There are a lot of cheap hosts offered that supply a good service. WPEngine Portal
However, what if you’re searching for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll wish to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, providing managed strategies that are completely enhanced for the platform. Obviously, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t precisely cheap. You’ll desire to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to perform a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial functions, support alternatives, performance capabilities, and everything else you’ll require 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 handled WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen began 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 business 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 factors to select WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, assistance, and management, however these are difficult to measure. Some features stick out when you search the interface, nevertheless, that can give you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool developed to assist you accelerate your WordPress website by providing meaningful 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 whole, and the total size of the page. It even includes historic data on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can decrease page load.
You can develop your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment before making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid embarrassing mistakes on your website by making changes to a copy of your site prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make comprehensive modifications to your site without affecting your consumers.
WP Engine has a comprehensive list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively uncommon relocation, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those generally limited are plugins that have been noted to cause efficiency concerns and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made options offered 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 readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies include limitless data transfer. The plans vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some unique functions for WordPress users that many hosts don’t use, or charge extra for. These unique features consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately develop a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies consisting of latest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most advanced and comprehensive managed 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 effective functions might 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 your home here, but otherwise you’ll require to spend some time on the assistance site.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page packed in simply over two seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web only a little behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service should offer extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support website includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the action was quick and the representative experienced. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website filling speed is a leading concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom-made NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology ensure that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robot demands and offers load balancing, giving your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides site material to your visitors based on their area to boost your website’s speed and decrease latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why people continue to pay a premium price for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, roughly 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with improved SLA, which equates 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 monitors all the traffic going to your site and automatically spots and obstructs possible attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and spots 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 function to get you back up and running rapidly. This hosting service safeguards your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with client care via chat. The assistance team has an outstanding knowledge base and can help you solve issues rapidly. You get 24/7 phone assistance 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 site’s live variation and make changes or check brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area does not impact your live website. This function enables designers to deal with websites without disrupting the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function enables you to construct a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to await the client to add you to their WordPress site. Once finished, you can move the site to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This functionality saves time if you routinely develop websites 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 business viewpoint, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and deal remarkable services because location. However, this model locks out many people 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 require to look elsewhere. You’ll have to utilize third-party services for domain registration or email 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 limitations. This may not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your strategy as your website grows. Nevertheless, substantial spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal business can cost you substantial overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the expense? The answer depends on figuring out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the price. You can even get devoted hosting for the exact same cost as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most notably, peace of mind. 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 usually paying for efficiency & not needing to believe excessive about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based on the features you’re getting- you truly do not get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will consider your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally logging in often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unneeded.
Many shared hosting servers can deal with the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My personal site a shared hosting strategy 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 dependable VPS, you can definitely deal with a lot more for much less. The website you are on deals with 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 strategy.
They are relatively transparent about how they count check outs, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” site owners how rapidly they can enter the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup plan, but rapidly wound up with a custom plan.
And as mentioned earlier that doesn’t 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 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 websites, you need to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your plan- particularly 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 site files- WP Engine is an expensive choice, especially compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Startup
The Startup plan is the most standard strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 check outs per month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets small websites and blogs with this plan, but we think it may be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t want to take any possibilities with uptime or require a guarantee that your site can deal with 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d recommend this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making great money and want guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 each year or 2 months complimentary if you pay annually.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing services and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs monthly.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you require to upgrade. With this strategy, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in helpful if you have a complicated issue that you require to fix quickly.
You can conserve 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 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 sees monthly.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We suggest this option 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 save $580 or 2 months free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
Finally, if you have a mission-critical website or big service, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of sees monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will need to talk to a sales rep to get your individualized quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy also uses proprietary support needs to 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 company likewise has 3 information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by choosing to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks destructive attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that enter into website speed, however the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your site is, the more complicated the solutions to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a couple of standard plugins and a few small images, you’ll be fine with an affordable shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually extra plugins, custom theme files, lots of images, widgets, ads, types and more.
All these features combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
A sluggish website doesn’t indicate that you require a bigger, much better server. It does imply that you need to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, however sometimes it’s more about caching particular resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Imagine you are trying to transport a trailer with a pickup. Envision your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you may just require to remove the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires assistance to remain quickly as you grow. There are lots of services … but either you or a designer should execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have customized servers with very aggressive caching and even more sophisticated “stack” than a typical webhosting. They also have trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and recognize the exact chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even enable caching plugins on their installs since they have such a personalized caching setup.
The intriguing thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still succeed on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, additional scripts, a lot of uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how rapidly the server returned enough data to start filling the page.
It’s great to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how big or complicated 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 may get with other services since you are free to concentrate on speed aspects that you can quickly manage like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just provides an integrated CDN, however they also offer global 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 exactly that. And considering that they work on Google Cloud, you don’t have to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of an international CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will assist your site load quick 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 approximated 78% of hacked sites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing websites is among the strong points of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several procedures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall program to obstruct the current threats.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can assist you recover 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 support for any concerns concerning security.
They supply webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and lists for designers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Launch your first website.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with greater effectiveness.
Both newbies and experienced WordPress website owners will find the assistance documentation invaluable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all membership fees is unique in the hosting market.
It enables you to try the service in a safe way.
Note: this option is not readily available on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but what is best for you based upon your objectives, spending plan, resources & habits.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they provide an excellent service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t want to fret about hosting problems.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go check out WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. So do a test install and see what you think of their backend. Be sure to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.