WP Engine Expert Review
Unlike many competitors which offer a scattershot approach to hosting, WP Engine has become one of the most popular choices thanks to its laser-focused approach to WordPress hosting. The company claims that they host more than 500,000 websites and have more than 90,000 customers worldwide.
Our WP Engine review tested the company’s services and found that overall, even with some areas for improvement, the company’s impressive uptimes and strong security features make it a great solution if you’re looking to get a dedicated WordPress hosting service. With reliable customer service to support you, as well as useful features to help your website run smoothly, WP Engine is a big contender in the hosting game.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Keep your website up and running no matter what with some of the most reliable uptimes in WordPress hosting.
- Get your questions answered when you need them with customer service that is always ready to help.
- Make sure your website is perfect before launch with a dedicated staging area to test new features.
- Keep you and your customers’ data safe with excellent security features that include malware scans and daily backups.
- Optimize your servers and assets to obtain better load times and higher rankings on Google.
- Keep your WordPress and plugins up to date with automatic updates and patching.
Cons:
- Phone support isn’t available to all plans, making it slightly harder to reach the company at times.
- WP Engine doesn’t offer Windows-based server, making it less applicable for certain users.
- Basic plans are limited by number of visitors, which can disproportionately add to your bills if you experience sharp growth.
Pricing and Payment Methods
All four of WP Engine’s different pricing options are exclusively WordPress hosting plans. The company’s basic plan, Startup, begins at $35 a month, supports 25,000 visits a month, 10GB of local storage, 50GB of bandwidth, as well as one website. The plan is ideal for individual websites or blogs, as well as personal projects.
If your website or business is expanding, you can choose the Growth plan for up to five websites, starting at $115 a month. This package ups your visitors limit to 100,000 and gives you 20GB of local storage with 200GB bandwidth per month.
For businesses that manage multiple websites or verticals, WP Engine offers their Scale plan, which gives you 15 websites starting at $290 a month. With this plan, you can host up to 400,000 visitors monthly and gain access to 30GB of storage to accompany 400GB of monthly bandwidth.
WP Engine also offers a more customized plan for enterprise-level companies that have mission-critical websites and require dedicated environments. The plan effectively removes the visitors cap (WP Engine’s website describes the limit as “millions”) and offers up to 1TB of storage with over 400GB of monthly bandwidth for up to 25 websites.
Ease of Use
One of the first things that stood out to us as we started our WP Engine expert review is the company’s fully managed model. WP Engine has become the most popular WordPress hosting thanks to its blend of speed and easy-to-use features.
We were happy to see that the company automates many of the more tedious and complex aspects of managing a server—updates and patches, backups, and security—making it easy for beginners. Even better, WordPress comes preinstalled, so you don’t even have to set up your CMS.
Advanced users can also take advantage of WP Engine, though they have somewhat less flexibility than with broader hosting services. The site does offer development, staging, and product environments, and some freedom in choosing your PHP version, as well as database access.
Load Times and Reliability
Reliability and speed have become two of the hallmarks of WP Engine’s services, and our tests revealed that the company does indeed deliver on both counts. Although many of WP Engine’s plans are for shared hosting—which generally affects load times—the company’s WordPress focus and architecture reduce the effects of multiple sites on a single server.
The company’s SLA promises 99.95% uptime on its website, and our tests revealed that WP Engine may be under-promising somewhat, as we found no significant downtime during our tests. In terms of loading times, WP Engine’s proprietary caching application means that your pages are always up in blazing fast times. Moreover, included Global CDN also boosts loading speeds to ensure you constantly rank highly on Google and other search engines.
Features
We were pleased and surprised to find that WP Engine presents you with one of the most feature-rich environments to build your WordPress website. To begin, you can choose from over 40,000 WordPress plugins that include e-commerce, security, design, and more. Additionally, you can choose from over 40 curated templates to quickly start building your website provided by WP Engine.
Another useful feature when setting up your hosting is the company’s transferable sites, which make it easy to migrate existing websites. To boost your security, the company gives you malware protection, along with automated SSL security and automated patching and updates.
One feature we appreciated is the inclusion of GeoTarget, which lets you provide location-specific content for visitors depending on their point of origin. This makes it easier to tailor your experiences and increase your conversions. Additionally, we were impressed to see that the company provides you with a Launch Readiness Assessment, examining your site for performance, best practices, and more to ensure it’s in peak form. Finally, we were thrilled that WP Engine offers automated backups for your websites as an added layer of protection should you encounter any problems.
Customer Support
On the whole, we were impressed with the quality of WP Engine’s customer service, although we found a few small areas for improvement. It’s worth noting that the company’s support staff was able to quickly and effectively answer all our questions and issues, and they are available 24/7/365. However, basic plans only have access to chat support, which may result in slower resolution times.
Even so, the other plans all feature phone support, and all users have access to WP Engine’s support documentation. This includes a variety of guides designed to assist with setting up websites, optimizing speeds, troubleshooting, and more advanced customization techniques.
WP Engine User Reviews
We focus our reviews on giving you the broadest possible picture of a company’s performance. However, if you want to learn about others’ experiences, explore our WP Engine user reviews below:
Conclusion
We were very happy with the level and quality of service WP Engine provides. Although they focus exclusively on WordPress hosting, we find that this gives the company an edge in terms of the features and support they’re able to provide. We were impressed with features that include over 40,000 integrations, GeoTargeting, and optimization for better loading times.
Additionally, although they may be somewhat limited for advanced users, the company’s hosting plans give anyone the ability to quickly build and start operating a website, replete with unique templates, mobile-friendly designs, and the support of an outstanding customer service team. If you need fast and reliable WordPress hosting, WP Engine is a strong contender for your subscription.
