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One in twelve folks on-line go to a web site hosted on WP Engine day by day. They host over one and a half million websites throughout 150 nations and nonetheless keep a buyer satisfaction fee of 96%. That’s dependable internet hosting.
WP Engine makes use of its personal caching system and content material supply system (CDN) and your get your alternative of information facilities in North America, Europe, or Asia. Plus, your web sites are hosted on the quick Google Cloud Platform. This all means your prospects ought to have a greater consumer expertise due to sooner loading instances and reliability.
WP Engine manages your WordPress web site for you making the day-to-day operating of your web site simpler permitting you to give attention to your corporation. As well as, WP Engine offers options like automated plugin updates, malware detection, and automatic backups. Though managed internet hosting comes at the next value than unmanaged, it is not till a vulnerability is found at 2am on a Saturday that the worth of getting somebody look over the safety and updates of your server turns into actually noticeable.
WP Engine Plans and pricing
WP Engine have three predominant forms of internet hosting: WordPress Internet hosting, WooCommerce Internet hosting, and Headless.
WordPress internet hosting has 5 plans that are all on a shared infrastructure. Probably the most fundamental plan is Startup which offers internet hosting for one web site, 25,000 month-to-month visits (with a 50GB bandwidth cap which is sufficient for the typical web site), and 10GB native storage.
With this plan you get chat solely assist, safety patching, plugin danger scans, day by day backups, EverCache, and world CDN. This plan is $20/mo and refreshingly there aren’t any complicated renewal costs.
From there onwards, the plans assist 3, 10, and 30 websites and the bandwidth, cupboard space, and month-to-month visits improve as you’d anticipate. There may be additionally the choice to fully customise your plan ranging from $600/mo.
For WooCommerce, the plans are related of their specs and what they assist however they arrive with numerous options as commonplace akin to elastic search capabilities, assist for limitless merchandise, Stay Cart, and extra. These plans are barely dearer than the WordPress internet hosting plans and the customized plan prices a minimal of $800/mo.
Options
The core causes to decide on WP Engine over cheaper WordPress internet hosting are elevated reliability, efficiency, assist, and administration, however these are laborious to quantify. Some options stand out once you browse the interface, nonetheless, that can provide you some perception into the service supplied.
WP Engine Web page Efficiency is a neat device designed that can assist you velocity up your WordPress web site by providing significant metrics on efficiency.
Operating a check returns you a page-performance report that particulars how shortly your web page rendered, how lengthy it took to load in its entirety, and the overall measurement of the web page. It even contains historic information in your web site’s efficiency over the previous six months and proposals on how one can cut back web page load.
Keep away from embarrassing errors in your web site by making adjustments to a duplicate of your web site earlier than it goes dwell. That is referred to as Staging, and it permits your builders to make intensive adjustments to your web site with out affecting your prospects.
In a comparatively uncommon transfer, WP Engine restricts the WordPress plugins you’ll be able to set up. These usually restricted are plugins which have been famous to trigger efficiency points and safety holes. For vital options akin to caching, backups, and search engine optimization instruments, WP Engine has made options out there that don’t put a excessive load on the server.
Interface and in use
WP Engine’s interface is skilled and nicely laid out, however the highly effective options may imply a steep studying curve for inexperienced customers. You probably have an understanding of phrases like Git, CNAME, and redirect guidelines, you’ll be proper at house right here, however in any other case you’ll must spend a while on the assist web site.
Making a web site in WP Engine is made easy, because of a simple course of. Whether or not you’re internet hosting on a website, or constructing a staging web site, the method is automated, so that you don’t must do something. As soon as the identify of the positioning has been set, and also you’ve selected including WordPress by itself, or Phrase Press with WooCommerce, it’s going to self-install when you make a espresso.
Observe that WP Engine doesn’t supply any AI-guided web site technology instruments right here. Something you create should be executed manually via the present WordPress theme administration surroundings.
One of many predominant points of interest for a lot of prospects is promised simple migration. Meant to make it easy to maneuver a WordPress web site from one host to a different, WP Engine affords a devoted plugin particularly for this function. Utilizing it’s easy sufficient – you put in the downloadable plugin on the supply (previous) net host, create a safe key when prompted, then paste this into the plugin in your WP Engine internet hosting. In testing, the migration of a web site round 500MB in measurement was fairly slick, finishing in just some minutes.
Assist
A managed WordPress service ought to supply further worth via its assist, and WP Engine delivers. The assist web site contains movies and articles of a top quality you’d anticipate from a paid coaching course, with assistance on deeper WordPress performance that many WordPress hosts don’t go into.
There’s 24/7 dwell chat assist and a ticket system, too. In our testing, the response was fast and the agent educated. For all plans aside from single-site plans, there’s phone assist, too.
Testing
Testing the efficiency of WP Engine – particularly, the Important Startup – I used to be intrigued to search out that whereas fairly slick, it appeared slower than different hosts. Now, I’ll preface this with the information that WP Engine particularly goals for environment friendly WordPress internet hosting. It’s identified to dam some plugins that may have an effect on efficiency; it opts for its personal caching plugin, for instance. So, gauging efficiency with benchmarking instruments on WP Engine is just a little totally different to different hosts.
Nevertheless, the checks delivered outcomes round 30% slower than different hosts. On condition that the comparisons had been with plans for the same price range and server specification, I used to be stunned at how poorly WP Engine scored.
The competitors
If it’s the upper degree of buyer assist you worth in a managed WordPress host, Liquid Web usually tops buyer satisfaction polls. It has a give attention to high-end merchandise like digital personal servers (VPS) and devoted servers, so in case your wants lengthen past a high-performance WordPress web site into different software program options, we suggest checking it out.
TsoHost is one other managed hosting supplier we suggest. The worth can ramp up, with even probably the most fundamental VPS choices beginning at $52 per thirty days, however you get a degree of on-hands buyer assist that’s just about unequalled.
Remaining verdict
WP Engine will not be the most affordable internet hosting round and it would not appear to be the quickest both. It is also not the primary WordPress host we’d suggest to newcomers, because the breadth of instruments will be intimidating.
WP Engine was the champion of WordPress internet hosting however I believe that is beginning to change with hosts like SiteGround and Kinsta taking up.