WP Engine Review

There are countless web hosts out there that can serve your website, whether it’s WordPress, some other content management system, or a home-spun website built from the ground up. A lot of these hosts are unquestionably great and a lot of others, not so much. But when you’re looking for a web host to provide hosting for your WordPress blog, there are a few that stand out from the crowd. WP Engine is one of those.

WP Engine is a host that specializes in WordPress hosting. Their servers are tuned to provide maximum performance for WordPress and the underlying technologies. But the question here is whether or not it’s worth it to go with a web host that’s focused entirely on WordPress, and whether that focus provides benefits over hosts that don’t provide that same level of integration and performance for WordPress.

With that said, we’re going to take a very thorough look at WP Engine, examine its specific features, look at its performance, and give you a full rundown of this WordPress-specific web host.

Overview

Managed hosting is a concept that entails platform-specific tuning on the host’s side that makes a site running that particular platform more efficient, more secure, and better optimized for performance.

WP Engine is one of the premier names in managed hosting for WordPress. Some of the features they offer are:

• Easy migration from your previous web host.
• The ability to set up staging websites.
• Extensive diagnostics and performance-tracking options for maximum optimization.
• SSL certificates that come free with your hosting.
• The ability to create three environments: One for development, one for staging and one for production.

Since WP Engine is a managed host for WordPress, if your business needs traditional virtual private servers, you’ll have to use another host. With that said, if you have no need for anything but a highly-optimized WordPress environment with all the latest and greatest, WP Engine offers a great experience.

When you first sign up, you won’t have to deal with any hosting setup, configuration, or WordPress installs. WordPress is already installed and ready to go. You’ll get an email with your credentials to log in to your WordPress environment and you’re ready to go. It’s a pleasant and seamless experience.

Another great feature about WP Engine is that many of the general maintenance and administration of your site is taken care of behind the scenes and automatically. Things like backups and plugin updates are all handled without you having to do a thing.

Of course, there are countless other features and benefits available. WP Engine makes its focus on businesses that are forward-thinking and disruptive. They’re constantly adding features and keeping their platform up to date with all the latest tech. So if you’re a business that’s agile and wants the latest and greatest, WP might be the host for you.

Performance

Performance, or lack there of, can easily be one of the most important metrics when it comes to a web host. A typical user will only wait mere seconds for a site to load before backing out and looking for something the loads quicker. So if your web host doesn’t excel in this department, you might as well not even have a site. Thankfully, WP Engine offers performance-enhancing features in spades.

For one, they have their own content delivery network (CDN) that every plan has access to. This gives you the ability to load certain resources for your site blazingly fast from all over the world, so users are never waiting long for your site to load.

They also have a page performance tool that you can use to analyze your site and tells you where you can make improvements to speed things up even more.

The best thing about the performance of WP Engine is twofold: They have countless server locations across the world, which means that, no matter where your users are, they’re going to be able to access your site from a server that’s close to them. On top of that, they also have an add on called GeoTarget that can optimize your site even further for particular regions.

One last thing in the performance umbrella that is immensely important is uptime. WP Engine offers some of the best uptime levels in the business, so this is an area you won’t have to concern yourself with at all.

Support

Another area where WP Engine shines is in its support and service. They offer phone support 24 hours a day, seven days a week via phone, live chat, or email. And they’re all easily accessible from your control panel on the main site.

To get an idea of the quality of their support, we did a test run with their live chat. The agent we spoke with was very helpful, attentive and seemed quite knowledgeable about WP Engine and WordPress in general.

Additionally, WP Engine gives you access to a comprehensive knowledge base that has a plethora of guides, tutorials, and troubleshooting documentation if you’re the type to solve problems on your own.

Pricing

WP Engine, as we’ve stated, is WordPress-focused. As such, they only have managed hosting plans for WordPress. With that said, they do offer quite a few tiers of plans, and these plans are mostly tailored to resource allocation and the number of sites you can have, so the plan’s focus is on scalability.

Startup Plan

WP Engine’s base tier will give you 10 GB of storage for a single website, along with 50 GB of bandwidth and 25,000 unique visitors per month. This plan will run you $35 per month.

Growth Plan

The growth plan will give you an additional four sites, bringing your total up to five. You’ll also get 20 GB of storage, a whopping 200 GB of bandwidth and 100,000 visits per month. This one comes in at $115 per month.

Scale Plan

For $290 per month, you can get a total of 15 websites, 30 GB of storage, 400 GB of storage and 400,000 unique visitors.

Premium and Enterprise

If you’ve got a substantial website that gets an immense amount of traffic, WP Engine offers custom Premium and Enterprise plans. One key distinction with these plans is that all of the previous plans are on shared servers. With the Premium and Enterprise plans, your site is moved to its own dedicated server, and you’re allotted an immense amount of resources. Since these plans are custom, you’ll need to contact WP Engine directly to discuss pricing and features.

Pros and Cons

Summing things up, let’s line out in pros and cons what we’ve covered in this review.

Pros

• WP Engine is extremely optimized for the WordPress platform.
• Their performance is amazing and consistent.
• They have an excellent CDN system and other features for serving users all over the world.

Cons

• WP Engine is definitely a premium host and their pricing reflects this.

Final Word

If you’re serious about your business and you’re looking for a WordPress-specific managed host, WP Engine is probably the best choice out there. While they are a little on the pricey side when compared to non-managed providers, their features and performance make this premium worth it. Excellent performance, amazing support and customer service, and countless features make this host one you’ll come to rely on for the long haul.

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References & Resources

• WP Engine, Official Website.