There are plenty of low-cost hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Subdomain
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to have a look at our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, using managed plans that are completely optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t exactly cheap. You’ll desire to understand 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 evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, support 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 among the leading managed WordPress hosting business 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 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 neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to pick WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, assistance, and management, but these are hard to quantify. Some functions stand apart when you browse the user interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool developed to help you accelerate your WordPress website by using significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how rapidly your page rendered, the length of time it required to load in its totality, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historic data on your site’s performance over the past 6 months and recommendations on how you can reduce page load.
You can develop your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment before making the changes live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid awkward mistakes on your website by making changes to a copy of your site before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it permits your designers to make comprehensive modifications to your site without affecting your clients.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those normally limited are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to cause efficiency concerns and security holes. For crucial functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made options available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses handled WordPress hosting. There are 5 various strategies available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies include endless data transfer. The plans vary based upon:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan consists of dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine consists of some special functions for WordPress users that the majority of hosts do not use, or charge additional for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly create a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from complimentary to paid accounts
- Innovative innovations consisting of most current PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most innovative and detailed managed 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 set out, however the powerful 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, but otherwise you’ll need to invest some time on the support site.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page filled in just over two seconds. This is one of the fastest responses we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web only slightly behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service must offer additional worth through its assistance, and WP Engine delivers. The support website includes videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with aid on deeper WordPress functionality that numerous WordPress hosts do not go into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction was quick and the agent educated. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site loading speed is a top priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation guarantee that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robotic requests and uses load balancing, providing your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based on their place to enhance your site’s speed and minimize latency. You get this capability for free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why people 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 further increase your uptime to 99.99% with improved 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 warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine monitors all the traffic going to your site and automatically finds and blocks possible attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to remove possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click repair feature to get you back up and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service secures your site 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 connect with client care through chat. The assistance group has an outstanding knowledge base and can assist you solve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all strategies.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or test brand-new plugins and themes. Anything you do in the staging area does not affect your live site. This feature enables developers to work on websites without disrupting the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature enables you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You do not have to await the customer to include you to their WordPress website. As soon as finished, you can move the website to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality saves time if you frequently develop sites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you run out luck. WP Engine only works with WordPress. From a company perspective, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and offer exceptional services because location. Nevertheless, this design 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 site host, you’ll require 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 prices structure. You will be punished for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limits. This may not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly update your strategy as your site grows. Nevertheless, significant spikes in traffic during product launches or seasonal service can cost you substantial excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in determining what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the exact same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the price. You can even get devoted hosting for the very same rate as WP Engine. What you are truly spending 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 plan, you are normally spending for performance & not needing to believe excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s pricing based upon the features you’re getting- you really do not get a lot.
And if you are the type who will consider your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and usually logging in regularly), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is unnecessary.
Numerous shared hosting servers can manage the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the cost. My individual site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with basic 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 manage a lot more for much less. In fact, the site you are on manages more than 110,000+ check outs each month with lots 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 strategy.
They are fairly transparent about how they count sees, however it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can enter the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, however quickly wound up with a custom-made strategy.
And as discussed earlier that doesn’t even consist of a number of the features 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 requires extra expenses & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test sites, you have to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to spread out the cost of your plan- particularly if you are hitting your visitor cap rather than your install cap.
If you are looking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your site files- WP Engine is a costly choice, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Startup
The Startup bundle is one of the most basic strategy and will set you back $25 monthly. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 visits each month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website included.
WP Engine targets small websites and blog sites with this plan, however we think it might be overkill for most people in this category. You can get a far much better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any opportunities with uptime or need a warranty that your website can handle 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d suggest this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making good money and desire assurances that nothing will change.
You can save $60 each year or more months complimentary if you pay every year.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing companies and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 visits monthly.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten sites included a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing business, and it might be a while before you need to upgrade. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will come in convenient if you have a complex concern that you need to resolve rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or two months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the best worth alternative. This one costs $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We advise this alternative 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 conserve $580 or 2 months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical site or big company, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of sees monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to speak to a sales representative to get your individualized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also uses exclusive assistance needs to something fail.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The business likewise has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve site speeds by choosing to host your website on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into website speed, however the rule of thumb is that the more complicated your site is, the more complex the services to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and quick. If you are running a mostly text site with a few fundamental plugins and a few small images, you’ll be great with an economical shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s usually additional plugins, custom style files, great deals of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these features integrated with good levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress installation.
But a slow site does not imply that you require a larger, better server. It does imply that you require to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, however often it’s more about caching particular resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Envision you are trying to transport a trailer with a pickup. Picture your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you might simply require to get rid of the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires assistance to stay fast as you grow. There are a lot of solutions … but either you or a developer should execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed concerns. They have actually customized servers with very aggressive caching and much more innovative “stack” than a normal webhosting. They also have trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress install and determine the exact chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even allow caching plugins on their installs because they have such a personalized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed on their platform because their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my customers on WP Engine (who has a puffed up style, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That measures how rapidly the server returned enough data to start 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 huge or intricate the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get back at better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services given that you are complimentary to focus on speed factors that you can quickly manage like image compression, use of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only supplies an integrated CDN, but they likewise supply worldwide data centers in case your audience is mainly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And since they run on Google Cloud, you do not need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a global CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will help your site 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 sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Protecting websites is among the strong points of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes several procedures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep track of an upgraded firewall software to block the current dangers.
All sites are supported 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 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 questions relating to security.
They provide webinars on security.
They release security standards and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Introduce your very first site.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with greater performance.
Both newbies and knowledgeable WordPress site owners will discover the support paperwork important.
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 allows you to try out the service in a risk-free method.
Keep in mind: this option is not available on customized hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but what is best for you based upon your objectives, budget plan, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a terrific service with a strong product. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic sites that don’t wish to fret about hosting problems.
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 assurance. Do a test set up and see what you believe of their backend. Make certain to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.