There are plenty of low-cost hosts available that provide a decent service. WPEngine Overages
However, what if you’re trying to find more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll wish to check out our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, providing handled strategies that are completely enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly cheap. Therefore, you’ll would like to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to perform an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, assistance options, efficiency capabilities, and whatever else you’ll need to know. Let’s get going!
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 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 rising 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 several 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 less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, but these are tough to quantify. Some functions stick out when you search the user interface, however, that can provide you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to help you accelerate your WordPress website by offering significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how quickly your page rendered, how long it took to load in its totality, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historic 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 site in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications 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 developers to make extensive changes to your site without affecting your customers.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those typically limited are plugins that have been noted to trigger performance concerns and security holes. For important functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made options offered that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only provides handled WordPress hosting. There are five different plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include unlimited information transfer. The plans vary based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some distinct features for WordPress users that most hosts don’t provide, or charge additional for. These special functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly develop a copy of your site for screening
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge innovations consisting of newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine provides the most sophisticated and extensive handled WordPress hosting features.
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, however the powerful features might imply a steep knowing curve for inexperienced 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 require to invest a long time on the support website.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page loaded in simply over two seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web only a little behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service need to offer extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance site includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with aid on deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the action was quick and the agent knowledgeable. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If website loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robotic demands and offers load balancing, providing your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website content to your visitors based upon their place to increase your website’s speed and decrease latency. You get this capability for free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why people continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, roughly 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced 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 below the warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine monitors all the traffic going to your site and immediately spots and obstructs potential attacks. Additionally, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to get rid of possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click remediation function to get you support and running quickly. Lastly, 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 connect with client care through chat. The assistance group has an excellent knowledge base and can assist you solve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all plans.
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 perform in the staging area does not affect your live site. This feature allows developers to work on websites without hindering the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature permits you to construct a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to await the customer to add you to their WordPress site. Once finished, you can transfer the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality saves time if you frequently build 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 works with WordPress. From a business viewpoint, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and deal remarkable services in that area. However, this design locks out many individuals who could 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 need to look in other places. You’ll need to utilize third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is shown in its rates structure. You will be penalized for exceeding your plan’s visitor limits. This might not be a problem if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly update your plan as your site grows. Significant spikes in traffic throughout product launches or seasonal company can cost you substantial excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the cost? The response depends on finding out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can deal with the very same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the price. You can even get committed hosting for the very same rate as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most importantly, comfort. The supreme question 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 efficiency & not needing to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the features you’re getting- you actually don’t get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and generally logging in often), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the rate. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) managed more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trusted VPS, you can definitely deal with a lot more for much less. The site you are on handles more than 110,000+ visits 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 relatively transparent about how they count visits, however it can still be rather a surprise for “little” website owners how rapidly they can enter the $290 per month tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup plan, but rapidly wound up with a custom strategy.
And as discussed earlier that does not even include a lot of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limits on local media storage. Anything above the limits requires extra expenses & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the rate. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your strategy- especially if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are looking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your site files- WP Engine is an expensive alternative, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup package is the most standard strategy and will set you back $25 monthly. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 gos to each month.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets small sites and blogs with this strategy, but we think it might be overkill for most people in this category. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any possibilities with uptime or require a warranty that your website can deal with 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d recommend this alternative to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great money and want guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 per year or 2 months complimentary if you pay yearly.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing companies and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 sees per month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten websites included a while.
This plan is a fantastic entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone support in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will be available in useful if you have an intricate problem that you require to solve rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or two months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the very best value option. This one expenses $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to per month.
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 assistance.
You can conserve $580 or two months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or large service, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Countless sees monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will have to speak with a sales rep to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also offers proprietary assistance needs to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The business also has three information 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 market.
WP Engine obstructs harmful attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into site speed, but the general rule is that the more complicated your website is, the more intricate the options to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a few fundamental plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be fine with an affordable shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s normally extra plugins, customized theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, types and more.
All these features combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
But a sluggish site does not imply that you require a larger, better server. It does imply that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, but in some cases it’s more about caching specific resources in a specific order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to transport a trailer with a pickup. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might simply need to eliminate the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to remain quick as you grow. There are lots of services … but either you or a designer must execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and a lot more sophisticated “stack” than a normal web host. They also have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even permit caching plugins on their installs since they have actually such a customized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers on WP Engine (who has a puffed up theme, 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 begin loading the page.
It’s nice to have that kind of speed right out of the box- 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 obsessed about speed, you can get even much better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services considering that you are totally free to focus on speed factors that you can easily manage like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only supplies an incorporated CDN, but they also supply global 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 precisely that. And considering that they run on Google Cloud, you don’t need to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include an international CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website load quick for customers around the globe by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An approximated 78% of hacked sites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several steps to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an updated firewall software to block the current risks.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recover your website in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website supplies a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical assistance for any questions regarding security.
They provide webinars on security.
They release security standards and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Introduce your first website.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater performance.
Both beginners and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will find the support documentation indispensable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all membership fees is distinct in the hosting industry.
It allows you to try the service in a risk-free way.
Note: this option is not readily available 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 upon your objectives, spending plan, resources & habits.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a fantastic service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They use more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic sites that do not want to worry about hosting concerns.
If managed hosting is a suitable for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. Do a test install and see what you believe of their backend. Be sure to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.