There are plenty of low-cost hosts readily available that provide a good service. WPEngine Seo
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll wish to have a look at our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, providing managed strategies that are totally enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly cheap. You’ll desire to understand whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to carry out a thorough WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, support options, performance abilities, and everything else you’ll require to know. Let’s start!
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 entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising appeal 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 business has won numerous awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to choose WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, support, and management, however these are difficult to measure. Some functions stick out when you browse the interface, however, that can provide you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool designed to assist you speed up your WordPress site by using meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how rapidly your page rendered, how long it required to pack in its entirety, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical data on your site’s performance over the past 6 months and suggestions on how you can minimize page load.
You can develop your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating errors on your website by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your developers to make extensive modifications to your site without affecting your consumers.
WP Engine has a comprehensive list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a relatively uncommon relocation, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those normally restricted are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger performance issues and security holes. For crucial 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 offers handled WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include unlimited data transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized plan consists of dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority support
WP Engine consists of some distinct functions for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not provide, or charge additional for. These special functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly create a copy of your site for screening
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Innovative technologies consisting of most current PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most sophisticated 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 mean a steep learning curve for unskilled 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 need to spend some time on the support website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page packed in just over two seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Assistance
A managed WordPress service should provide additional worth through its assistance, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance site includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with aid on deeper WordPress functionality that lots of WordPress hosts don’t go 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 plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If website filling speed is a top concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of custom NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robot requests and offers load balancing, providing your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides website material to your visitors based on their place to boost your website’s speed and minimize latency. You get this capability free of charge with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s difficult to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, approximately four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further 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 below the guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and immediately identifies and obstructs prospective attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click repair function to get you support and running quickly. Lastly, this hosting service safeguards your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, strength attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with consumer care by means of chat. The support team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you solve issues rapidly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your site’s live version and make changes or evaluate brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t affect your live website. This feature enables developers to deal with websites without hindering the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature enables you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You do not need to await the customer to include you to their WordPress site. As soon as completed, you can move the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you frequently develop sites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine just deals with WordPress. From a company perspective, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and offer extraordinary services in that area. This model locks out many 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 site host, you’ll require to look somewhere else. You’ll need to use third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is shown in its pricing structure. You will be punished for surpassing your plan’s visitor limitations. This may not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly update your plan as your website grows. Nevertheless, substantial spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal business can cost you significant overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The response depends on determining what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get devoted hosting for the exact same rate as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, assurance. The ultimate question 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 plan, you are typically paying for efficiency & not needing to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s rates based on the features you’re getting- you really don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and normally visiting regularly), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Numerous shared hosting servers can deal with the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the cost. My individual 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 reliable VPS, you can certainly manage a lot more for much less. In fact, the site you are on deals with more than 110,000+ sees monthly with plenty of room left to 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 strategy.
They are relatively transparent about how they count check outs, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” website owners how quickly they can get into the $290 per month tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup plan, but rapidly ended up with a customized strategy.
And as discussed earlier that doesn’t even consist of much 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 limitations on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra expenses & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably 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 rate. You can’t utilize them to spread out the cost of your plan- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your set up 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 choice, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Startup
The Startup bundle is the most fundamental strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 gos to monthly.
50GB bandwidth each month.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets little sites and blogs with this plan, however we think it might be overkill for most people in this category. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any possibilities with uptime or require a guarantee that your website can handle 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this alternative to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good money and desire guarantees that nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 each year or more months totally free if you pay annually.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing services and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 websites included a while.
This strategy is a great entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while before you need to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will can be found in handy if you have a complicated problem that you need to resolve rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months totally free with yearly 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 gos to monthly.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We recommend this option 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 two months complimentary with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical site or large company, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will have to speak to a sales associate to get your personalized quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy also offers proprietary assistance must something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The business likewise has three information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better website speeds by picking to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that enter into website speed, but the general rule is that the more intricate your website is, the more intricate the services to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a few basic plugins and a few small images, you’ll be great with a budget-friendly shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s typically extra plugins, custom theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these features combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
A slow website doesn’t indicate that you need a bigger, better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as basic as getting a more powerful server, however sometimes it’s more about caching specific resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. 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 consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to stay quick as you grow. There are plenty of options … however either you or a designer must implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed concerns. They have tailored servers with extremely aggressive caching and even more advanced “stack” than a common web host. They also have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and identify the exact chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs since they have such a customized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed 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, 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 information to start loading the page.
It’s good to have that sort of speed right out of the box- and have it stay that way no matter how big or complicated the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get back at much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services given that you are totally free to concentrate on speed factors that you can easily manage like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only offers an integrated CDN, but they also offer global data centers in case your audience is primarily 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 because they run on Google Cloud, you do not need to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a worldwide CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website load quickly for customers around the globe 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. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Securing websites is one of the fortes of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several steps to secure WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an upgraded firewall program to block the most recent threats.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can assist you recuperate 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 questions 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, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Launch your first site.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with greater performance.
Both newbies and knowledgeable WordPress site owners will find the support documentation vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all membership costs is distinct in the hosting market.
It allows you to check out the service in a risk-free way.
Keep in mind: this alternative is not available on customized hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, however what is best for you based upon your goals, budget plan, resources & routines.
If you are in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they use a fantastic service with a solid product. As a managed WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t want to fret about hosting issues.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go check out WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. Do a test install and see what you believe of their backend. Make sure to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.