There are lots of low-cost hosts available that supply a good service. WPEngine Reset Environment
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, providing managed strategies that are fully enhanced for the platform. Obviously, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely cheap. You’ll want to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to carry out a comprehensive 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 started!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now one of the leading handled WordPress hosting companies 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 workplaces 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 adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, support, and management, however these are hard to quantify. Some functions stand out when you search the interface, however, that can offer you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to help you accelerate your WordPress website by using meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, how long it took to load in its whole, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historical information on your website’s efficiency over the past 6 months and recommendations on how you can reduce 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 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 enables your developers to make extensive changes to your website without affecting your customers.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly uncommon move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those normally limited are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to trigger performance concerns and security holes. For crucial functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has made alternatives readily available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 various plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include unrestricted information transfer. The plans differ based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan includes dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some special functions for WordPress users that a lot of hosts don’t offer, or charge additional for. These special functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately produce a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies including most current PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most innovative and detailed handled WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is expert and well set out, however the effective functions may indicate a steep learning 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 need to invest a long time on the assistance website.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page packed in simply over two seconds. This is among the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service need to use additional worth through its assistance, and WP Engine provides. The support website includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with assistance on much 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 experienced. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If site packing speed is a top concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of customized 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 provides load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website content to your visitors based on their area to boost your site’s speed and minimize latency. You get this capability totally free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium price for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, approximately four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted SLA, which translates to a little under an hour of downtime per year. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls below the warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and automatically spots and blocks prospective attacks. In addition, the hosting service instantly updates and patches the WordPress core to remove potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration feature to get you support and running rapidly. This hosting service safeguards your site versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact customer care via chat. The assistance group has an excellent knowledge base and can assist you resolve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all strategies other than 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 test brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This function allows designers to work on websites without disrupting the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function allows you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You do not need to await the customer to include you to their WordPress website. When finished, you can move the site to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you routinely 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 only deals with WordPress. From a service viewpoint, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and offer remarkable services because location. This design locks out lots of individuals 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 in other places. You’ll have to use third-party services for domain registration or email accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its pricing structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limitations. This may not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your website grows. However, considerable spikes in traffic throughout product launches or seasonal company can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? The answer depends on determining what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the exact same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the cost. You can even get dedicated hosting for the exact same cost as WP Engine. What you are really spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. The supreme concern is just 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 plan, you are typically spending for efficiency & not having to think too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the features you’re getting- you actually do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and generally visiting frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Numerous shared hosting servers can handle the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the price. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reputable VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. In fact, the site you are on handles more than 110,000+ check outs each month with plenty of room delegated spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, email, RSS apps, etc with an InMotion VPS. I pay 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 “small” site owners how quickly they can get into the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, however quickly ended up with a custom-made strategy.
And as pointed out earlier that does not even consist of a lot of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra expenses & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly 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 cost. You can’t utilize them to spread out the expense of your strategy- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are aiming to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your website files- WP Engine is a pricey option, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Startup
The Startup bundle is the most basic plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 sees monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets little sites and blogs with this strategy, but we think it may be overkill for many people in this classification. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or require a warranty that your website can manage 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d advise this choice to small companies, affiliate sites, and blogs making great money and desire assurances that nothing will alter.
You can save $60 each year or two months free if you pay yearly.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in convenient if you have a complicated issue that you require to solve rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the very best worth choice. This one costs $241 each month. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs monthly.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We recommend this alternative for a fast-growing blog site or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the support.
You can save $580 or more months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
Finally, if you have a mission-critical site or big business, the Custom strategy may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of check outs monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to talk to a sales rep to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy likewise provides exclusive support ought to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The business also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by selecting to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into website speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your site is, the more complex the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text site with a couple of standard plugins and a few small images, you’ll be fine with an affordable shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s typically additional plugins, customized theme files, lots of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these features combined with decent levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress setup.
But a sluggish site doesn’t imply that you require a bigger, better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, but sometimes it’s more about caching particular resources in a specific order and enhancing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Imagine you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup. Envision your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you may simply require to remove the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires assistance to remain quickly as you grow. There are plenty of solutions … but either you or a developer need to execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have personalized servers with extremely aggressive caching and much more advanced “stack” than a normal web host. They likewise have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and recognize the precise chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even allow caching plugins on their installs because they have actually such a tailored caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated theme, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how rapidly the server returned enough data to begin packing 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 huge or complicated the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get back at much better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services since you are totally free to concentrate on speed aspects that you can easily control like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an incorporated CDN, however they also supply worldwide data 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 exactly that. And considering that they operate on Google Cloud, you do not need to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies include a worldwide CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will assist your website load quick for consumers around 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 firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing sites is one of the strong points of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The company takes numerous procedures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an updated firewall program to obstruct the most recent 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 offers 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 standards and lists 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 find out how to:.
Introduce your very first website.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both novices and skilled WordPress website owners will discover the support documentation vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all subscription charges is distinct in the hosting market.
It allows you to try out the service in a risk-free method.
Note: this alternative is not available on custom hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but what is finest for you based on your goals, budget plan, resources & habits.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a fantastic service with a strong product. As a handled WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for smart DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that do not wish to fret about hosting problems.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. So do a test set up and see what you think about their backend. Make sure to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.