There are plenty of inexpensive hosts offered that offer a good service. WPEngine Redis
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll want to have a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, providing managed strategies that are fully enhanced for the platform. Of course, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely cheap. For that reason, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service deserves the expense prior to buying.
To help you out, we’re going to conduct an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial functions, assistance alternatives, efficiency abilities, and everything else you’ll require to understand. Let’s start!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading handled WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a requirement 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 actually won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to select WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, assistance, and management, however these are hard to measure. Some functions stand out when you browse the user interface, however, that can provide you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool developed to assist you speed up your WordPress website by using meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, how long it took to pack in its entirety, and the total size of the page. It even consists of historic information on your website’s performance over the past 6 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 modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating mistakes on your website by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make substantial changes to your site without impacting your consumers.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those generally restricted are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger efficiency concerns and security holes. For crucial features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made options available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of endless information transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom plan includes dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some unique features for WordPress users that many hosts don’t provide, or charge additional for. These special functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately create a copy of your site for screening
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge technologies consisting of latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine offers the most sophisticated and extensive managed WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is expert and well set out, but the powerful functions may mean a high knowing curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right in the house here, however otherwise you’ll require to spend some time on the assistance site.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page filled in just over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web only slightly behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service ought to offer additional worth 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 much deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts do not go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the response fasted and the representative educated. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site filling speed is a leading priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology make sure that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robot demands and provides load balancing, providing your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides website content to your visitors based on their location to increase your website’s speed and minimize 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 individuals continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, roughly four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced SLA, which equates 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 track of all the traffic going to your site and instantly finds and obstructs potential attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to remove potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click restoration function to get you support and running quickly. Finally, this hosting service safeguards your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care by means of chat. The assistance group has an outstanding knowledge base and can help you resolve problems rapidly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or check new plugins and themes. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This function allows developers to deal with websites without interfering with the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature enables you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait for 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 performance saves time if you routinely build 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 only deals with WordPress. From a business perspective, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and offer exceptional services because location. This design locks out lots of individuals who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll need 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 shown in its prices 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 always update your strategy as your website grows. However, significant spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal organization can cost you substantial overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the cost? The response lies in determining what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the exact same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get dedicated hosting for the exact same rate as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most significantly, comfort. The ultimate 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 typically spending for efficiency & not needing to think excessive about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the functions you’re getting- you truly don’t get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will think of your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and typically logging in regularly), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Many shared hosting servers can handle the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the cost. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) managed more than 15,000+ visits 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+ gos to each month with lots of room left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, e-mail, 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 fairly transparent about how they count check outs, but it can still be quite a surprise for “little” website owners how rapidly they can get into the $290 per month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, but quickly wound up with a custom strategy.
And as mentioned previously that doesn’t even consist of 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 limitations on local 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 couple of side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the rate. You can’t utilize them to expand the cost of your strategy- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are looking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your site files- WP Engine is an expensive choice, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Start-up
The Startup bundle is one of the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 check outs per month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets small websites and blog sites with this strategy, but we believe it might be overkill for most 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 opportunities with uptime or require an assurance that your website can deal with 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d advise this option to small companies, affiliate sites, and blogs making good money and desire assurances that nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 annually or two 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 sees each month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is an excellent entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while before you require to upgrade. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will be available in helpful if you have an intricate concern that you need to deal with rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the very best value alternative. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits each month.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We suggest this choice for a fast-growing blog site or company. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the support.
You can conserve $580 or two months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom-made
If you have a mission-critical website or large organization, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Countless sees per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will have to speak to a sales associate to get your customized quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy likewise uses proprietary support ought 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 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 malicious attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that enter into website speed, but the general rule is that the more complex your website is, the more intricate the services to speed ended up being.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a few fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with an inexpensive shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s usually extra plugins, customized style files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, types and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
However a slow site doesn’t imply that you need a larger, better server. It does suggest that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as basic as getting a more powerful server, however in some cases it’s more about caching specific resources in a certain order and enhancing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Envision you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Picture your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might simply need to eliminate the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires aid to remain quick as you grow. There are lots of solutions … however either you or a developer should implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed concerns. They have actually customized servers with incredibly aggressive caching and a lot more innovative “stack” than a common web host. They also have actually trained assistance who will go into your WordPress install and recognize the exact chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t 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 do well on their platform since their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated style, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how rapidly the server returned enough information to start loading the page.
It’s good to have that kind of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how big or complex the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services considering that you are complimentary to focus on speed elements that you can easily manage like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just offers an integrated CDN, but they also supply worldwide information centers in case your audience is mainly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are attempting to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And since they work on Google Cloud, you don’t need to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a worldwide CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will help your site load fast for consumers 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 firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting sites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of procedures to protect WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall program to obstruct the latest hazards.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recover your site 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 concerns concerning security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security standards and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Launch your very first site.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Manage your hosting account with higher effectiveness.
Both newbies and experienced WordPress site owners will find the assistance documentation important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all subscription fees is distinct in the hosting market.
It enables you to try out the service in a risk-free way.
Note: this option is not offered on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is finest for you based upon your goals, budget plan, resources & habits.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they provide an excellent service with a solid item. As a handled WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They provide more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t want to fret about hosting issues.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go take a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. Do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Be sure to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.