
There are a lot of cheap hosts available that supply a good service. WPEngine Ssh
However, what if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll wish to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, offering handled strategies that are fully optimized for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly low-cost. You’ll desire to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense before making a purchase.
To help you out, we’re going to perform an extensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential features, support alternatives, efficiency capabilities, and everything else you’ll require to understand. 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 entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the increasing appeal 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 consistently contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to pick WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, assistance, and management, but these are difficult to quantify. Some functions stick out when you search the interface, however, that can offer you some insight into the service offered.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to help you speed up your WordPress site by providing significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how rapidly your page rendered, the length of time it took to load in its entirety, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historical data 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 before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating mistakes on your website by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows your designers to make substantial changes to your site without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those generally limited are plugins that have been noted to cause efficiency issues and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has made alternatives readily available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses managed WordPress hosting. There are five different plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans include limitless data transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan consists of dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some unique features for WordPress users that the majority of hosts don’t offer, or charge additional for. These special functions consist of:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly produce a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Innovative technologies consisting of latest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine provides the most sophisticated and detailed handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is expert and well laid out, however the powerful functions might imply a steep knowing curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be right at home here, however otherwise you’ll require to invest a long time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page packed in just over two seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve checked, with rival Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service must provide extra value through its assistance, and WP Engine provides. The assistance website consists of videos and articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the reaction was quick and the agent knowledgeable. For all strategies except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If website filling speed is a top priority, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology make sure that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human demands over robot demands and offers load balancing, offering your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website material to your visitors based upon their place to boost your site’s speed and lower latency. You get this ability totally 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 price for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted 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 monitors all the traffic going to your site and automatically detects and obstructs potential attacks. Additionally, the hosting service automatically updates and spots the WordPress core to eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine immediately backups your website every day and has a one-click remediation function to get you support and running rapidly. This hosting service protects your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with client care via chat. The assistance group has an exceptional knowledge base and can assist you fix issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or test new plugins and themes. Anything you carry out in the staging area does not impact your live site. This function allows developers to work on websites without interfering with the live website’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 have to await the customer to add you to their WordPress site. As soon as finished, you can move the site to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you regularly 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 service viewpoint, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and offer extraordinary services because area. Nevertheless, this model locks out lots of people who could otherwise take advantage of WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your email account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll need 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 exceeding your strategy’s visitor limitations. This may not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly update your strategy as your website grows. Significant spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal company can cost you substantial excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the cost? The answer lies in figuring out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the very same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the cost. You can even get committed hosting for the very same rate as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most significantly, assurance. The ultimate question 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 usually paying for efficiency & not having to believe too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s prices based upon the features you’re getting- you truly don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and typically logging in often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Many shared hosting servers can deal with the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the rate. My individual site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ check outs in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on handles more than 110,000+ visits per month with plenty of space left to spare for side-projects, gigabytes of media, email, 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, however it can still be rather a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can enter the $290 per month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, however quickly ended up with a custom-made plan.
And as mentioned earlier that doesn’t even include much of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs additional expenses & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly for me- you are restricted 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 spread out the expense of your plan- specifically if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your install cap.
If you are aiming to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your site files- WP Engine is a costly choice, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Startup
The Startup package is one of the most standard plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 gos to per month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site included.
WP Engine targets little sites and blog sites with this strategy, however we think it may be overkill for many 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 guarantee that your site can handle 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d recommend this alternative to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making good money and want guarantees that nothing will alter.
You can save $60 each year or 2 months totally free if you pay every year.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing businesses and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 sees each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
Ten websites included a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this plan, 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 complicated problem that you require to fix quickly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or more months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the very best value alternative. This one costs $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We suggest this choice for a fast-growing blog or company. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance center.
You can save $580 or 2 months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical site or big organization, the Custom plan may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will have to speak to a sales associate to get your customized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy likewise offers proprietary assistance should something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network facilities.
The company also 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 destructive attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into website speed, however the guideline is that the more complicated 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 mainly text site with a few fundamental plugins and a couple of small images, you’ll be great with an economical shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s normally extra plugins, customized style files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, types and more.
All these features combined with good levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress setup.
A sluggish site doesn’t suggest that you require a larger, better server. It does indicate that you need to get smarter about speed. In some cases it’s as basic as getting a more effective server, but sometimes it’s more about caching specific resources in a specific order and optimizing your files. Simply put- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup. Imagine your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you may just require to eliminate the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress requires help to remain quick as you grow. There are a lot of options … but either you or a developer must implement them.
That’s where handled WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed concerns. They have customized servers with very aggressive caching and even more advanced “stack” than a common web host. They also have actually trained assistance who will go into your WordPress set up and identify the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even enable caching plugins on their installs since they have such a customized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well 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 quickly the server returned enough data to begin filling the page.
It’s great to have that sort 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 even better numbers with WP Engine than you may get with other services because you are free to focus on speed aspects that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just provides an incorporated CDN, but they likewise supply worldwide information centers in case your audience is mostly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And given that they run on Google Cloud, you do not have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of an international CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will assist your site load quick for clients all over the world 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.
Protecting sites is among the strengths of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The company takes a number of measures 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 block the most recent threats.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can help you recover your site 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 questions relating to security.
They offer webinars on security.
They release security guidelines and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Introduce your very first website.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with higher effectiveness.
Both novices and experienced WordPress website owners will discover the support paperwork vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back warranty on all subscription fees is special in the hosting market.
It enables you to check out the service in a risk-free method.
Note: this option is not offered on custom hosting strategies.
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 & routines.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a great service with a strong item. As a handled WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They offer more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unequaled for savvy DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic sites that do not want to worry about hosting issues.
If managed hosting is a suitable 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 believe of their backend. Make sure to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.