There are a lot of inexpensive hosts readily available that offer a good service. WPEngine Reverse Proxy
However, 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 webhosting, offering managed strategies that are fully optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly low-cost. Therefore, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to 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 options, performance abilities, and everything else you’ll require to know. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading handled WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need 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 business has won numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to select WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, assistance, and management, however these are tough to quantify. Some functions stand apart when you search the user interface, nevertheless, that can offer you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to assist you speed up your WordPress website by providing significant 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 overall size of the page. It even includes historic data on your website’s efficiency over the past 6 months and recommendations on how you can lower page load.
You can develop your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment before making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid awkward mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make extensive changes to your website without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a comprehensive list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively unusual relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those generally restricted are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to trigger efficiency issues and security holes. For essential functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only uses managed WordPress hosting. There are five different plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include unrestricted information transfer. The strategies 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 includes some distinct functions for WordPress users that most hosts don’t use, or charge extra for. These unique functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly produce a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies including newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most innovative and detailed managed 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, but the powerful functions may imply a steep learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right in your home here, however otherwise you’ll need to spend a long time on the support site.
In our testing, the default WordPress web page loaded in just over two seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web only somewhat behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service should offer additional worth through its support, and WP Engine provides. The support website consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress functionality that many WordPress hosts don’t go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the action was quick and the representative knowledgeable. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If website loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom 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, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides website material to your visitors based on their area to improve your website’s speed and minimize latency. You get this capability totally free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s tough to beat WP Engine’s performance, 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 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 guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and immediately spots and blocks possible attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine automatically backups your site every day and has a one-click repair function to get you back up and running quickly. This hosting service protects your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Phenomenal Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care by means of chat. The support group has an exceptional knowledge base and can help 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 website’s live variation and make changes or test brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you perform in the staging area doesn’t affect your live website. This function enables designers to deal with sites without interfering with the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this feature allows you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to await the client to add you to their WordPress site. When finished, you can move the website to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you routinely construct websites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are utilizing any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine just deals with WordPress. From a service viewpoint, it makes sense to focus on a single market and offer extraordinary services because area. This model locks out many people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your email account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll need to look in other places. You’ll have to use third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its prices structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your plan’s visitor limits. This may not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can always update your strategy as your website grows. Significant spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal organization can cost you significant excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is costly. Is it worth the expense? The response depends on finding out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get devoted hosting for the very same rate as WP Engine. What you are truly spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most notably, assurance. The ultimate question is just 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 normally spending for efficiency & not needing to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices based on the features you’re getting- you really do not get a great deal.
And if you are the type who will think of your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally visiting regularly), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unneeded.
Many shared hosting servers can handle the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the cost. My personal website a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with standard caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reputable VPS, you can definitely deal with a lot more for much less. In fact, the website you are on handles more than 110,000+ visits monthly with a lot of room delegated spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, e-mail, 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 check outs, however it can still be rather a surprise for “little” site owners how rapidly they can get into the $290 each month tier. I have a client who started with the Startup plan, but rapidly ended up with a custom-made strategy.
And as pointed out previously that does not even include a lot of the features you do not get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires extra expenses & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test sites, you need to factor those into the rate. You can’t utilize them to spread out the cost of your strategy- especially if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are seeking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your site files- WP Engine is an expensive alternative, especially compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Startup
The Startup bundle is the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 sees each month.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets small sites and blog sites with this plan, however we think it may be overkill for many people in this category. You can get a far much better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not want to take any chances with uptime or need 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 blog sites making good cash and desire guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can save $60 each year or more months free if you pay each year.
Growth
The development plan targets growing companies and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 gos to per month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten sites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while prior to you need to upgrade. With this strategy, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will be available in convenient if you have an intricate issue that you need to resolve quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or 2 months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale strategy as the best value option. This one costs $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs monthly.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 sites included.
We advise this option for a fast-growing blog site or organization. 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 totally free with annual pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or big company, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of sees monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will have to speak to a sales representative to get your individualized quote depending on your requirements. This plan also provides proprietary support ought to 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 facilities.
The business also has 3 data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website 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 go into site speed, but the guideline is that the more complicated your website is, the more complicated the services to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a primarily text site with a couple of fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with a budget-friendly shared hosting strategy from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s typically additional plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, forms and more.
All these functions integrated with good levels of traffic can begin to decrease your WordPress setup.
But a sluggish website does not suggest that you need a larger, much better server. It does suggest that you require to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, however often it’s more about caching certain resources in a particular order and enhancing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Picture you are attempting to carry a trailer with a pickup truck. Imagine your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might simply need to remove the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs help to remain fast as you grow. There are a lot of solutions … however either you or a designer need to execute them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed concerns. They have actually customized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and much more advanced “stack” than a typical web host. They also have actually trained support who will go into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have such a personalized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still succeed on their platform since their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a puffed up theme, extra scripts, a lot of uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how rapidly the server returned enough information to begin loading the page.
It’s nice to have that sort of speed right out of package- and have it remain that way no matter how huge or complex the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get even much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services since you are free to concentrate on speed elements that you can quickly control like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only provides an incorporated CDN, but they likewise provide worldwide information centers in case your audience is mostly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are attempting 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 do not have to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include an international CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will assist your site load quickly for clients worldwide by serving it to them from the network node that’s geographically closest to them.
Security and Backups
An approximated 78% of hacked websites are WordPress websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Securing websites is one of the strong suits of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several measures to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall program to block the current threats.
All websites 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 site supplies 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 regarding security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Launch your very first site.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both beginners and experienced WordPress site owners will find the assistance documents invaluable.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all subscription charges is special in the hosting market.
It enables you to check out the service in a safe method.
Keep in mind: this choice is not readily available on custom hosting plans.
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 objectives, budget, resources & practices.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they use a fantastic service with a strong item. As a handled WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They provide more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unequaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic websites that do not want to worry about hosting issues.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go check out WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back guarantee. Do a test install and see what you think of their backend. Make certain to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.