There are plenty of cheap hosts offered that supply a good service. WPEngine Transfer Site
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, providing managed strategies that are completely enhanced for the platform. Of course, when compared to lots of other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s strategies aren’t precisely low-cost. Therefore, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service deserves the cost prior to making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to conduct a comprehensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its key functions, support choices, performance capabilities, and everything else you’ll need to understand. Let’s begin!
WP Engine Video Review
Sign up for a WP Engine plan and receive the Genesis Framework and 35+ StudioPress Themes free!
About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now among the leading handled WordPress hosting business in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a requirement for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising appeal 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 actually won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and regularly contributes to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to pick WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased reliability, efficiency, support, and management, however these are tough to quantify. Some features stick out when you search the user interface, however, that can provide you some insight into the service used.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to help you accelerate your WordPress site by offering significant metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that details how quickly your page rendered, for how long it required to fill in its whole, and the total size of the page. It even includes historical information on your site’s efficiency over the past 6 months and suggestions on how you can lower page load.
You can develop your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid embarrassing mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your website before it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your designers to make comprehensive modifications to your website without impacting your clients.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those typically restricted are plugins that have been noted to trigger performance concerns and security holes. For important features such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives offered that don’t put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides managed WordPress hosting. There are five various plans readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies consist of unlimited data transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom-made strategy consists of dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority support
WP Engine consists of some special features for WordPress users that most hosts don’t provide, 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 complimentary to paid accounts
- Cutting edge technologies including latest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine uses the most sophisticated and thorough managed WordPress hosting functions.
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, but the effective functions may imply a high learning curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right in the house here, however otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the assistance website.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page loaded in just over two seconds. This is one of the fastest reactions we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web only somewhat behind.
Support
A handled WordPress service ought to provide additional worth through its support, and WP Engine provides. The support website consists of videos and posts of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with assistance on deeper WordPress performance that numerous WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat support and a ticket system, too. In our screening, the action was quick and the agent experienced. For all plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If website loading speed is a top concern, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your websites load quickly. NGINX extension prioritizes human requests over robot requests and offers load balancing, giving your visitors a better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website content to your visitors based upon their location to boost 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 rate for this service. WP Engine ensures 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with boosted SLA, which equates to a little under an hour of downtime per year. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls below the assurance.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your site and instantly spots and obstructs prospective attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service instantly updates and spots the WordPress core to get rid of prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine automatically backups your website every day and has a one-click remediation feature to get you support and running rapidly. Lastly, this hosting service safeguards your site against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, strength efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Extraordinary Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to connect with customer care through chat. The support group has an outstanding knowledge base and can assist you solve problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all plans other than the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support 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 styles. Anything you perform in the staging area does not affect your live site. This function enables developers to deal with websites without interfering with the live site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function permits you to construct a website from your WP Engine account. You don’t need to wait for the client to include you to their WordPress site. When finished, you can transfer 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 concentrate on a single market and deal extraordinary services because area. Nevertheless, this design locks out many individuals who could otherwise benefit from 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 somewhere else. You’ll need to utilize third-party services for domain registration or e-mail accounts.
Inflexible Pricing: WP Engine runs a tight ship, and this is reflected in its pricing structure. You will be penalized for exceeding your strategy’s visitor limits. This might not be an issue if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly update your plan as your site grows. However, considerable spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal organization can cost you substantial excess charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in determining what you are paying for.
You can get shared hosting that can handle the same quantity of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the price. You can even get devoted hosting for the exact same rate as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most importantly, assurance. The supreme question is just 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 usually spending for efficiency & not needing to think too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the features you’re getting- you really don’t get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and typically logging in often), you’ll likely be paying for “management” that is superfluous.
Lots of shared hosting servers can handle the exact same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the cost. My personal site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with basic caching) handled more than 15,000+ sees in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trustworthy VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. The website you are on manages more than 110,000+ visits per month with plenty of space 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 plan.
They are relatively transparent about how they count gos to, but it can still be rather a surprise for “little” website owners how rapidly they can enter the $290 monthly tier. I have a client who started with the Startup strategy, but rapidly wound up with a custom plan.
And as pointed out earlier that doesn’t even include many of the functions you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on local media storage. Anything above the limits needs additional expenses & technical application of Amazon cloud services.
And most significantly for me- you are limited on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test sites, you have to factor those into the rate. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your strategy- specifically if you are striking your visitor cap instead of your set up cap.
If you are seeking to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & dish out your website files- WP Engine is an expensive option, especially compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Start-up
The Startup bundle is the most standard plan and will set you back $25 monthly. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 gos to monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets little sites and blog sites with this plan, however we believe it may be overkill for the majority of people in this classification. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you don’t wish to take any chances with uptime or need an assurance that your website can deal with 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d advise this option to small companies, affiliate websites, and blogs making good money and desire guarantees that nothing will change.
You can save $60 each year or 2 months complimentary if you pay every year.
Growth
The growth plan targets growing companies and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 check outs each month.
200GB bandwidth monthly.
25GB storage.
Ten websites included a while.
This plan is an excellent entry point for a growing service, and it might be a while before you require to upgrade. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone support in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will can be found in helpful if you have a complex issue that you require to deal with rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or two months complimentary with yearly billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale plan as the very best worth choice. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 visits each month.
500GB bandwidth per month.
50GB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
We suggest this alternative for a fast-growing blog or service. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the support.
You can conserve $580 or 2 months totally free with annual pre-paid billing.
Custom
Lastly, if you have a mission-critical site or large company, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Millions of check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth each month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites included.
You will have to speak to a sales associate to get your customized quote depending upon your requirements. This plan also provides exclusive support should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine achieves over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The company also has 3 information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can improve website speeds by choosing to host your website on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks malicious attacks on your site.
Speed & Performance
There are a lot of variables that go into website speed, however the rule of thumb is that the more complex your site is, the more complicated the options to speed ended up being.
Out of the box- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text site with a couple of standard plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be fine with an economical shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s typically additional plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, forms and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
But a slow site does not imply that you need a bigger, better server. It does indicate that you need to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as simple as getting a more powerful server, however often it’s more about caching specific resources in a specific order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Envision you are attempting to haul a trailer with a pickup truck. Envision your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep grumbling that your truck is not big enough when you may simply 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 requires aid to remain quick as you grow. There are a lot of options … however either you or a designer should implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually customized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and even more innovative “stack” than a normal web host. They likewise have actually trained support who will enter into your WordPress set up and determine the exact chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even enable caching plugins on their installs due to the fact that they have actually such a tailored caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still do well on their platform due to the fact that their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for among my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated theme, extra scripts, a lot of 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 start loading the page.
It’s good to have that sort of speed right out of package- 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 might get with other services considering that you are totally free to concentrate on speed aspects that you can easily manage like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only provides an incorporated CDN, but they also offer worldwide data centers in case your audience is primarily in Asia and/or Europe.
If you are trying to get top speeds without messing with layered caching plugins- the WP Engine does exactly that. And since they run on Google Cloud, you do not have to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a worldwide CDN (material delivery network).
The CDN will help your website load quick for consumers worldwide 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 upgraded.
Protecting websites is among the strengths of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes numerous measures to secure WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep track of an upgraded firewall program to block the latest 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 support for any concerns relating to security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine provides webinars, guides, blog posts, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can find out how to:.
Launch your very first site.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with greater efficiency.
Both novices and skilled WordPress site owners will discover the assistance documents vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all subscription charges is distinct in the hosting market.
It allows you to check out the service in a safe way.
Keep in mind: this alternative is not available on custom 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, budget plan, resources & habits.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they provide an excellent service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They provide more features than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unmatched for savvy DIYers, WordPress website developers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t want to fret about hosting issues.
If handled hosting is a fit for you- then go take a look at 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 talk w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.