WP Engine: Web hosting has grown exponentially with the need for organizations and even individuals to represent their brand in a digital space. And who can blame them? It is a much more efficient way to share information by publishing it for the world to see than sharing information in ones and twos.
Whether sharing your autobiography, publishing a blog, or starting your e-commerce store, today’s technology has made it plausible to reach a global audience through the internet.
Now, it may seem like the best deal, but it takes a lot of resources in terms of time and money to host a website. More importantly, money. If you need high-performance WordPress hosting, it’s not easy to find a host that is both cost-efficient and gives you the desired features. That’s where the WP Engine comes in.
The WP Engine is a WordPress specific premium, high-performance hosting service. In fact, it’s a managed WordPress hosting service offering a variety of packages that are all fully optimized for the platform.
However, the catch is that WP Engine’s pricing plans are not exactly cheap. That’s why it’s important to have a detailed understanding of each package’s features so that you can make an informed decision about whether it’s worth it for you.
When it comes to web hosting, a website developer, admin, or owner will encounter a number of problems to solve:
- The first is limiting downtime. When you’re website is down, it not only leads to frustration for you and your visitors but also leads to lost business opportunities.
- Security is another crucial concern. An insecure website can lead to downtime, lost or stolen data, and can endanger your visitors or customers as well
- Lastly, you would want a site that loads efficiently. In other words, it should not eat up a lot of bandwidth and network resources and should load promptly for visitors all over the globe.
A performance-oriented manage WordPress hosting service, these are all problems WP Engine promise to help solve. In this WP Engine review, we’ll give you an idea of what to expect in terms of features, support options, performance, and everything else you need to know.
Some of the key advantages we can tell you about now are that this provider is quick and easy to operate and that the underlying infrastructure is optimized, protected, and blazingly fast. In terms of management, WP Engine is the way to go with top-notch technical support that takes care of most of the daily hassle of running a WordPress website.
Without further ado, here’s our WP Engine review where we’ll give you our honest thoughts on the good, the bad, and the ugly for this hosting provider.
Key Features
First, let’s look at some of the headlining features that should make you want to consider WP Engine for your WordPress site.
Managed WordPress Hosting
One of the problems with managed WordPress hosting is that it is quite troublesome to change from host to host. However, it’s no problem when it comes to using WP Engine. This managed WordPress host offers hassle-free automated website migrations at no additional cost. No matter where your website was hosted previously, it’s easy and safe to make the switch over to WP Engine.
SSL Certificate
There has never been so many cybersecurity threats as there are today. Encrypting data and communications on your website is one of the foundational security measures you can put in place.
To that end, WP Engine offers free Secure Socket Layers (SSL) Certificates with all of their plans. They are automatically activated for your WordPress site and are easy to manage.
An SSL-protected website is much more secure against various types of cyber attacks and hacking attempts, such as intercepting your data. This shows how committed WP Engine is to securing the websites of their customers.
Easier Debugging with WP Engine
Testing and debugging is every developer’s nightmare. It can take hours upon hours to find any sort of inconsistencies in your webpage with manual debugging techniques, and the chances are that many may not be resolved.
One of the most useful developer features we discovered in our WP Engine review is their debugging capabilities. WP engine supports debugging through tools like Debug Bar and WP-CLI. You can also set up testing and staging environments to verify whether you’re websites are working correctly before launching them.
WP Engine also brings you innovation through plenty of tracking and diagnostic options to keep up with updates. This makes it easier to manage your WordPress site across frequent changes and updates.
WP Engine Customer Support Team
Now that we have covered the key features let’s see what support you get with the hosting WP Engine provides.
First of all, you will get access to the provider’s 24/7 dedicated support team that you can reach via phone, email, or even live chat. Reaching out to the WP Engine hosting provider support, specifically using the live chat feature, the assistance was fast, concise, and it felt like they knew what they were talking about.
While they genuinely recommended what they knew felt was best for the WordPress sites in question, they are also open to listening to your preferences and unique considerations. This is different than how support is handled through many other hosting providers.
The quality of the support really tilted the scales in the host’s favor in our WP Engine review. WP Engine customers will have their queries dealt with quickly and conveniently. And, if you prefer DIY support, they have an extensive and easy-to-use knowledge base.
Performance
In terms of performance, WP Engine’s infrastructure gives your website the boost it needs to get an edge over your competition. As far as performance is concerned, the most important factor is how fast your content is delivered to consumers, no matter where they are located.
This is why WP Engine offers Content Delivery Network CDN to accelerate your website loading times across the globe. The best thing about WP Engine is that this feature comes with all of its available plans.
You will also get access to daily backups as part of the tool so your monthly visitors don’t miss out on content even if something goes wrong with your site.
WP Engine’s Page Performance Tool helps you to speed test and measure your site’s performance with ease on a regular basis. This alleviates much of the hassle that comes in testing new features and streamlines the process of identifying performance issues and finding solutions.
WP Engine’s GeoTarget Feature
Raw performance might not be enough to satisfy your particular audience. You can use WP Engine’s GeoTarget feature to further boost your website loading times for users in specific regions. It allows you to segment your visitors by region and set up specific caching rules for them to speed website performance.
This feature is provided via the official WP Engine GeoTarget plugin. It’s free for customers on dedicated and enterprise hosting plans but will need to be purchased separately by Startup, Growth, and Scale customers.
What makes this so effective is that WP Engine has a wide array of server locations, including NA, EU, Asia, and Australia. In total, there are 19 separate points of presence, and the WP Engine team has plans to make more data centers available soon.
Who Should be Using WP Engine?
WP Engine offers a hands-off approach to those who want to jump straight into developing a WordPress website and hosting it immediately without going through the usual hassles. However, due to its price tag, it is not suitable for creating a small-scale blog or small business website, or a site that may only cater to a relatively small audience.
However, WP Engine is highly recommended for developing major website projects or applications with a high volume of monthly visitors that require a fast environment. If you’re a developer and don’t want to worry about your website’s performance, page speed, response time, security, daily backups, WordPress installation, access to the Google Cloud platform, migrations, optimizations, and support for WordPress plugins then WP Engine might be what you are looking for.
With the extensive research we conducted for our WP Engine review, these are the applications we recommend that are suitable for WP Engine:
- Medium to large publishers
- Large-scale e-commerce websites
- Enterprise-grade startups
- Professional designers and developers
Whether you want to build your webpage for your website from scratch or make changes to an existing website, WP Engine allows you to create, launch, and maintain the site from its very own staging site without experiencing downtime.
Because WP Engine provides managed WordPress hosting services for your WordPress websites, you don’t have to worry about minor details or the underlying infrastructure that keeps things going, giving you more time to focus on improving your website. If you’re willing to pay the big bucks for this level of convenience and features, then the WP Engine might be right up your alley.
Pros
Now that you have an idea of what WP Engine has to offer, let’s look at the main benefits of using this hosting provider:
Exceptional Load Speeds
This is one area where WP Engine excels in comparison to most other WordPress hosting services. With a customized NGINX extension, built-in CDN, and SSD technology, WP Engine ensures that your WordPress website webpages are sure to load at the snap of a finger.
The NGINX extension distinguishes and prioritizes human requests instead of robot requests. This enables better load balancing for your website, giving a better experience to visitors.
The CDN delivers site content to visitors based on their location to boost site speed and minimize latency. This comes with all WP Engine plans.
WP Engine’s Page Performance Tool is absolutely exceptional as compared to other WordPress hosting providers, even those of managed or performance hosting competitors. Even if you’re loading tons of WordPress plugins and WordPress core files onto your site, the response time of the site will still remain phenomenal. The same goes whether you want to un a single WordPress instance a WordPress multisite environment. WP Engine will keep your site speed top-notch, no matter what.
High-Uptime Web Hosting
Apart from the great speed test results, it’s hard to beat WP Engine’s performance in terms of uptime. WP Engine guarantees a 99.95% server uptime and it’s estimated that there are only about four and a half hours of downtime yearly. This can be further increased to 99.99% with the enhanced SLA. Even if this is not enough, WP Engine will guarantee compensation with hosting credit if your WordPress website uptime falls below the guarantee.
Advanced Security
WP Engine hosting monitors and troubleshoots all the traffic going into your WordPress site while automatically detecting and protecting against possible attacks. WP Engine is a hosting provider that also updates and patches your WordPress core files to get rid of any potential vulnerabilities.
Worst case, WP Engine automatically backups your site to its data centers and has a one-click restoration feature to get back to previous sessions quickly. Lastly, WP Engine actively protects your site against JS/SQL injection attacks, brute force, and DDOS attempts.
Amazing Customer Support
WP Engine has an amazingly convenient, transparent, and trackable ticketing system to communicate with its audience. They’re a hosting provider with one of the most exceptional support you’ll ever find. You get 24/7 customer service for your WordPress site via the user portal.
Even if you can’ reach support, WP Engine’s troubleshooting capabilities make their WordPress hosting a great option. You can also access the extensive and informative knowledgeable base that will help you in solving problems quickly so your time utilizing the user portal will be absolutely minimal.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re facing issues with WordPress themes, a hosting plan, migration to WP Engine, or just some other WordPress-related site issue, the WP Engine team will help you out.
Staging Environment
The staging area allows you to replicate your site’s live version so that you can try out different plugins and themes. WP Engine’s staging area does not make any sort of changes to your live site until you are ready to commit the changes you made to your staging site. The staging environment allows developers to operate on WordPress websites without interfering with the official site’s functionality or user experience.
Transferable Sites Install
WP Engine designed this feature to make the life of developers easier. This allows you to build websites or web pages on behalf of your clients from your own WP Engine account. You don’t even have to wait for clients to add you to their website or hosting package. Once completed, it is easy to transfer the site to the client or host the site with WP Engine. This saves time if you want to build sites regularly using WP Engine’s managed hosting.
Customer Site Satisfaction Rate
Looking at the statistics, the WP Engine sports an impressive 97% satisfaction rate. From our WP Engine review, we would have to say that the superior level of expert technical support and the sheer quality of the service as a whole is why it’s so highly rated by customers.
The company also regularly takes customer feedback into account and has a separate development team for troubleshooting bugs as well as implementing suggestions for their products and services. This promises an improved experience year after year for loyal users.
Cons
No hosting provider is perfect, not even WP Engine. Before you sign up, you should consider whether any of the following are dealbreakers:
Limited to WordPress Sites
It’s arguable whether this is an actual con. WP Engine, as the name suggests, only works with the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress. As a WordPress specific service, won’t be able to build or host websites using any other CMS or website builder using their service. Unfortunately, the WP Engine model locks out many people who could otherwise benefit from WP Engine services.
However, this can also be considered a pro as it allows WP Engine to focus on a single market and offer exceptional services in that area.
No Domain/Email Hosting
As a matter of convenience, most other managed hosting providers offer a free email address and domain for your website (usually, for the first year at least).
Unfortunately, WP Engine doesn’t offer this luxury with its WordPress hosting packages. This means you won’t be able to include these features alongside your site in a single subscription package. You’re only option will be to get a third-party business email or to purchase a domain through another domain registrar.
Fixed Pricing
WP Engine is a managed hosting service that runs a tight ship. This is pretty evident in its pricing structure. Like many other WordPress hosting services, WP Engine is strict when it comes to traffic. You’re paying for a specific amount of traffic and if you’re violating it, your managed hosting service won’t like it.
if you exceed your visitor limits, you’ll be forced to upgrade your WP Engine managed hosting plan, or may even have your account frozen. In the case of predictable traffic, it’s usually not such a big problem to choose the right package for your needs. However, sites with unpredictable or seasonal traffic may face issues.
Thankfully, you can always upgrade your plan through the user portal in the case that your site grows. But, significant spikes in traffic for your WordPress websites during launch or seasonal business may cost a lot extra.
Requires Technical Skills
A major flaw, in turn, is that WP Engine requires customers to have some technical experience. However, for people in need of that, the managed hosting service has an ever-expanding support center that caters to give you detailed and step-by-step directions. This is not only limited to instructions but also screenshots, FAQs, articles, tutorials, and more resources.
Now that we have dived into some of its perks let us look at its pros and cons to see what we are getting for our package.
Pricing
WP Engine pricing isn’t a service that’s affordable for every site owner, and there is no way to get around this. In fact, you can get find shared hosting options that handle traffic volumes similar to WP Engine.
The main incentive for WP Engine is if you want a web host with a hosting service that offers security, performance, speed, and most importantly, peace of mind that you have handed your website to a trustworthy and reputable company.
The best part is that there is a 60-day money-back guarantee that comes with all packages. This is great for a small business that isn’t sure whether WP Engine and the Genesis Framework is the right option for them.
Here are some of the most popular hosting packages:
Startup Plan
The Startup Plan sets you back about $25 per month. This package will provide you:
- 25,000 visits per month
- 50GB bandwidth per month
- 10GB storage
- One site included
WP Engine targets small-to-medium websites and blogs with this plan. However, this is not recommended for people who just want to start a small website as an experiment or hobby. We would suggest looking up more cheap shared hosting services such as DreamHost or InMotion. You can easily save about $60 per year.
Growth Plan
This web host plan will cost you $95 per hour. You will get:
- 100,000 visits per month
- 200GB bandwidth per month
- 25GB Storage
- Ten sites included a while
This hosting plan is suitable for a growing business with a website that might need some upgrades along the way. This will also give you 24/7 phone support in addition to chat support that is extremely helpful when you have a complex issue that needs to be resolved quickly.
You can save $230 or two months free on your website with the annual billing.
Scale Plan
- 400,000 visits per month
- 500GB bandwidth per month
- 50GB storage
- 30 websites included
If you are in it for the long haul and want to be able to continue growing your website to enterprise-scale capabilities, this is the package to go for. You can also save $580 or two months free with annual billing as compared to a monthly subscription.
Custom
- Millions of visits per month
- 400GB+ bandwidth per month
- 100GB-1TB storage
- 30 sites included
You will have to speak to a sales rep to get a personalized quote depending on your website requirements. This plan also offers top-class support in case something should go wrong.
Product Offering
Furthermore, there are a number of other notable products and services that are offered by WP Engine. These are as follows:
Local Development
WP Engine offers a complete local environment. This allows developers to be more flexible in terms of the sort of Web page they can create. This also gives them multiple options and variations. This feature also includes debugging tools such as Xdebug, WP-CLI, and Mailhot.
You can start building your site instantly with the one-click WP installation. You can also customize the environment according to your preference with technologies such as MySQL, Hot-Swap PHP, and PHP 7.3.
Auto Migration
Migrating your website can be a stressful experience. However, thanks to the auto migration feature, moving your website to WP Engine is a breeze. This is why Auto Migration exists in the user portal, to make this move a less time-consuming and stressful experience. This automatic plugin updates your site on your behalf with your existing content, complete with database and domain value imports.
WP Engine Environments
WP Engine offers three environments. This includes Development, Staging Site, and Production. Access to all environments is included in all their plans, which means you do not have to pay for it as an add-on.
The development and staging environments allow you to make changes and modifications on a separate testing site so that you can implement changes when required.
This duplication allows you to search for bugs and make changes to the site without it affecting the live website’s performance, uptime, or functionality.
WP Engine Automated Backups
WP Engine takes the extra step to secure your site by creating an automated backup procedure. In total, there are 40 backup points available, and you can have up to 60 if you contact support for recent backup points to their data centers.
CDN and SSL Certificates
With WP Engine, you get free access to the global Content Delivery Network with the click of a button. This allows you to organize and distribute your content to multiple server locations across the world. Users will enjoy faster download speeds, even during peak traffic hours. This feature is available for your site on all WP Engine plans.
Moreover, this adds an extra layer of security in the form of SSL certification that is included in your plan.
Proprietary EverCache
EverCache is a proprietary front-end system that was introduced by WP Engine to enable faster and more efficient digital services that are also scalable. The main design concept of EverCache is that it removes network strain by automatically caching static content on your site.
The system is designed from the ground up to cache and deliver large amounts of resources on a regular basis without a hitch. It has also been completely tuned around to be compatible with WordPress rules and is frequently audited and updated to make sure it stays that way.
If you know how to do it, EverCache is entirely customizable and can be tweaked to suit your WordPress-specific needs.
Core Updates and Features
We’ll say this again, the main reason why you should opt for WP Engine is if you want a hands-off approach when it comes to managing your site. WP Engine regularly adds new updates and features with the core concept of improving your site’s functionality while keeping the fast and efficient design intact.
The team behind the product continuously updates and field tests changes made. And, you will have the option to change or revert to previous versions.
Threat Detection and Blocking
WP Engine takes extreme caution when it comes to security. The host will log all attempts to write to the disk and identify malicious and non-malicious code. A few of its countermeasures include disallowing plugins for security reasons, a firewall proposition that automatically detects threats, and blocking requests to scrape author ID information.
Page Performance Analysis
WP Engine also provides an in-depth tool to summarize the performance statistics of your site. These are accessed as part of the dashboard, containing information related to performance, speed, and historical data. The tool can also automatically track the performance of your site at pre-set intervals, and it is possible to track performances and the effect of changes in real-time.
Alternatives to WP Engine
Here are some of our top picks of services that can serve as alternatives to WP Engine:
ISP Manager
This is a much simpler web hosting and website control panel alternative to WP Engine. However, it still serves as an advanced solution for both VPS management along with shared and reselling hosting packages.
This allows you to manage websites, database domains, use alternative PHP versions, and get alerts on server load. Most of the functionalities are quite simple and can be achieved with a single click.
The problem is that this product is not cheap. The lifetime license costs about $300, and the pro version is available for the hefty yearly price of $400. This is the only hurdle when it comes to this product. Otherwise, it’s something that you should consider if it suits your needs.
OnWorks
This is a more robust hosting service, offering a variety of hosting infrastructure types you may struggle to find at your typical host.
OnWorks has a clear focus on hosting workstations that run in your browser. Operating Systems such as CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian can be hosted on the web using this system. It’s a multi-device platform that can be used simultaneously by a number of employees or users. It’s pretty straightforward, full of features, light, and easy to use.
The only flaw is that it is focused on workstations, making it more of a productivity platform than a true hosting solution. Someone who wants to subscribe exclusively to a service to host their website cannot use this as a medium.
CloudWays
Cloudways takes an unorthodox approach, which utilizes cloud-based infrastructure for speed. It is also very scalable and has fast servers for quick response. They offer incredible 24/7 live support with a custom control panel to manage your hosting account. Cloudways also uses a brilliant server and cache technology stack that they developed in-house and call Thunderstack.
You can also take advantage of advanced collaboration tools and simple configurations. Moreover, it’s very low cost and relatively affordable to purchase.
However, it does not possess email hosting. You are also unable to register any sort of domain name, so you require third-party support to get that. Lastly, this Cloudways is a bit more complex and requires some hands-on experience to make it work.
FlyWheel Hosting
As a premium managed WordPress hosting service, Flywheel is a direct competitor to WP Engine.
This product handles the entire process of migrating your sites for free. It gives you complete access to all features using one dashboard as well as the added touch of providing you with dedicated IP addresses for your sites. Unlike many competitors, Flywheel offers free email accounts with your hosting.
Flywheel automatically creates backup points and secures them in an off-site location. You can also white-label easily to host sites on your branding. There are no overcharges for its services, and it easily scales your site as it grows.
The slight disadvantage is that there are only a few free plugins available. It’s also not one of the more affordable services.
Kinsta
As of now, Kinsta is one of the fastest-growing web hosting platforms. It’s blazing fast with a cloud-based infrastructure for better speed and availability with a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
It’s a nearly hands-off approach to web hosting, like WP Engine. The technical support is brilliant, with a simple setup for migration. You are guaranteed peace of mind with its services which are brilliant at handling traffic spikes and optimized for e-commerce.
However, it lacks customer support via phone and it also comes in at a steep price point. Additionally, it does not offer as many themes as compared to WP Engine and its collaboration with StudioPress.
GoDaddy
One of the most popular web hosting services out there, GoDaddy has long been the go-to standard when it comes to all kinds of web hosting.
GoDaddy provides various hosting services, including Windows, Linux, VPS, and WordPress hosting. Some plans allow you to host an unlimited number of websites. They also offer a state-of-the-art website builder platform. Plus, you’ll find ready-to-launch website templates that can be used, frequent offers and discounts, and top-notch customer support.
The cons are that it has limited live chat support, some packages are expensive compared to competitors, and there is a lack of tutorials that can be used for assistance.
ServeBolt
This is one of the oldest managed WordPress hosting services that was launched back in 2014.
Now, it has become a well-rounded service, offering a blazing fast speed along with outstanding reliability. All plans can be tried for free thanks to the 60-day trial. There is also a free website migration service that is included in the trials. The support is impeccable, with agents that are knowledgeable and listen to what the customer wants.
The cons are that it has limited hosting on its platform, there is no money-back guarantee, and it is relatively expensive.
Conclusion
To sum it off, WP Engine is not suitable for individual projects that may be small-scale. If you’re a small business or hobbyist, you’d be better off running your WordPress sites on some cheaper shared hosting providers.
However, if you’re looking to start and grow a company website with ambitious goals in mind, it may be exactly what you’re looking for. Performance aside, this web hosting surface has a lot to offer if you dig deeper with hundreds of themes and functionalities you can use for free, terrific customer support, and all the features you could possibly desire as a developer.
With multiple plans and options to choose from and the fact that most of the core features are available across all plans, you can change to whatever package suits your business requirements – as long as it’s within your budget.
