WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting service that offers a high-performance hosting environment that helps websites load faster, smoother, and securely. It streamlines the website development process by ensuring your websites are optimized and secure, without you doing much of the technical stuff. The platform offers daily backups, secure updates, a one-click staging area, automatic caching, and many more services that enable enterprise performance.
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Table of Contents
Features
WP Engine has unique features that most WordPress hosts don’t have, yet they are critical to the user. These features include one-click staging, Git version control, and an option to move to the latest version of PHP. Generally, WP Engine offers the most comprehensive and advanced managed WordPress hosting features.
1. Premium WordPress Themes
WP Engine acquired StudioPress, a premium WordPress theme company. StudioPress had more than 36 premium themes, which are all owned by WP Engine and are available for their clients. To spice it up, the famous Genesis framework is freely available for all plans. Considering these themes cost around $129, WP Engine saves you a lot of money.
There are themes for creating online portfolios, different types of blogs, e-commerce stores, agency websites, and many more to help you get started.
2. Advanced security features
Studies show that 78 percent of the total websites hacked were WordPress sites. Securing your website is WP Engine’s top priority. They take the following measures to safeguard your site.
- Websites are backed up daily
- They release checklists and guidelines for engineers and developers
- WP Engine monitors and updates the firewall to block all threats
- They perform virus and malware scans every day
- All plans offer an SSL certificate
- All plans have access to 24/7/365 technical support for all issues regarding security
Above all these measures, in case your site gets hacked, WP Engine will clean it for you and restore it for free.
3. Performance
Performance can make or break a web hosting service, and WP Engine knows that. They boast a large number of performance-enhancing features including:
- An add-on commonly referred to as GeoTarget that optimizes your site for your specific region
- A page performance tool that tests your website and helps you improve page performance
- A free CDN (Content Delivery Network) service on all plans, which makes their hosting affordable and faster
- WP Engine offers 19 server locations including Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America. This translates to great performance
4. Support
WP Engine has a customer support team of more than 100 WordPress experts. Each day, this team interacts with thousands of clients day and night through the live chat. Besides the live chat, they offer 24/7 phone support for all plans except for the Personal plan. For more complicated issues that cannot be resolved via phone or chat, the support team will create a support ticket for you. The company reported a 97 percent customer satisfaction score.
5. Money-back guarantee
The company offers a generous money-back guarantee. If their services don’t please you within the first 60 days, you can cancel your account and get a refund. This offer only applies to personal, professional, and business plans only.
6. Automatic WordPress updates
As part of the managed hosting plan, WP Engine keeps the core WordPress software of your site up-to-date to ensure your website is using the latest version of WordPress. Before updating the software, the team at WP first tests the update to ensure it is stable. Clients are also given the choice of differing the updates where they are given thirty days to test the update before its integration into the core of the software.
7. Development and staging environment
In addition to the production environment, WP offers two more environments for helping you to set up your development environments. You can create your site in the development environment and then move it to the staging environment for testing before pushing it to the production environment when ready to go live. Moving between the environments is easy on WP Engine.
8. Transferable sites
If you are a developer creating WordPress sites for your clients, you can utilize the transferable environment when building the site. These transferable websites are password-protected, and cannot be publicly available until they are transferred to the client. When developing a transferable site, you can choose to start with an existing site or a fresh WordPress installation. Developers have the option of configuring plugins, themes, and other settings that help them save time each time they are creating a new site.
Pricing
WP Engine offers four pricing plans:
- Startup (for starting a small website), and it goes for $25 per month and $300 per year. With this plan, you get to host one site, get support for 25,000 visits per month, 50GB of bandwidth, 10GB storage, an SSL certificate, and access to a CDN
- Growth (for a growing business), and it goes for $95 per month and $1150 per year. Here, you can host up to ten WordPress sites, traffic support of up to 100,000, and 24/7 phone support. In addition, you can import your own SSL certificates
- Scale (for a higher capacity website), and it goes for $241 per month and $2900 per year. With the Scale plan, you can host up to 30 sites and get support for up to 400,000 visits per month
- Custom (for mission-critical sites and large businesses)
Pros and cons
Though WP Engine is a powerful web hosting service, it might not be the best choice for everyone. Consider the following pros and cons before making your final choice.
Pros
- Faster loading. The servers are optimized for WordPress sites and everything is cached at the server level. With access to the CDN, pages load much faster
- Expert customer support. The entire support team is made up of expert WordPress developers. They offer technical support to clients in all plans
- Security. WP Engine has several security features that protect your site and relieves you the worry of setting up your own security or paying for extra security
- Reliability. With the proprietary front-end layer system, your site can handle traffic spikes without slowing down your site
- Numerous reviews. Being a famous site, you can easily find WP Engine reviews which can help you make up your mind about acquiring their services
Cons
- Expensive. WP Engine is relatively expensive compared to other hosting companies. However, the services offered are worth the extra dollars
- Lack of domain registration. It is common for a hosting site to offer domain registration. However, this is not the case with WP Engine. This means that a client will need to register their domain with another company, which is unpleasant for some people
- Restricted plugins. WP Engine restricts the installation of certain plugins on your site, probably because they duplicate or conflict with WP’ Engine’s features or have a very high server load which could slow down your site. Some of the restricted plugins include backup, caching, related post plugins, and others.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve gone through the review and looked at the features, pricing, pros, and cons, you could be wondering whether WP Engine is the right web host for you.
WP Engine is an ideal choice for someone looking for a hassle-free web host for a WordPress site. For bloggers and businesses that don’t want to waste much time implementing technical details to make their site secure and faster, WP Engine is the right choice. As for developers, WP Engine’s advanced features will save you the time and effort on creating a top-notch site for your clients.
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