WP Engine Review: A Powerful Tool for Bloggers Who Need to Scale
WP Engine Review: A Powerful Tool Who Need to Scale – Your website is your storefront, and your storefront needs to be optimized for the user. Your website needs to be fast, reliable, and easily accessible.
If you are running WordPress, WP Engine is the hosting service to help you meet these requirements.
WP Engine is an excellent choice for any small business looking for a WordPress hosting service with fantastic support services and a large community of users to connect with.
WP Engine is an excellent WordPress hosting provider. It provides top-notch security, remarkable speed, and a user-friendly interface.
If you’re considering WP Engine for your site, this is the blog post for you!
We’ll look at some of the features that make WP Engine so great, as well as their pricing packages.
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How WP Engine Works
With the variety of paid and free options available on the market today, it’s a little challenging to grasp how WP Engine works and what it offers fully.
In part, that’s because, as an authorized affiliate of the company, we don’t have full access to its source code (you can read more about this on the company’s site here) and won’t be able to do a deep-dive analysis of it as we can with WordPress.com or Wix.
However, we’re not as ignorant of the inner workings of the service as our tone of this review would suggest.
With that in mind, we have carefully researched what makes WP Engine a top contender in the managed WordPress hosting space and where the company makes improvements to ensure it’s a good fit for its customers.
Pros of WP Engine
Let’s quickly review the pros and cons of the WP Engine platform…
Pricing for WP Engine is very competitive. You can choose from either a hosted or VPS plan, starting at just $3.33 per month.
You can customize your website’s visual look and feel—a clear advantage over most managed hosts.
WordPress is extremely fast and responsive to your traffic. WP Engine has five optimized WordPress hosts to get outstanding performance without compromising any other web design requirements.
WordPress is supported out of the box. But you can customize your website’s look and feel to a much greater extent.
Excellent uptime — WP Engine offers 24/7 support, allowing customers to get on with doing what they love doing most: Running their businesses.
What’s The Problem With WP Engine?
Where WP Engine falls short is in its page speed capabilities.
WP Engine Speed Optimize Plugin
WP Engine’s average page load time (as measured by GTmatrix) is around 49 seconds, significantly slower than many of the other leading managed WordPress hosts, like our 2016 competitor survey winners Kinsta and Squarespace.
GTmatrix also measures the impact of slow page loads by showing you how long visitors spend waiting to load the page.
GTmatrix’s average page load time shows WP Engine is the slowest, while GoDaddy and Wix are the fastest.
What does this mean? Well, on average, a person who has to wait 48 seconds to load a page will spend 42 seconds reading that page, 18 seconds getting bored and clicking away from the page, and 13 seconds signing up for a Wix account.
Pricing
WP Engine pricing depends on how many customs features you need, how many servers you need, and how many users you need to host on each server.
On its “Business” plan, a “small” site (with an optimized theme) with five WordPress sites running on a single server will cost you $63 per month.
That’s a pretty good deal when you consider you’re getting access to all of WP Engine’s best-of-breed features, such as daily backups and automatic updates, and all of its 24/7 support and tech support services.
The pro version of WP Engine Business ($292/month) has higher levels of support (which include live chat support), advanced security features, and priority customer service.
Meanwhile, the primary “Individual” plan costs $242 per month per site, and the “Mini” plan is $25.
Inability to Scale
You might think that a cloud-hosted WordPress website would be super-flexible.
But the reality is that the possibility of scaling a website like this, for WordPress, really depends on how many sites you have and how significant your traffic is.
When looking at the numbers, you can see that there are some obvious upsides.
For example, as long as your traffic is relatively low, WP Engine allows you to scale from a single machine to the highest possible number of the device under your control.
The problem is that this means that you can only be a little bit flexible when it comes to your hosting setup.
WP Engine’s configuration lets you control everything except for the machines.
Security Concerns
For many websites, WP Engine is simply the cheapest of all the managed WordPress hosting options available.
That said, it also has the highest monthly fees of any of the managed WordPress hosts we tested.
The caveat is that if you run an ecommerce site, security is an issue.
WP Engine is only certified to secure 1,500 ecommerce sites, so if you have hundreds or even thousands of sites to confirm.
Then you might be better off looking at managed hosting options that can offer security enhancements for more significant areas.
And that’s why we haven’t included WP Engine in our current managed-to-host coverage and instead have found alternatives to review here.
Why Consider WP Engine?
Here are a few reasons why you should consider WP Engine in a multi-site hosting environment:
Professional Support: When you’re looking to host several sites (even with the free starter plan), it’s not all that uncommon to find out that you don’t have the expertise to set up or troubleshoot your first site.
For example, you may not have years of experience at all, or maybe you had some, but not enough.
WP Engine’s professional support is more than adequate, so you can avoid costly situations, like a server suddenly giving you trouble and not even realizing it until you spend hours trying to get it fixed.
Advanced Features: WP Engine is a platform geared towards highly demanding websites, so you’ll find that many advanced features are built into the venue.
WP Engine Migrations Plugin
Conclusion
So, to summarize, despite some of the perceived drawbacks, I would still recommend WordPress to nearly everyone if it meets your needs.
I also still believe that, like a blog or other type of site, WordPress offers superior development performance, ease-of-use, and scalability.
However, suppose you’re planning to grow. In that case, it’s worthwhile to give some thought to the logistics of how to distribute your traffic.
So that you don’t saturate the site, which will eventually lead to a bottleneck of unused visitors or potential users.
That’s why I recommended WP Engine for the ultimate self-hosting WordPress environment.
WP Engine gives you access to one of the highest-quality networks in the world, multiple data centers, and reliable bandwidth, all of which make it easy to scale your site.