WordPress currently supports millions of websites worldwide. Because of this, many primary web hosting services focus on hosting one of the world’s most popular content management systems—WP Engine.
WP Engine content management systems have a host of user-friendly features, including excellent uptime, real-time threat detection, and daily backups, among many others.
Despite some flaws (a lack of email hosting and domain names), this CMS is pretty high-performance for most individual and business users, providing an affordable, reliable, and decent service.
So why should you consider using WP Engine?
If you’re bored with reading WP Engine reviews online that simply list key features and promote the product without real insights, you’ve come to the right place. We will provide you with a detailed review that will cover this CMS’s essential features, performance, security capabilities, pricing, support options, and more.
Our detailed review should help you to quickly make an informed decision on whether or not WP Engine is the right hosting service for you.
Read on to learn more.
About WP Engine WordPress Hosting
WP Engine is the largest managed WordPress hosting provider in the world. While they may not have been the first to offer the service – Pagely did it first – they are now the best-known service provider in this sector with just over 120,000 customers in 140 countries.
The company operates out of London, UK, and attributes its growth to the stellar WP managed hosting services it offers. The platform equips its customers with a host of creative website building and management tools, optimization tools that provide ongoing monitoring and intelligence capability, and effective cloud hosting and security solutions.
With the WordPress REST API and a comprehensive range of other tech partner integration solutions, this service enables users to create varied and rich WordPress digital experiences. These experiences are made easier by a host of tools that help stabilize WordPress websites and high-performance hosting environments optimized for WordPress websites.
WP Engine is the perfect cloud-based managed hosting service for anyone in need of more than what other typical lower-cost web hosts can deliver.
Why You Should Consider Using WP Engine as Your Managed Hosting Service
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But is WP Engine worth the extra cost? What does it offer that other hosting services don’t?
As mentioned above, WP Engine provides managed WordPress hosting that creates hosting environments optimized for WordPress websites with fast loading times and efficient, uninterrupted operation.
What does this mean in terms of features and functionality? Here, we take a closer look at what makes WP Engine unique, which could help you decide if this is the WP hosting service for you.
Automatic Nightly Site Backups
One of the most notable features of WP Engine is their nightly automatic backups, including website backups.
These backups cover all the WordPress core files, database, themes, and plugins. If your site experiences a hiccup and you need to restore it to a previous version, there shouldn’t be significant issues when rectifying the situation.
In addition to the automated nightly backups, the service allows users to perform manual site backups and full backups using the WP Engine user portal at any time. All backup files can be accessed through the WP Engine portal or downloaded as ZIP files for safekeeping and future reference.
These capabilities are essential, especially when making significant changes on your site, such as installing a new theme or plugin. They enable users to revert their site quickly and efficiently to previous versions should anything go wrong.
Automatic Software Updates
In addition to making automatic nightly site backups, WP Engine also applies core WordPress software updates to keep your site current with WordPress’s latest version. Conveniently, the WP Engine tech team ensures that they test every WP software update to ensure its stability before applying it to your site.
While you can opt for automatic software updates, you also have the option to defer the installation of upcoming WordPress core software updates. All users get 30 days to test new versions before WP Engine automatically applies the changes.
Perhaps the only downside to this feature is that, unlike other managed WordPress hosting service providers, WP Engine does not automatically update plugins for you, so this is something you’ll have to do yourself.
Easy and straightforward signup and account setup
WP Engine provides detailed information on all their hosting plans to help users decide which one best meets their needs and budget.
They also provide ample information on any extras and add-ons up front, making it easy for you to see how much your entire plan will cost. You can choose extras like the GeoTarget add-on, which enables your site to deliver custom content depending on a visitor’s IP address. For example, users can display location-specific product prices in a local currency, or WordPress Multisite, enabling users to create a subsite network within a single WordPress domain.
Additionally, you can amp up security features on your site with the Global Edge Security add-on that builds on the free product with powerful paid extras like web application firewall and DDoS protection.
At this point, WP Engine customers get to choose where in the world they would like to have their site hosted. As the company has data centers in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Belgium, Germany, and Taiwan, customers have an excellent selection to choose from compared with other managed hosting providers.
When making payments, WP Engine only accepts credit cards; they do not support other payment platforms, such as PayPal or bank transfers.
You can also select from annual and monthly billing for your chosen hosting plan depending on your budget. Although monthly billing is 16% more expensive than annual billing, it is an excellent option if you don’t have the cash required for annual billing upfront. On the other hand, picking a yearly hosting plan gives you significant savings as you can enjoy two months for free.
Once you’ve made your payment, the company directs you to a Welcome page with links to your WP Engine account, your WP site admin page, and an initial URL derived from your name. The company will then send an email once the site is ready, prompting users to create a password. After this, users can immediately use their WP Engine control panel and default site.
The WP Engine account setup process is simple and straightforward, something that has resulted in consistent and top-rated WP Engine reviews from users online. Additionally, the company sends a final email that summarizes user site details and provides helpful links to support pages and tutorials, plus a handy reference for quick referral, which is especially useful to the non-expert, beginner users.
Award-winning user support
All WP Engine users have access to 24/7/365 user support. Whether it’s site launch, migration, or growth you need, the WP specialists at the company keep customers informed with the latest technology trends and help them to implement them effectively.
On the official WP Engine support site, there are useful links to essential guides covering how to use the WP Engine portal, how to migrate your website, how to optimize a website for speed, and how to troubleshoot.
An easy-to-use, built-in search engine helps users quickly find the information they need and delivers quality content. However, you’ll have to use exacting keywords to get the information you need to come up quickly.
WP Engine provides a comprehensive support page that inspires confidence. The information and videos are detailed and well-laid-out, making them feel like content from a professional training course, which not many other managed hosting service providers can replicate.
Perhaps what makes WP Engine’s customer service stand out the most is its 24/7 live chat support. Customer service representatives are very responsive to this service; for example, we could present our queries and get a response in less than one minute. We felt suitably impressed that they could handle more complex issues just as efficiently.
Excellent Performance
One of the best features of WP Engine is its excellent uptimes.
Using Uptime.com, we monitored our simple WordPress blog over 14 days. The results were that we experienced 100% uptime with no outages for the entire two week period.
The page speed was not too bad either. Most hosting service providers range from 200-400ms; our review came in at 230ms, which is about the expected loading speed.
A Host of Premium Features Included
While other hosting service providers charge for premium features, WP Engine includes these as standard. This financial advantage is why it has garnered a reputation for the most value-for-money cloud-based managed hosting service in many WP Engine reviews online.
Some features, like performance, management, and reliability, are challenging to measure. Other features such as automatic nightly backups, integrated CDN, website staging for private testing, in-built page performance testing, automatic software updates, custom caching, and malware scanning are easy to track.
WP Engine’s in-built automatic nightly backups, typically a paid service with other hosting providers, protect the integrity of your website and ensure that you can access or download archived versions from the past 30 days.
WP Engine also has a global and integrated content distribution network or CDN. This geographically distributed network of proxy servers provides high performance and availability by distributing services depending on the end-users’ location and needs.
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The service also has a high-quality page performance testing service to assess website performance; this service also makes recommendations and advises on everything, such as how to combine CSS files, which, although easy for experts, may be necessary for beginning users.
Also included is a custom caching service that uses heuristics to determine the appropriate amount of time to cache a response. While most providers charge for this feature, WP Engine provides it for free.
Their website staging areas also enable users to create copies of their website for private testing, especially if they need to try new services such as themes or plugins without affecting site productivity.
WP Engine also includes malware scanning into the price of its hosting plans. This service deep-scans websites to identify potential malware and prevent infection and possible hacking. Again most providers charge for this, but it is free on this service, generating even more positive WP Engine reviews.
These premium features are mostly paid-for-features with other companies, so in this regard, WP Engine has outdone themselves.
Premium Managed WordPress Environments
Although WP Engine offers primarily shared hosting, the provisions are far from low-spec, even on their entry-level plans. Instead, with WP Engine, users get to access well-resourced and balanced shared hosting that’s highly optimized for WordPress platforms.
Within the price of your chosen hosting plan, the company also provides two different WordPress environments on top of the one you host on your live WordPress website. This service helps users to set up efficient development workflows.
Transparent Pricing
WP Engine hosting plans start at $25 per month on the annual payment plan or $30 per month on the Startup Plan. This service comes with 50 GB monthly bandwidth, which can handle a suggested 25,000 visits, 10 GB storage, and single-site hosting support.
The next plan is the Growth Plan, which comes in at $95.83 a month when billed annually or $115 per month. This plan offers 200 GB bandwidth with support for hosting ten sites and 20 GB storage. As mentioned before, WP is quite pricey but don’t let the price fool you because the features that come with it, such as automatic software updates and nightly backups, eventually save you money.
The Scale Plan, which is the next expensive plan, costs $241.67 per month when paid annually upfront. If paying month-to-month, the cost will be $290 per month. It gets you 500 GB of bandwidth, which allows for 400,000 site visits per month, 50 GB storage, and support for hosting 30 sites.
For the Custom Plan, WP Engine does not display the prices, but you can get a custom quote from one of WP Engine’s sales specialists.
Overall, WP Engine is quite pricey, but considering all the features you get included with your hosting plan, we would say it provides real value for money.
To add to this, the company gives users a generous 60-day money-back guarantee, which applies to both monthly and annual billed plans. When you compare this guarantee to providers like GoDaddy, who provide a mere 48-hour money-back guarantee, you see why WP Engine is the better service.
Varied Choice of Genesis WordPress Themes
WP Engine acquired StudioPress in July 2018, the company that produced a large section of premium WordPress Themes and the overall Genesis Framework.
This acquisition gave WP Engine users valued access to the Genesis Framework, which came with a selection of 35 StudioPress WordPress, all with no extra costs. When you consider that these themes cost approximately $130, this represents excellent value for money.
These themes come with options for creating a wide range of impressive options for creating blogs, agency websites, restaurant sites, e-commerce stores, and online portfolios, among many others.
This service has not only simplified the process of choosing a WP theme but has also saved users quite a bit of money.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
Startup Hosting Plan – $25 per month or $300 per year
The Startup Plan comes with all the basics to set up an essential website or blog.
It is the most affordable of WP Engine’s hosting plans and is perfect for supporting a small blog or website for individuals who are just starting online.
Key Features
Aside from the necessary bandwidth and storage features, WP Engine’s Startup Plan also comes with useful advanced technical features to help you launch a small site successfully.
When you sign up for the Startup Plan, you’ll get:
- 50 GB bandwidth per month
- 25,000 visits per month
- 10 GB Storage
- Hosting Support for one site
- 24/7 Live Chat Support
- Free 35+ StudioPress Themes
- Free Automated SSL Certificates
- Free Development, Staging, and Production Environments
- Free Evercache
- Free Genesis Framework
- Free Global CDN
- Free Page Performance Testing
- Free SSH Gateway
- LargeFS
- PHP 7.4 Ready
- Transferable Sites
- Free Add-ons – Additional Sites, Smart Plugin Manager, Global Edge Security, and Genesis Pro
When you subscribe to the annual payment plan, you can save up to $60 and get two months free for the Startup Plan.
Growth Hosting Plan – Starting at $95.83 per month or $1150 per year
This Growth Plan has all the features you need to grow and scale your small business.
It is more generous on services than the Startup Plan. It provides higher limits on features such as bandwidth and storage space and a whole host of resources to jump-start your website’s growth without locking you into paying for advanced features that you don’t need yet.
This plan is suitable for fast-growing business sites as the features provided can support fast growth without impacting site performance and reliability.
Key Features
Pay an additional $80 per month to unlock the following features on the Growth Plan. These key add-ons give you all the tools you need to run your site more professionally. It gives your website the capabilities to handle increased traffic, essential for a growing website.
- 200 GB bandwidth per month
- 100,000 visits per month
- 20 GB storage
- Hosting Support for ten sites
- 24/7 Live Chat Support
- Additional 24/7 Phone Support
- Free 35+ StudioPress Themes
- Free Automated SSL Certificates
- Free Development, Staging, And Production Environments
- Free Evercache
- Free Genesis Framework
- Free Imported SSL Certificates
- Free Page Performance Testing
- Free SSH Gateway
- Global CDN
- LargeFS
- PHP 7.4 Ready
- Transferable Sites
- Free Add-ons – Additional Sites, Smart Plugin Manager, Global Edge Security, and Genesis Pro
Save up to $230 and get two months free when you prepay for this plan by opting for annual billing.
Scale Hosting Plan – Starting at $271.67 per month or $2900 per year
This high-performing hosting plan comes with high site limits and capacities, perfect for scaling.
The company touts it as its best-value plan, with more capacity for performance improvement and growth than the Growth Plan. It best suits large and fast-growing sites, and although it doesn’t come with many extra features, it ensures that you get ample bandwidth, storage, and site allowances.
Key Features
The Scale plan lifts your site limits to acceptable standards and gives you all the resources you need to scale up. On this plan, your website can handle significantly increased traffic comfortably without losing its reliability and performance, enabling you to scale up your operation and push your website to the next performance level.
- 500 GB bandwidth per month
- 400,000 visits per month
- 50 GB Storage
- Hosting Support for 30 sites
- Free Genesis Framework
- Free 35+ StudioPress Themes
- 24/7 Live Chat Support
- Free Development, Staging, And Production Environments
- Transferable Sites
- PHP 7.4 Ready
- Evercache
- LargeFS
- Free Global CDN
- Free Page Performance Testing
- Free Automated SSL Certificates
- Free SSH Gateway
- Additional 24/7 Phone Support
- Free Imported SSL Certificates
- Free Add-ons – Additional Sites, Smart Plugin Manager, Global Edge Security, and Genesis Pro
Save a whopping $580 and get two months free when you subscribe to the annual plan.
Custom Hosting Plan – Custom-Quoted
The Custom Plan is WP Engine’s dedicated hosting plan that delivers high performance and excellent customer service with dedicated onboarding and operational support. It is suitable for large businesses or companies that have mission-critical sites.
This plan has features to support substantial businesses. Because such companies have varied operational and cost needs, WP Engine doesn’t have a set price for it but offers custom quotes when you contact a sales specialist.
If you’re a business that’s already bringing in massive revenue through your site and relies on your site for survival, this is the hosting plan for you.
Key Features
Say hello to impressive features for large enterprises when you sign up for the Custom Plan. This hosting plan gives you all the tools from the lower-cost plans, with added premium features to suit your intensive business operations.
Apart from giving you higher quality service for your website, the Custom Plan also guarantees your site’s visitors a more improved interaction level.
For instance, with the GeoTarget add-on, you can identify the location from which someone is visiting your site and show them content that’s suited to their area. Offer a more personalized service and provide real value to your audience via your website, something crucial for large businesses.
- 400+ GB Bandwidth per month
- Millions of visits per month
- 100GB – 1TB Storage
- Hosting Support for 30 sites
- 1 Smart Plugin Manager License
- 24/7 Live Chat support
- Additional 24/7 Phone Support
- Consultative and Dedicated Customer Onboarding
- Evercache
- Free 35+ StudioPress Themes
- Free Automated SSL Certificates
- Free Development, Staging, and Production Environments
- Free Genesis Framework
- Free GeoTarget
- Free Global CDN
- Free Imported SSL certificates
- Free Launch Readiness Assessment
- Free Page Performance Testing
- Free SSH Gateway
- Free WordPress Multisite
- LargeFS
- PHP 7.4 ready
- Transferable Sites
- Free Add-ons – Application Performance, Dedicated Development Environments, Customer Success Management with 24/7 Ticket Support and High Availability, Smart Plugin Manager, Global Edge Security, and Genesis Pro
Speak to a sales specialist at +1-512-273-3906 to get a custom quote.
WP Engine – Overall pros and cons
When reading through WP Engine reviews, or any hosting service review for that matter, it is advisable to weigh the hosting service’s pros and cons to help you decide if it’s the right one.
Below we look at the main strengths and weaknesses of WP Engine. Although the pros far outweigh the cons, there are still some downsides to this service. As with any business purchase, it is prudent to consider the services offered carefully before making your final purchasing decision.
Pros
- Automatic daily backups
- Excellent speed—one of the fastest hosting services available
- Excellent uptimes
- Free Genesis Themes that make WordPress theme development more manageable
- High levels of security
- Next-level, dedicated, 24/7/365 customer support, especially on the Enterprise Plan
- Simple and easy-to-use control panel
- Well-optimized for WordPress users
Cons
- Could do with better customer support on Non-Enterprise Plans
- Does not offer free domains or email accounts
- Limits the plugins you can use for optimization and speed
- Managed hosting only available on shared servers or custom plan dedicated servers
- PHP environments are not flexible
- Quite pricey compared to well-known hosting providers like Bluehost, A2 Hosting, SiteGround
Our Verdict: WP engine for WordPress
While we feel that WP Engine may be an expensive managed hosting service for an individual or casual user, the more demanding user and business users will love this provider’s high-quality features, security safeguards, and power.
As with every service, we encountered both strengths and weaknesses with WP Engine, but in our opinion, the advantages more than outweighed the disadvantages. Premium features included at no extra cost, such as automatic daily backups, useful website staging for private testing, in-built page performance testing, automated update service, custom caching, malware scanning, and integrated CDN, tipped the scales for us.
WP Engine also impressed us with their 35+ quality StudioPress themes and award-winning and responsive 24/7/365 user support.
However, as with all business services, there were some noticeable downsides. There are significant resource limits with all the hosting plans. WP Engine also doesn’t allow some plugins based on the reasoning that they might adversely affect site performance. This restriction may need you to engage an expert to advise on which plugins might help and which won’t, at an extra cost to you.
This leads nicely into our next point—many user-based WP Engine reviews online indicate that beginner or new users have found the service intimidating. Some of the features are incredibly advanced or unnecessary for individual and small-scale business users.
From our testing, we also got mixed results on site performance, especially on speed. And finally, it is, on average, quite pricey compared to other cloud-based managed hosting providers. However, WP Engine’s prices include many freebies that other web hosting providers charge extra to have.
All in all, we voted in favor of WP Engine because even with the downsides, the excellent features and proven track record means this company gets the nod of approval from us.
If you want to see how just impressive WordPress is, we highly recommend this service.
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Frequently asked questions
What does WP Engine do?
WP Engine provides the best services for businesses of all kinds. They have developed a new breed of software that can create amazing websites and apps on WordPress, which is just one more reason why WP Engine should be your first choice to partner with in this fast-paced world we live in today.
WPEngine is part company offering digital experience solutions as well as being an industry leader at the intersection between innovation and service providing their clients with innovative products when it comes to doing business online.
What features can WP Engine offer?
WP Engine has a ton of features that will make your life easier. You’ll have access to WP engine automated migration, staging sites, copy site, billing transfer and support from WordPress experts. There’s also wordpress core patching which ensures you’re always up-to-date on the latest updates so things don’t go wrong with security issues or vulnerabilities for example in PHP or WordPress itself. If disaster strikes then there are two options – immediate recovery where they can restore what was lost within minutes to hours depending on severity; but if not possible then their live backups allow them to recreate an accurate replica of everything before it all went down!
How good is WP Engine?
WP Engine is a high-quality host that offers excellent uptime and WordPress-specific security. Not only does WPEngine provide daily backups, but it also has real time threat detection to keep your site safe from malicious code or hackers. This hosting company’s cloud platform flexibility allows you the freedom of choice with which webpages are hosted on what servers at any given moment in order to optimize performance for visitors around the world while still being able to create content remotely without worrying about downtime!
Who are WP Engine competitors?
WP Engine is a well-known web hosting company which offers unlimited website storage, domain name registration and SSL certificates. However there are other alternatives that offer the same or even more for less money! Your options include Pantheon, Kinsta, Cloudways (all three of these provide similar features but differ in how they’re priced), A2 Hosting with its one click WordPress installation service as well as SiteGround’s competitive pricing on hosting packages). There are also DreamHost and Bluehost to consider – while their prices may be higher than WP engine’s you can benefit from tools like Softaculous’ automated software installer including most popular CMS platforms such as Drupal 7+, Joomla 3.x+ & WordPress 4+.
