There are lots of low-cost hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Redirect Rules
Nevertheless, what if you’re searching for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, providing managed plans that are completely enhanced for the platform. Of course, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely inexpensive. You’ll want to understand whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to carry out an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, assistance choices, performance capabilities, and everything else you’ll need to know. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re66PSKd7_E
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now one of the leading handled WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a requirement 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 actually won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly contributes to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to pick WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are hard to quantify. Some features stand out when you browse the interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool designed to help you speed up your WordPress website by offering meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, for how long it required to fill in its whole, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historic data on your website’s performance over the past 6 months and suggestions on how you can minimize page load.
You can establish your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating errors on your site by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make substantial modifications to your site without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a thorough 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 typically limited are plugins that have been noted to trigger performance problems and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made options readily available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides managed WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of unlimited data transfer. The plans differ based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority support
WP Engine consists of some unique features for WordPress users that many hosts do not offer, or charge additional for. These special features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately develop a copy of your site for screening
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations consisting of newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine provides the most innovative and extensive handled WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is professional and well laid out, however the effective functions may mean a steep learning curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right in your home here, however otherwise you’ll require to spend some time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page packed in simply over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest responses we’ve checked, with rival Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service need to offer additional worth through its assistance, and WP Engine provides. The support website consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress functionality that numerous WordPress hosts do not go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the action fasted and the representative well-informed. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If website packing speed is a leading concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom-made NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation make sure that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robot demands and provides load balancing, offering your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site material to your visitors based on their location to improve your site’s speed and decrease latency. You get this capability 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 rate 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 boosted 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 immediately identifies and blocks possible attacks. Additionally, the hosting service automatically updates and spots the WordPress core to get rid of possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you support and running rapidly. Finally, this hosting service secures your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with client care through chat. The support group has an exceptional knowledge base and can help you resolve problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans other than 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 site’s live variation and make changes or evaluate brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you carry out in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This feature allows designers to work on websites without hindering the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function permits you to construct a website from your WP Engine account. You do not have to wait for the customer to include you to their WordPress website. When finished, you can transfer the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you routinely 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 only deals with WordPress. From a service point of view, it makes sense to focus on a single market and deal exceptional services in that location. This design locks out lots of people who could 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 require to look somewhere else. 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 punished for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limitations. This may not be a problem if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your plan as your site grows. Significant spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal company can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? The answer lies in figuring out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get dedicated hosting for the very same price as WP Engine. What you are actually paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most notably, comfort. The supreme concern 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 paying for performance & not having to believe excessive about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s pricing based on the features you’re getting- you actually do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress updated and typically logging in frequently), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Many shared hosting servers can deal with the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the price. My individual website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with fundamental caching) handled more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can certainly deal with a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on deals with more than 110,000+ check outs per month with a lot of space delegated 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 gos to, however it can still be rather a surprise for “little” website owners how rapidly they can get into the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup strategy, however rapidly wound up with a custom-made plan.
And as discussed previously that doesn’t even consist of many of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limitations on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional costs & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly 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 price. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your plan- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are seeking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is a costly option, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Start-up
The Startup bundle is the most basic plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 check outs each month.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets little sites and blog sites with this strategy, however we think it might be overkill for the majority of people in this classification. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any chances with uptime or require a guarantee that your website can manage 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d recommend this choice to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good cash and desire assurances that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can save $60 annually or more months totally free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 gos to monthly.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 websites included a while.
This plan is a terrific entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while before 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 come in convenient if you have a complicated concern that you need to deal with quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or two months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale plan as the very best value alternative. This one expenses $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 visits monthly.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We suggest 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 save $580 or 2 months totally free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or big organization, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of gos to each month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will need to talk to a sales associate to get your personalized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also offers proprietary support should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The business also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by selecting to host your website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into site speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more complex your site is, the more complex the solutions to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text site with a couple of fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with an affordable shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually additional plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, forms and more.
All these features integrated with good levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress setup.
However a sluggish site does not imply that you need a bigger, much better server. It does imply that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, however often it’s more about caching particular resources in a specific order and enhancing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Picture you are attempting to haul a trailer with a pickup. Picture your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may simply require to remove the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires help to stay fast as you grow. There are plenty of solutions … however either you or a developer must implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed concerns. They have actually tailored servers with extremely aggressive caching and much more advanced “stack” than a common webhosting. They likewise have actually trained assistance who will go into your WordPress set up 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 tailored caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still do well on their platform since 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, 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 data to begin packing 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 intricate the website 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 might get with other services given 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 incorporated CDN, however they also supply global data centers in case your audience is mainly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And since they work on Google Cloud, you do not need to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include an international CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will assist your website load quickly for consumers 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 websites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Protecting websites is one of the fortes of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The company takes a number of measures to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep track of an upgraded firewall program to obstruct the current threats.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recover your site in case of an attack.
The WP Engine site provides a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical assistance for any concerns regarding security.
They offer webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and lists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Release your very first website.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both beginners and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will discover the assistance documentation important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all subscription costs is distinct in the hosting market.
It allows you to try the service in a safe way.
Keep in mind: this option is not readily available on custom hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is finest for you based on your goals, spending plan, resources & practices.
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 handled WordPress host, their rates 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 sites that do not want to stress over hosting issues.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go take a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make certain to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.