There are a lot of low-cost hosts offered that offer a decent service. WPEngine Valuation
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? In that case, you’ll want to check out our WP Engine review for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, using handled strategies that are completely optimized for the platform. Of course, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly cheap. You’ll desire to understand whether this hosting service is worth the cost before making a purchase.
To assist you out, we’re going to carry out an extensive WP Engine review for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, assistance options, performance abilities, and whatever else you’ll require to understand. Let’s get going!
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 business owner 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 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 contributes to the WordPress core and neighborhood.
WP Engine Features
The core factors to choose WP Engine over more affordable WordPress hosting are increased reliability, performance, support, and management, but these are difficult to measure. Some functions stand out when you search the user interface, however, that can offer you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool designed to assist you accelerate your WordPress website by offering meaningful metrics on performance.
Running a test returns you a page-performance report that information how rapidly your page rendered, how long it took to load in its entirety, and the overall size of the page. It even includes historical information on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and recommendations on how you can decrease page load.
You can establish your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the modifications live (Image credit: WP Engine) Avoid humiliating mistakes on your site by making changes to a copy of your site prior to it goes live. This is called Staging, and it enables your developers to make substantial changes to your site without affecting your customers.
WP Engine has an extensive list of plugins that are disallowed (Image credit: WP Engine) In a reasonably uncommon move, WP Engine limits the WordPress plugins you can install. Those typically restricted are plugins that have been noted to trigger performance concerns and security holes. For essential features such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made options offered that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only provides managed WordPress hosting. There are 5 various strategies readily available: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies include unlimited information transfer. The strategies vary based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Custom strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority assistance
WP Engine includes some distinct features for WordPress users that most hosts do not use, or charge additional for. These special features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: instantly produce a copy of your website for testing
- Easy transferable installs from free to paid accounts
- Cutting edge innovations consisting of newest PHP version.
In our WP Engine evaluation, we discovered that WP Engine uses the most sophisticated and detailed managed WordPress hosting functions.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s user interface is professional and well laid out, however the powerful features might imply a high knowing curve for inexperienced users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and reroute guidelines, you’ll be right at home here, but otherwise you’ll require to invest some time on the assistance site.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page filled in simply over 2 seconds. This is among the fastest actions we’ve evaluated, with competitor Liquid Web only somewhat behind.
Assistance
A handled WordPress service must provide additional value through its assistance, and WP Engine provides. The support website consists of videos and short articles of a quality you ‘d get out of a paid training course, with assistance on much 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 response fasted and the representative well-informed. For all strategies except for single-site plans, there’s telephone support, too.
Pros
Extraordinary Load Speed: If site packing speed is a leading priority, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s combination of customized NGINX extension, integrated Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology ensure that your web pages load quickly. NGINX extension focuses on human requests over robotic demands and uses load balancing, giving your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN delivers website content to your visitors based upon their area to boost your website’s speed and lower latency. You get this capability totally free with all WP Engine plans.
High Performance: It’s difficult to beat WP Engine’s performance, which is why people continue to pay a premium cost for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, approximately four and a half hours of downtime a year. You can even more increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced 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 guarantee.
Advanced Security: WP Engine monitors all the traffic going to your website and immediately spots and blocks prospective attacks. In addition, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to remove 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. Finally, this hosting service safeguards your website against JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force attempts, and DDoS attacks.
Remarkable Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to contact customer care by means of chat. The assistance team has an excellent knowledge base and can help you resolve issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone assistance for all strategies except the Growth Plan, in addition to 24/7 live chat support on all plans.
Useful Staging Environment: The staging area allows you to clone your website’s live version and make changes or check new plugins and styles. Anything you do in the staging area does not impact your live website. This feature permits developers to deal with websites without interfering with the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting developers, this feature enables you to construct a site from your WP Engine account. You do not have to wait on the client to add you to their WordPress website. When completed, you can move the site to the client or host the website on WP Engine. This performance saves time if you routinely develop websites for customers.
Cons
WordPress-Only Hosting: If you are using any other content management system aside from WordPress, then you are out of luck. WP Engine only deals with WordPress. From a company perspective, it makes good sense to focus on a single market and offer remarkable services in that location. However, this design locks out lots of people who might otherwise benefit 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 need to look elsewhere. 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 punished for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limits. This may not be a problem if you have predictable traffic, and you can constantly update your plan as your website grows. Considerable spikes in traffic during item launches or seasonal business can cost you considerable overage charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is pricey. Is it worth the cost? The response lies in finding out what you are spending for.
You can get shared hosting that can manage the same amount of traffic as WP Engine for a fraction of the cost. You can even get committed hosting for the same rate as WP Engine. What you are actually paying for here is security, efficiency, speed, and, most notably, comfort. The ultimate 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 normally paying for performance & not having to believe too much about upkeep, security & speed. If you take a look at WP Engine’s rates based upon the features you’re getting- you really do not get a whole lot.
And if you are the type who will think about your website’s health anyhow (ie, keeping WordPress upgraded and normally logging in often), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unnecessary.
Many shared hosting servers can deal with the very 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) managed more than 15,000+ gos to 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. In fact, the site you are on deals with more than 110,000+ visits each month with lots of space delegated 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 relatively transparent about how they count sees, but it can still be quite a surprise for “small” website owners how rapidly they can enter into the $290 monthly tier. I have a client who started with the Startup strategy, but rapidly ended up with a customized plan.
And as pointed out previously that does not 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 limits on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires extra costs & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most importantly for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a couple of side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to spread out the expense of your plan- specifically if you are striking your visitor cap rather than your set up cap.
If you are wanting to spend for hosting- ie, a server that will hold & provide your website files- WP Engine is a pricey alternative, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Startup
The Startup package is the most basic plan and will set you back $25 per month. With this package, you get:.
25,000 check outs monthly.
50GB bandwidth monthly.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets little websites and blog sites with this strategy, but we believe it might be overkill for many people in this category. You can get a far much better handle shared hosting at Bluehost However, if you do not wish to take any possibilities with uptime or require an assurance that your website can deal with 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d advise this alternative to small companies, affiliate websites, and blogs making great money and want guarantees that absolutely nothing will alter.
You can conserve $60 per year or 2 months complimentary if you pay annually.
Growth
The development plan targets growing services and will cost you $95 each month. Here you get:.
100,000 visits each month.
200GB bandwidth per month.
25GB storage.
10 sites included a while.
This plan is an excellent entry point for a growing organization, and it might be a while prior to you need to update. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to round-the-clock chat assistance. This addition will be available in handy if you have a complex problem that you need to resolve rapidly.
You can conserve a cool $230 or 2 months free with annual billing.
Scale
WP Engine promotes its scale plan as the very best value option. This one costs $241 per month. Here you get:.
400,000 check outs each month.
500GB bandwidth each month.
50GB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
We recommend this choice for a fast-growing blog or company. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the assistance.
You can save $580 or two months complimentary with yearly pre-paid billing.
Customized
If you have a mission-critical website or big service, the Custom plan might be appealing. With this plan, you get:.
Millions of check outs per month.
400GB+ bandwidth monthly.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will need to talk to a sales rep to get your personalized quote depending upon your requirements. This strategy also provides exclusive assistance should something go wrong.
Migrate WordPress websites in just a few clicks.
Solid Uptime
WP Engine accomplishes 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 improve website speeds by picking to host your site on servers that are closest to your target market.
WP Engine obstructs harmful attacks on your website.
Speed & Performance
There are a great deal of variables that go into website speed, but the rule of thumb is that the more intricate your website is, the more intricate the options to speed ended up being.
Out of package- WordPress is relatively lean and quick. If you are running a mainly text website with a few fundamental plugins and a few little images, you’ll be fine with a budget-friendly shared hosting plan from someone like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few site owners keep their WordPress set up lean. There’s generally additional plugins, customized theme files, lots of images, widgets, advertisements, kinds and more.
All these functions combined with decent levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress setup.
A slow site doesn’t mean that you need a larger, better server. It does indicate that you require to get smarter about speed. Often it’s as simple as getting a more effective server, but sometimes it’s more about caching specific resources in a particular order and optimizing your files. In other words- it gets complex.
Envision you are attempting to transport a trailer with a pickup. Envision your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s meaningless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might just need to get rid of the emergency brake, install a turbocharger, refresh the transmission fluid and combine your load.
The point is that WordPress needs help to remain quickly as you grow. There are plenty of services … but either you or a designer should execute them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine looks after (nearly) all speed issues. They have personalized servers with exceptionally aggressive caching and a lot more advanced “stack” than a common webhosting. They likewise have trained assistance who will enter into your WordPress set up and identify the precise chokepoint to get your site moving.
They don’t even enable caching plugins on their installs since they have such a tailored caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress installs still succeed on their platform since their platform does the additional work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my clients on WP Engine (who has a bloated theme, extra scripts, too many uncompressed images, to name a few things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how rapidly the server returned enough information to begin packing 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 complex the website gets.
* Note that the other point here is that if you are obsessed 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 focus on speed aspects that you can quickly manage like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only supplies an incorporated CDN, but they likewise supply international 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 precisely that. And since they operate on Google Cloud, you don’t have to stress over uptime either.
CDN Included
All strategies consist of a worldwide CDN (material shipment network).
The CDN will help your site load fast for clients worldwide 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 websites, according to Sucuri, a web security firm. Regularly the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t upgraded.
Protecting sites is one of the strengths of WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting service.
The company takes a number of procedures to safeguard WordPress sites:.
WP Engine runs everyday malware/virus scans in collaboration with Sucuri.
They keep track of an updated firewall to block the most recent hazards.
All websites are supported daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can assist you recover your website 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 concerning security.
They provide webinars on security.
They publish security guidelines and lists for developers and engineers.
If your site gets hacked, WPE will clean it totally free.
Online Resources
WP Engine supplies webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can discover how to:.
Release your first website.
Troubleshoot typical problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Manage your hosting account with higher effectiveness.
Both newbies and knowledgeable WordPress website owners will discover the support documentation vital.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all subscription costs is distinct in the hosting market.
It allows you to try out the service in a safe method.
Keep in mind: this option is not offered on custom hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is finest overall, but what is finest for you based upon your objectives, spending plan, resources & routines.
If you remain in what I consider WP Engine’s core markets- they provide a fantastic service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their rates is competitive. They offer more features than “WordPress hosting” strategies from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unrivaled for smart DIYers, WordPress website designers and/or high-traffic websites that don’t wish to fret about hosting concerns.
If managed hosting is a fit for you- then go take a look at 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 think of their backend. Make certain to chat w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.