There are plenty of cheap hosts readily available that provide a good service. WPEngine Templates
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll wish to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific webhosting, using managed plans that are fully enhanced for the platform. Naturally, when compared to many other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely inexpensive. For that reason, you’ll would like to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to carry out an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial features, assistance choices, performance capabilities, and whatever else you’ll require to understand. Let’s start!
WP Engine Video Review
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About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading managed WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen began WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the increasing 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 business has won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly adds to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to select WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, assistance, and management, but these are difficult to quantify. Some functions stand apart when you search the user interface, however, that can give you some insight into the service used.
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 quickly your page rendered, the length of time it took to load in its totality, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historical information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can lower 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 embarrassing mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your website prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it allows 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 reasonably unusual relocation, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those normally limited are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to cause performance concerns and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives available that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 different plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of limitless information transfer. The plans differ based upon:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, client success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some distinct features for WordPress users that a lot of hosts do not use, or charge extra for. These unique functions include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately develop a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Innovative innovations consisting of most current PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we found that WP Engine uses the most innovative and extensive handled WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is expert and well set out, but the powerful functions might mean a high learning curve for inexperienced 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 need to spend some time on the support site.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page loaded in simply over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest reactions we’ve evaluated, with rival Liquid Web just somewhat behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service should offer extra value through its support, and WP Engine delivers. The support site includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with aid on much deeper WordPress performance that many WordPress hosts don’t enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the response was quick and the agent experienced. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If site filling speed is a top priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of custom NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology make sure that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and provides load balancing, providing your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides site material to your visitors based upon their area to improve your site’s speed and reduce latency. You get this ability totally free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s difficult to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why people continue to pay a premium price for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, roughly 4 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 annually. 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 instantly discovers and blocks prospective attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to get rid of possible vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine automatically backups your site every day and has a one-click repair function to get you support and running quickly. Lastly, this hosting service protects your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care by means of chat. The support team has an exceptional knowledge base and can help you resolve issues rapidly. 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 version and make changes or check new plugins and themes. Anything you do in the staging area doesn’t impact your live site. This function permits designers to deal with sites without interfering with the live website’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature permits you to develop a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t have to wait on the client to add you to their WordPress site. When finished, you can transfer the website to the customer or host the website on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you regularly construct websites 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 deals with WordPress. From a service viewpoint, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and offer extraordinary services in that area. Nevertheless, this model locks out lots of people who might otherwise gain from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you prefer to host your e-mail account and register your domain through your website host, you’ll require to look somewhere else. You’ll have 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 pricing structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limits. This might not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can always upgrade your plan as your website grows. Nevertheless, considerable spikes in traffic throughout product launches or seasonal business can cost you substantial excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The response depends on finding out what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the very same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a portion of the price. You can even get committed hosting for the same price as WP Engine. What you are truly paying for here is security, performance, speed, and, most notably, comfort. 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 spending for efficiency & not needing to believe excessive about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s pricing based on the features you’re getting- you truly do not get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your site’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and normally visiting frequently), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Lots of shared hosting servers can deal with the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the rate. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with fundamental 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 trustworthy VPS, you can certainly deal with a lot more for much less. The site you are on manages more than 110,000+ check outs 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 pay 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 “little” website owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 monthly tier. I have a customer who started with the Startup strategy, however rapidly ended up with a customized plan.
And as mentioned earlier 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 limitations on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra costs & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you need to factor those into the rate. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your strategy- specifically if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are looking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & serve up your website files- WP Engine is a pricey alternative, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting alternatives.
Start-up
The Startup package is one of the most fundamental strategy and will set you back $25 per month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 check outs per month.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets small websites and blogs with this strategy, however we think it may be overkill for many people in this classification. You can get a far much better deal with shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t want to take any possibilities with uptime or need a guarantee that your website can manage 25,000 visitors monthly, WP Engine is a sure thing. We ‘d suggest this option to small businesses, affiliate sites, and blogs making good cash and want guarantees that nothing will change.
You can save $60 each year or more months free if you pay each year.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing services and will cost you $95 per month. Here you get:.
100,000 visits each month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
Ten sites included a while.
This strategy is a terrific entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while prior to you require to update. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will be available in convenient if you have a complicated problem that you need to deal with quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months totally free with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale plan as the best value option. 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 recommend this alternative for a fast-growing blog or company. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the support.
You can save $580 or more months complimentary with annual pre-paid billing.
Customized
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical site or big business, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Countless check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will have to speak with a sales associate to get your tailored quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy also provides proprietary support should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its world-class network infrastructure.
The company likewise has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by choosing to host your site on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into site speed, however the guideline is that the more complex your website is, the more intricate the options to speed become.
Out of the box- WordPress is relatively lean and fast. If you are running a mostly text website with a few fundamental plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be fine with a cost effective shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s generally extra plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, forms and more.
All these features combined with good levels of traffic can begin to slow down your WordPress setup.
A sluggish website does not mean that you need a larger, much better server. It does suggest that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as easy as getting a more effective server, however in some cases it’s more about caching specific resources in a particular order and enhancing your files. To put it simply- it gets complex.
Picture you are trying to haul a trailer with a pickup. Envision your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may just need to remove the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, revitalize the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress requires aid to stay quickly as you grow. There are a lot of solutions … however either you or a developer must implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed issues. They have tailored servers with extremely aggressive caching and even more advanced “stack” than a normal web host. They also have trained support who will go into your WordPress set up and determine the precise chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even allow caching plugins on their installs because they have such a tailored caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform since their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for among my customers on WP Engine (who has a bloated theme, extra 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 loading the page.
It’s good to have that sort of speed right out of package- and have it stay that way no matter how huge or intricate the site gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed about speed, you can get even much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services since you are complimentary to concentrate on speed factors that you can quickly control like image compression, use of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only offers an incorporated CDN, but they also provide worldwide data centers in case your audience is mostly in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are attempting to get top speeds without tinkering layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does precisely that. And because they work on Google Cloud, you do not need to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of an international CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will help your website load quickly for clients 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 sites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Often the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Protecting sites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of procedures to protect WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They monitor an updated firewall program to obstruct the latest threats.
All sites are supported daily.
You get a one-click restore function that can help you recover your website 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 concerns relating to security.
They provide webinars on security.
They publish security standards and checklists for developers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Introduce your very first website.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both beginners and skilled WordPress website owners will find the assistance documentation important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all subscription charges is unique in the hosting market.
It allows you to experiment with the service in a risk-free way.
Note: this alternative is not offered on custom hosting strategies.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, however what is best for you based upon your goals, budget, resources & practices.
If you are in what I think of as WP Engine’s core markets- they offer a terrific service with a solid item. As a handled WordPress host, their prices is competitive. They use more functions than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic sites that do not want to worry about hosting concerns.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go check out WP Engine’s strategies here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back warranty. Do a test set up and see what you believe of their backend. Make certain to talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.