There are a lot of low-cost hosts offered that provide a decent service. WPEngine Vs Bluehost
What if you’re looking for more of a performance-oriented, concierge service? Because case, you’ll wish to take a look at our WP Engine evaluation for WordPress.
WP Engine is a WordPress-specific web host, providing handled plans that are fully optimized for the platform. Obviously, when compared to numerous other WordPress hosts, WP Engine’s plans aren’t exactly cheap. Therefore, you’ll wish to know whether this hosting service is worth the expense prior to purchasing.
To assist you out, we’re going to perform an extensive WP Engine evaluation for WordPress. We’ll discuss its essential functions, support alternatives, performance abilities, and whatever else you’ll need to understand. Let’s get started!
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 increasing 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 company has 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 more affordable WordPress hosting are increased dependability, performance, assistance, and management, however these are difficult to measure. Some features stand apart when you browse the interface, however, that can provide you some insight into the service provided.
WP Engine Page Performance is a cool tool developed to help you speed up your WordPress site 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 required to pack in its whole, and the overall size of the page. It even consists of historic data on your website’s efficiency over the past six months and suggestions on how you can decrease page load.
You can establish your WordPress site in a Staging or Development environment prior to making the changes 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 allows your developers to make substantial modifications to your website without impacting your consumers.
WP Engine has a detailed list of plugins that are prohibited (Image credit: WP Engine) In a fairly unusual move, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you can set up. Those generally limited are plugins that have been kept in mind to trigger efficiency concerns and security holes. For crucial functions such as caching, backups, and seo tools, WP Engine has actually made alternatives offered that do not put a high load on the server.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine just uses handled WordPress hosting. There are five different strategies offered: Startup, Growth, Scale, and Custom.
All strategies include endless information transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (# of visits per month)
- disk storage amount
- Customized strategy includes dedicated dev. environments, consumer success, and priority support
WP Engine includes some special functions for WordPress users that the majority of hosts don’t use, or charge extra for. These unique features include:.
- Git version control
- Staging: immediately produce a copy of your site for screening
- Easy transferable installs from totally free to paid accounts
- Innovative technologies consisting of newest PHP variation.
In our WP Engine review, we discovered that WP Engine offers the most innovative and comprehensive handled WordPress hosting features.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.
User interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is professional and well laid out, but the powerful functions might suggest a steep learning curve for unskilled users. If you have an understanding of terms like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be right at home here, however otherwise you’ll require to spend a long time on the support website.
In our testing, the default WordPress home page filled in simply over two seconds. This is one of the fastest actions we’ve checked, with competitor Liquid Web only a little behind.
Support
A managed WordPress service ought to use extra value through its assistance, and WP Engine provides. The assistance website consists of videos and articles of a quality you ‘d anticipate from a paid training course, with help on much deeper WordPress performance that numerous WordPress hosts do not enter into.
There’s 24/7 live chat assistance and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the action was quick and the representative educated. For all plans except for single-site strategies, there’s telephone assistance, too.
Pros
Remarkable Load Speed: If website loading speed is a leading concern, WP Engine does well in this regard. The host’s mix of custom-made NGINX extension, built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN), and SSD technology make sure that your websites load rapidly. NGINX extension focuses on human demands over robotic requests and offers load balancing, providing your visitors a much better experience. For its part, CDN provides site material to your visitors based upon their place to increase your website’s speed and lower latency. You get this ability for free with all WP Engine strategies.
High Performance: It’s hard to beat WP Engine’s efficiency, which is why people continue to pay a premium price for this service. WP Engine guarantees 99.95% server uptime, approximately 4 and a half hours of downtime a year. You can further increase your uptime to 99.99% with enhanced 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 warranty.
Advanced Security: WP Engine keeps an eye on all the traffic going to your website and automatically finds and obstructs prospective attacks. Furthermore, the hosting service immediately updates and spots the WordPress core to remove potential vulnerabilities. In a worst-case situation, WP Engine instantly backups your site every day and has a one-click remediation feature to get you back up and running rapidly. This hosting service protects your website versus JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, brute force efforts, and DDoS attacks.
Incredible Customer Support: The hosting service has a transparent and trackable ticketing system to get in touch with customer care via chat. The assistance team has an exceptional knowledge base and can help you fix issues quickly. You get 24/7 phone support for all plans except 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 does not impact your live website. This function permits developers to work on websites without hindering the live website’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Installs: Also targeting designers, this function allows you to build a site from your WP Engine account. You do not need to wait for the customer to add you to their WordPress website. As soon as completed, you can transfer the website to the client or host the site on WP Engine. This functionality conserves time if you frequently develop 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 only works with WordPress. From an organization perspective, it makes good sense to concentrate on a single market and deal extraordinary services in that area. Nevertheless, this design locks out many people who might otherwise benefit from 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 require 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 prices structure. You will be penalized for surpassing your strategy’s visitor limitations. 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 during item launches or seasonal business can cost you significant excess charges.
There is no other way to put it: WP Engine is expensive. Is it worth the cost? The response depends on determining 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 dedicated hosting for the exact same cost as WP Engine. What you are actually spending for here is security, performance, speed, and, most importantly, 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 normally spending for performance & not needing to believe excessive 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 lot.
And if you are the type who will think of your site’s health anyway (ie, keeping WordPress updated and usually logging in regularly), you’ll likely be spending for “management” that is unneeded.
Lots of shared hosting servers can deal with the same traffic numbers as WP Engine- and cost a fraction of the cost. My personal site a shared hosting strategy from HostGator with standard caching) handled more than 15,000+ gos to in a 24 hour duration when a post of mine And if you are running a reliable VPS, you can definitely deal with a lot more for much less. In fact, the site you are on deals with more than 110,000+ visits per month with a lot of room delegated 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 fairly transparent about how they count sees, but it can still be rather a surprise for “small” website owners how quickly they can get into the $290 each month tier. I have a customer who began with the Startup plan, but rapidly ended up with a custom strategy.
And as pointed out previously that doesn’t even consist of a lot of the features you do not get with WP Engine’s plans. You can’t run any e-mail from your servers. You have low limitations on regional media storage. Anything above the limits requires additional costs & technical implementation of Amazon cloud services.
And most notably for me- you are restricted on your installs. If you have a few side projects or low-traffic test websites, you have to factor those into the cost. You can’t use them to expand the cost of your strategy- particularly 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 an expensive alternative, particularly compared to other non-managed hosting choices.
Start-up
The Startup plan is one of the most standard plan and will set you back $25 each month. With this bundle, you get:.
25,000 visits monthly.
50GB bandwidth per month.
10GB storage.
One website consisted of.
WP Engine targets little websites and blogs with this strategy, but we think it may 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 require a warranty that your website can manage 25,000 visitors each month, WP Engine is a certainty. We ‘d suggest this alternative to small companies, affiliate sites, and blog sites making great money and want assurances that nothing will change.
You can conserve $60 each year or two months complimentary if you pay annually.
Growth
The development plan targets growing companies and will cost you $95 monthly. Here you get:.
100,000 sees each month.
200GB bandwidth each month.
25GB storage.
Ten sites included a while.
This strategy is a fantastic entry point for a growing company, and it might be a while before you need to upgrade. With this plan, you also get 24/7 phone assistance in addition to day-and-night chat assistance. This addition will be available in helpful if you have a complex problem that you require to solve quickly.
You can save a cool $230 or 2 months free 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 sees monthly.
500GB bandwidth monthly.
50GB storage.
30 websites included.
We recommend this choice for a fast-growing blog site or business. You get access to 24/7 live chat and 24/7 phone assistance in addition to the support.
You can save $580 or 2 months totally free with yearly pre-paid billing.
Custom-made
If you have a mission-critical site or large business, the Custom strategy may be appealing. With this strategy, you get:.
Countless gos to each month.
400GB+ bandwidth per month.
100GB-1TB storage.
30 sites consisted of.
You will have to speak to a sales representative to get your customized quote depending on your requirements. This strategy likewise offers exclusive assistance ought to 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 facilities.
The business also has three data centers in London, Tokyo, and Midwest USA.
As a result, you can get better site speeds by selecting to host your site on servers that are closest to your target audience.
WP Engine blocks harmful attacks on your site.
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 fairly lean and quick. If you are running a primarily text website with a couple of basic plugins and a couple of little images, you’ll be great with a cost effective shared hosting plan from somebody like InMotion HostGator Bluehost But few website owners keep their WordPress install lean. There’s typically extra plugins, custom style files, lots of images, widgets, ads, forms and more.
All these functions integrated with good levels of traffic can start to slow down your WordPress installation.
A slow website doesn’t mean that you require a larger, much better server. It does suggest that you need to get smarter about speed. Sometimes it’s as basic as getting a more effective 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.
Imagine you are trying to transport a trailer with a pickup truck. Picture your trailer keeps getting heavier. It’s pointless to keep complaining that your truck is not big enough when you might just 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 quick as you grow. There are a lot of services … but either you or a developer should implement them.
That’s where managed WordPress hosting can be found in. WP Engine takes care of (almost) all speed concerns. They have actually customized servers with incredibly aggressive caching and even more sophisticated “stack” than a common web host. They likewise have trained support who will go into your WordPress install and identify the specific chokepoint to get your website moving.
They don’t even allow caching plugins on their installs since they have actually such a tailored caching setup.
The fascinating thing is that even unoptimized WordPress sets up still succeed on their platform since their platform does the extra work.
Here’s the speed test for one of my customers on WP Engine (who has a bloated theme, additional scripts, too many uncompressed images, among other things)- Note the Time To First Byte and the Start Render numbers. That determines how quickly the server returned enough data to start filling the page.
It’s nice to have that sort of speed right out of the box- and have it remain that way no matter how big or intricate the site 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 considering that you are free to concentrate on speed elements that you can easily control like image compression, usage of scripts, and so on
. The last observation on speed- WP Engine not only offers an integrated CDN, but they also provide worldwide data centers in case your audience is primarily 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 since they run on Google Cloud, you do not have to fret about uptime either.
CDN Included
All plans consist of a global CDN (content delivery network).
The CDN will assist your website load quick 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 websites are WordPress sites, according to Sucuri, a web security company. Frequently the “open doors” are plugins that weren’t updated.
Protecting sites is one of the strong suits of WP Engine’s handled WordPress hosting service.
The business takes a number of steps to protect WordPress websites:.
WP Engine runs day-to-day malware/virus scans in partnership with Sucuri.
They keep an eye on an upgraded firewall program to block the most recent dangers.
All sites are backed up daily.
You get a one-click bring back function that can assist you recuperate your website in case of an attack.
The WP Engine website supplies a guide on “Tips to Protect Your WordPress Site From Being Hacked.”.
You’ll have access to 24/7/365 technical support for any questions regarding security.
They supply webinars on security.
They publish security standards and checklists for designers and engineers.
If your website gets hacked, WPE will clean it free of charge.
Online Resources
WP Engine offers webinars, guides, article, updates, tutorials, and a knowledgebase. With these you can learn how to:.
Release your very first site.
Troubleshoot common problems.
Make improvements to your site.
Handle your hosting account with greater performance.
Both newbies and knowledgeable WordPress site owners will discover the support documents important.
WP Engine’s 60-Day Guarantee
WP Engine’s 60-day money-back guarantee on all membership costs is special in the hosting industry.
It enables you to try the service in a safe method.
Note: this choice is not available on custom-made hosting plans.
Is WP Engine Worth It?
Like any service, it’s not about what is best overall, but 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 offer an excellent service with a strong item. As a managed WordPress host, their pricing is competitive. They provide more functions than “WordPress hosting” plans from other hosting brands. Their feature-set is unmatched for smart DIYers, WordPress site designers and/or high-traffic websites that do not want to fret about hosting concerns.
If handled hosting is a suitable for you- then go check out WP Engine’s plans here View Current Plans They do a 60-day money-back assurance. So do a test install and see what you think of their backend. Be sure to talk w/ assistance & sales.
Get 3 months free when you sign up for WP Engine.