perspective, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and offer remarkable services in that area. This design locks out many people who might otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your email account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll need to look somewhere else. 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 shown in its pricing structure. You will be punished for surpassing your plan’s visitor limits. This may not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can always upgrade your strategy as your site grows. However, considerable spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal business can cost you significant overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The response depends on figuring out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the exact same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the rate. You can even get committed hosting for the exact same price as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most significantly, assurance. The supreme question 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 strategy, you are normally spending for performance & not needing to think too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based upon 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 updated and usually logging in frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My individual website a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with fundamental caching) managed more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can definitely manage a lot more for much less. The website you are on handles more than 110,000+ check outs 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 plan.
They are fairly transparent about how they count check outs, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” site owners how rapidly they can get into the $290 per month tier. I have a client who started with the Startup plan, but quickly wound up with a custom plan.
And as pointed out earlier 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 limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional expenses & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test websites, you need to factor those into the rate. You can’t utilize them to spread out the expense of your strategy- especially if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are looking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is a costly option, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Startup
The Startup plan is one of the most basic plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 visits monthly.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this plan, however we think it might be overkill for the majority of people in this category. You can get a far much better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any opportunities with uptime or need a guarantee that your site can deal with 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d recommend this alternative to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making good money and want assurances that absolutely nothing will change.
You can save $60 per year or more months complimentary if you pay each year.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing services and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 visits per month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 sites included a while.
This plan is a great entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you require to update. With this strategy, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will can be found in convenient if you have an intricate issue that you need to solve quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or more months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale strategy as the very best worth option. This one expenses $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We recommend this choice for a fast-growing blog site or service. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the support.
You can conserve $580 or two months totally free with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
Finally, if you have a mission-critical site or big company, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of check outs each month.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will need to talk to a sales associate to get your customized quote depending on your requirements. This plan likewise provides exclusive assistance ought to something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The business also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by picking to host your website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that enter into site speed, however the general rule is that the more complex your website is, the more intricate the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text site with a few fundamental plugins and a few small images, you’ll be fine with a cost effective shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s typically extra plugins, custom-made style files, lots of images, widgets, ads, kinds and more.
All these features integrated with good levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress installation.
A slow website does not mean that you require a bigger, better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting a more effective server, but often it’s more about caching certain resources in a certain order and enhancing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Envision you are trying to carry a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might just need to eliminate the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs assistance to remain quick as you grow. There are lots of options … however either you or a developer must execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed concerns. They have personalized servers with extremely aggressive caching and even more sophisticated “stack” than a normal web host. They also have actually trained assistance who will go into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even enable 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 additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated theme, extra scripts, too many 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 begin packing the page.
It’s great to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or intricate the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services since you are complimentary to focus on speed factors that you can quickly control like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only offers an incorporated CDN, however they likewise supply 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 do not need to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include a global CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will help your website load quickly for clients 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing websites is one of the fortes of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several procedures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall software to obstruct the current risks.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can assist you recuperate 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 supply webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Release your first website.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both novices and experienced WordPress site owners will find the assistance documentation invaluable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all subscription costs is unique in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try out the service in a risk-free method.
Note: this choice is not readily available on customized hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is best for you based upon your goals, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they use a fantastic service with a strong product. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They provide more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unequaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t want to worry about hosting concerns.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go check out 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 think about their backend. Make certain to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.