There are plenty of low-cost hosts readily available that offer a decent service. WPEngine Support
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 evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, using managed strategies that are completely optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely low-cost. For that reason, you’ll need to know whether this hosting service is worth the cost before purchasing.
To assist you out, we’re going to carry out a comprehensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key features, support choices, performance abilities, and everything else you’ll need to know. Let’s begin!
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 entrepreneur Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising 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 company has won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently adds to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to choose WP Engine over less expensive WordPress hosting are increased dependability, efficiency, support, and management, however these are hard to measure. Some functions stick out when you search the user interface, nevertheless, that can provide you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a neat tool designed to help you speed up your WordPress site by offering significant metrics on efficiency.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, for how long it took to load in its totality, and the total size of the page. It even includes historic data on your site’s efficiency over the past six months and suggestions on how you can reduce page load.
You can establish your WordPress website in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the changes 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 designers to make extensive modifications to your site without impacting your customers.
WP Engine has a comprehensive list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can install. Those typically limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to cause performance concerns and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives readily available that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only uses managed WordPress hosting. There are five different plans offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of limitless information transfer. The plans vary based upon:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made plan includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority support
WP Engine consists of some unique features for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not provide, or charge additional for. These special features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately produce a copy of your website for screening
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Leading edge innovations including most current PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most advanced and thorough 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 set out, however the powerful features might mean 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 require to spend a long time on the assistance site.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page packed in just over two seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web just slightly behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service need to use extra worth through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The assistance site consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with assistance on deeper WordPress performance that lots of WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the reaction fasted and the agent educated. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If website loading speed is a top priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD innovation ensure that your web pages load rapidly. NGINX extension prioritizes human demands over robotic demands and provides load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN provides website material to your visitors based on their area to improve your site’s speed and lower latency. You get this ability free of charge with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why people continue to pay a premium rate for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, roughly four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with improved 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 warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and automatically spots and obstructs potential attacks. In addition, the hosting service instantly updates and patches the WordPress core to eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case circumstance, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click restoration function to get you back up and running rapidly. This hosting service safeguards your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Sensational Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact client care through chat. The assistance team has an outstanding knowledge base and can help you solve problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat assistance on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area enables you to clone your site’s live variation and make changes or check brand-new plugins and styles. Anything you carry out in the staging area doesn’t impact your live website. This function allows designers to deal with websites without disrupting the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function enables you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to await the customer to include you to their WordPress website. When finished, you can move the website to the customer or host the website on WP Engine. This performance conserves time if you routinely construct websites 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 just works with WordPress. From a service point of view, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and deal exceptional services in that area. However, this design locks out many people who might 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 in other places. You’ll need 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 rates structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your plan’s visitor limits. This might not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly upgrade your strategy as your website grows. Significant spikes in traffic throughout item launches or seasonal service can cost you significant excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? The answer depends on figuring out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the rate. You can even get committed hosting for the exact same price as WP Engine. What you are truly spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, peace of mind. The ultimate concern is 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 strategy, you are generally spending for performance & not having to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s prices based upon the functions you’re getting- you really do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will consider your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and generally logging in often), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Many shared hosting servers can manage the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the rate. My personal website a shared hosting plan from HostGator with basic caching) handled more than 15,000+ visits in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trustworthy VPS, you can certainly handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on handles more than 110,000+ sees per month 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 plan.
They are fairly transparent about how they count gos to, but it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how rapidly they can enter the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup strategy, however rapidly ended up with a customized plan.
And as mentioned earlier that doesn’t even consist of many of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s strategies. You can’t run any email from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra expenses & technical execution of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test sites, you have to factor those into the cost. You can’t utilize them to spread out the expense of your strategy- specifically if you are hitting your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are aiming to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is a costly option, specifically compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Start-up
The Startup package is the most standard plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 check outs each month.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets small sites and blog sites with this plan, but we believe it might be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far better deal with 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 each month, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d suggest this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great money and want assurances that nothing will change.
You can save $60 annually or 2 months free if you pay annually.
Growth
The growth strategy targets growing organizations and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs monthly.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten websites consisted of a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing business, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this plan, you likewise get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat support. This addition will come in helpful if you have a complicated problem that you need to fix quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months totally free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine markets its scale plan as the best value alternative. This one expenses $241 monthly. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We advise this alternative for a fast-growing blog or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone support in addition to the support center.
You can save $580 or more months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
If you have a mission-critical website or large business, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of sees monthly.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites included.
You will have to speak to a sales associate to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy likewise provides proprietary support should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The company likewise has three information 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 market.
WP Engine obstructs harmful attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into site speed, but the general rule is that the more intricate your website is, the more complex the solutions to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text site with a couple of basic plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine 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 usually additional plugins, customized theme files, great deals of images, widgets, advertisements, types and more.
All these features integrated with decent levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress installation.
A sluggish website doesn’t mean that you need a bigger, better server. It does imply that you need to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as simple as getting a more powerful server, however in some cases it’s more about caching particular resources in a certain order and optimizing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup. Picture your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might simply require to remove the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to remain quickly as you grow. There are plenty of services … but either you or a developer need to implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting is available in. WP Engine looks after (almost) all speed concerns. They have actually personalized servers with very aggressive caching and even more innovative “stack” than a common webhosting. They likewise have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and recognize the specific chokepoint to get your site moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs since they have actually such a customized caching setup.
The interesting thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still do well on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients 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 information to begin filling the page.
It’s nice to have that type of speed right out of package- and have it remain 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 much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services considering that you are free to concentrate on speed aspects that you can easily manage like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not just offers an integrated CDN, however they likewise supply international data centers in case your audience is mainly 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 given that they operate on Google Cloud, you do not have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans include 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 sites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting websites is among the strong suits of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The company takes several steps to safeguard WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs daily malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall software to obstruct the current hazards.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can assist you recover your site 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 support for any concerns relating to security.
They provide webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists for designers and engineers.
If your site 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 find out how to:.
Introduce your very first site.
Troubleshoot typical issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with higher efficiency.
Both beginners and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will discover the support documentation vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all subscription fees is distinct in the hosting market.
It allows you to try out the service in a risk-free method.
Note: this choice is not readily available on custom hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but what is finest for you based upon your goals, spending plan, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a great service with a solid item. As a handled WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They offer more features 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 wish to stress over hosting problems.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go have a look at WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. Do a test install and see what you think of their backend. Be sure to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.