There are a lot of low-cost hosts offered that provide a decent service. WPEngine Sla
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to take a look at our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, providing managed plans that are completely enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly cheap. You’ll desire 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 thorough WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial functions, assistance options, performance capabilities, and whatever else you’ll need to know. Let’s get going!
WP Engine Video Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnf3do933oY
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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 began WP Engine when he saw a need 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 won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to select WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, support, and management, but these are hard to quantify. Some functions stick 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 assist you speed up your WordPress site by offering meaningful metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, the length of time it required to pack in its entirety, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historic information 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 embarrassing errors on your website by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make substantial changes to your website without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a thorough list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those typically restricted are plugins that have actually been noted to cause performance problems and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just offers managed WordPress hosting. There are five various plans available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of unrestricted information transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan includes dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some unique features for WordPress users that the majority of hosts don’t offer, or charge additional for. These special features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: quickly develop a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies consisting of newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most innovative and thorough 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 professional and well laid out, but the effective functions may imply a high knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect rules, you’ll be right at home here, however otherwise you’ll require to invest a long time on the support site.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page loaded in simply over two seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve checked, with rival Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service need to use additional worth through its support, and WP Engine provides. The assistance website consists of videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress performance that many 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 well-informed. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Remarkable 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 technology make sure that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robotic requests and offers load balancing, offering your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides website material to your visitors based upon their area to boost your site’s speed and lower latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why individuals 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 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 listed below the assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps track of all the traffic going to your website and automatically finds and obstructs prospective attacks. Additionally, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to eliminate potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine automatically backups your site every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you support and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service safeguards your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, strength attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with client care through chat. The assistance group has an exceptional knowledge base and can help you fix issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area permits you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or evaluate new plugins and themes. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This feature allows developers to deal with websites without hindering the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function permits you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait for the customer to include you to their WordPress site. As soon as completed, you can move the website to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you regularly build 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 works with WordPress. From a service viewpoint, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and deal remarkable services because area. However, this design locks out many people who could otherwise take advantage of WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll need to look elsewhere. You’ll need 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 rates structure. You will be punished for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limitations. This might not be an issue if you have foreseeable traffic, and you can always update your plan as your website grows. Significant spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal service can cost you considerable excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the expense? The response depends on finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the rate. You can even get dedicated hosting for the same price as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most importantly, comfort. The ultimate 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 strategy, you are usually spending for efficiency & not having to believe excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices based upon the functions you’re getting- you actually don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and usually logging in regularly), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Many shared hosting servers can handle the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with fundamental caching) handled more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour duration 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 manages more than 110,000+ visits per month with lots of room delegated 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 sees, but it can still be quite a surprise for “small” website owners how rapidly they can enter into the $290 per month tier. I have a client who started with the Startup strategy, however rapidly ended up with a custom plan.
And as mentioned previously that doesn’t even include a number of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limits on local media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra costs & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test websites, you need to factor those into the rate. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your strategy- especially if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are seeking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your website files- WP Engine is a costly option, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Startup
The Startup plan is one of the most standard plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 gos to each month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets small websites and blog sites with this strategy, but we think it might be overkill for the majority of people in this category. You can get a far better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any opportunities with uptime or need a warranty that your site can handle 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d suggest this option to small companies, affiliate websites, and blogs making great money and desire assurances that absolutely nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 annually or 2 months free if you pay each year.
Growth
The development plan targets growing companies and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs monthly.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
10 sites included a while.
This strategy is a great entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while before you need to upgrade. With this strategy, you also 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 complex problem that you require to deal with quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or more months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale plan as the best worth alternative. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to per month.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 sites included.
We recommend this option for a fast-growing blog or company. 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 free with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical website or big organization, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless gos to each month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to speak to a sales representative to get your personalized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also uses exclusive support must something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network infrastructure.
The company also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by selecting to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs destructive attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into website speed, however the rule of thumb is that the more complex your site is, the more complicated the services to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a mostly text website with a couple of fundamental plugins and a few small images, you’ll be great with a budget friendly shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s typically additional plugins, custom theme files, lots of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these functions combined with good levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress setup.
However a slow site doesn’t suggest that you require a bigger, better server. It does mean that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, however often it’s more about caching specific resources in a specific order and enhancing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to carry a trailer with a pickup truck. Envision your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may just need to get rid of the emergency brake, set up a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs assistance to stay fast as you grow. There are lots of services … however either you or a developer need to execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have actually personalized servers with incredibly aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a typical web host. They also have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and recognize the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even permit caching plugins on their installs since they have such a tailored caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still succeed on their platform since their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my customers on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, additional scripts, too many uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how quickly the server returned enough information to begin filling the page.
It’s good to have that kind of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how big or intricate 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 because you are free to concentrate on speed factors that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just supplies an incorporated CDN, however they likewise provide international information centers in case your audience is primarily in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are attempting to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And because they run on Google Cloud, you don’t have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include a worldwide CDN (content shipment network).
The CDN will help your site 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 approximated 78% of hacked sites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Securing sites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several steps to protect WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep track of an upgraded firewall program to block the most recent hazards.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recuperate your website in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website 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 relating to security.
They offer webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists 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 discover how to:.
Launch your very first website.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with higher performance.
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 warranty on all subscription charges is special in the hosting industry.
It allows you to try out the service in a safe way.
Note: this choice is not readily available on custom-made 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 & habits.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they use a great service with a solid product. As a managed WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brand names. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t wish to worry about hosting problems.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go check out WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. So do a test set up and see what you think of their backend. Make certain to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.