There are a lot of inexpensive hosts readily available that supply a decent service. WPEngine Tutorial
However, 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 webhosting, using managed plans that are totally optimized for the platform. Naturally, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly cheap. For that reason, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service deserves the cost prior to buying.
To help you out, we’re going to perform a comprehensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its crucial functions, support options, efficiency 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 handled WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial business owner Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising 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 actually won several awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Features
The core reasons to pick WP Engine over cheaper WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, support, and management, but these are difficult to quantify. Some functions stick out when you search the user interface, nevertheless, that can give you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool created to help you speed up your WordPress website by using significant metrics on performance.
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 totality, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historical data on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can lower page load.
You can establish your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment before making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating errors on your site 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 impacting your clients.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those generally restricted are plugins that have actually been kept in mind to cause performance problems and security holes. For important functions such as caching, backups, and search engine optimization tools, WP Engine has actually made options offered that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just provides managed WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All plans consist of limitless data transfer. The strategies differ based upon:
- number of WordPress sets up
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, customer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some unique functions for WordPress users that a lot of hosts don’t offer, or charge additional for. These unique features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately create a copy of your site for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Leading edge technologies including latest PHP version.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most advanced and detailed managed WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is professional and well set out, however the powerful features might indicate a steep knowing curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute rules, you’ll be right in your home here, however otherwise you’ll need to invest some time on the assistance site.
In our screening, the default WordPress web page packed in just over two seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web only somewhat behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service ought to use extra worth through its assistance, and WP Engine delivers. The support site includes videos and articles of a quality you ‘d expect from a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress performance that numerous 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 plans except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Exceptional Load Speed: If website loading speed is a leading priority, WP Engine succeeds in this regard. The host’s mix of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology guarantee that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robotic requests and provides load balancing, offering your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers site content to your visitors based upon their location to improve your website’s speed and minimize 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 price for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, roughly 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 annually. WP Engine will compensate you with hosting credit if your uptime falls listed below the guarantee.
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 eliminate prospective vulnerabilities. In a worst-case scenario, WP Engine instantly backups your website every day and has a one-click repair function to get you back up and running quickly. This hosting service safeguards your site 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 contact customer care by means of chat. The support team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you fix problems quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies other than 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 evaluate new plugins and themes. Anything you do in the staging area does not impact your live website. This feature allows developers to work on sites without hindering the live site’s performance or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this function allows you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You do not need to wait for the client to include you to their WordPress website. When finished, you can transfer the website to the customer or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you regularly develop sites for clients.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are utilizing any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you are out of luck. WP Engine only deals with WordPress. From a business point of view, it makes sense to concentrate on a single market and offer remarkable services because location. This model locks out numerous people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine’s services.
No Domains or Email Hosting: If you choose to host your email account and register your domain through your site host, you’ll require to look somewhere else. 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 shown in its rates structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your plan’s visitor limits. This might not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can always update your strategy as your site grows. Nevertheless, significant spikes in traffic throughout product launches or seasonal organization can cost you substantial overage charges.
There is no other method to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the expense? The answer lies in figuring out 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 rate. You can even get devoted hosting for the very same rate as WP Engine. What you are really paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most significantly, peace of mind. The supreme question 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 plan, you are usually paying for efficiency & not having to believe too much about maintenance, security & speed. If you look at WP Engine’s prices based on the features you’re getting- you really do not get a lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and normally logging in often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is superfluous.
Numerous shared hosting servers can manage the very same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a portion of the price. My personal site a shared hosting plan from HostGator with standard caching) dealt with more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour period when a post of mine And if you are running a trusted VPS, you can definitely handle a lot more for much less. The site you are on manages more than 110,000+ check outs 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 spend for the VPS plus a CDN for less than WP Engine’s starter strategy.
They are relatively transparent about how they count sees, however it can still be quite a surprise for “small” site owners how quickly they can enter into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup plan, however quickly wound up with a customized strategy.
And as discussed earlier that doesn’t even consist of many of the features you don’t get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits needs extra expenses & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably 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 price. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your plan- particularly if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are looking to pay for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is a pricey option, especially compared to other non-managed hosting options.
Startup
The Startup plan is the most standard plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this plan, you get:.
25,000 check outs monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One site consisted of.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this strategy, but we believe it may be overkill for most people in this classification. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not want to take any chances with uptime or require an assurance that your website can deal with 25,000 visitors per month, WP Engine is a sure bet. We ‘d recommend this alternative to small companies, affiliate websites, and blogs making good money and want assurances that nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 annually or more months complimentary if you pay each year.
Growth
The development strategy targets growing services and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 visits per month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
10 websites consisted of a while.
This strategy is an excellent 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 support in addition to day-and-night chat support. This addition will be available in useful if you have an intricate problem that you need to resolve rapidly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months complimentary with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine advertises its scale strategy as the best worth option. This one expenses $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 gos to monthly.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We suggest this option for a fast-growing blog site or service. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance.
You can conserve $580 or more months free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom
Finally, if you have a mission-critical site or large business, the Custom strategy might be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless check outs each month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 websites consisted of.
You will need to talk to a sales associate to get your individualized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy also uses exclusive support should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Strong Uptime
WP Engine attains over 99% uptime thanks to its first-rate network facilities.
The company likewise has three information centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by choosing to host your site on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that enter into site speed, however the rule of thumb is that the more complex your site is, the more complicated the solutions to speed become.
Out of package- WordPress is fairly lean and fast. If you are running a primarily text website with a few fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with a cost effective shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But couple of site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s generally extra plugins, custom style files, great deals of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these functions integrated with decent levels of traffic can start to decrease your WordPress installation.
A sluggish website does not mean that you require a larger, much better server. It does mean that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as easy as getting a more powerful server, however often 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 truck. Envision your trailer keeps getting much heavier. It’s meaningless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you may simply need to get rid of the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and consolidate your load.
The point is that WordPress needs aid to remain fast as you grow. There are plenty of services … however either you or a developer need to execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting comes in. WP Engine takes care of (nearly) all speed issues. They have actually tailored servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and a lot more innovative “stack” than a common webhosting. They likewise have trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress install and determine the exact chokepoint to get your website moving.
They do not even permit caching plugins on their installs because they have actually such a customized caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up 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, additional scripts, a lot of 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 loading the page.
It’s great to have that sort of speed right out of the box- and have it stay that way no matter how big or intricate the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are consumed about speed, you can get back at much better numbers with WP Engine than you might get with other services since you are complimentary to concentrate on speed elements that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, etc
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only provides an integrated CDN, however they also supply global 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 because they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t have to worry about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a worldwide CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will help your website load quickly for customers 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 websites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Securing sites is one of the fortes of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of measures to protect WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an updated firewall software to block the current risks.
All websites 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 release security guidelines and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it for free.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, post, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Release your first website.
Troubleshoot common issues.
Make improvements to your website.
Handle your hosting account with higher effectiveness.
Both novices and skilled WordPress site owners will discover the assistance paperwork vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back assurance on all subscription fees is special in the hosting market.
It allows you to check out the service in a risk-free method.
Keep in mind: this choice is not readily available on custom hosting plans.
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 objectives, budget, resources & practices.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they use an excellent service with a strong product. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress site developers and/or high-traffic sites that do not want 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 warranty. So do a test install and see what you think about their backend. Make certain to chat w/ support & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.