WP Engine – The WordPress hosting specialist

WP Engine is an industry-renowned managed WordPress hosting company. Their turnkey package offers fast, robust servers that can run any type of site.

With Wp Engine, your website is virtually hacker-proof, and their quality customer service makes you feel like a VIP. They offer automatic security updates, daily backups, one-click restore points, automatic caching and much more.

WPEngine is like having an army of WordPress experts on your side to help you with your internet project. Brands like HTC, FourSquare, SoundCloud, and many others use WPEngine services for their WordPress hosting. If you are a business that doesn’t want to deal with the technical side of running your WP site or blog, then WPEngine can be a good solution for you, if you can afford it!

Let’s review this web host to see whether or not it offers good value for money.

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About WP Engine

WP Engine was founded in 2010 with its headquarters in Austin, Texas. Since then, the company has grown significantly and now operates data centers in the UK, Belgium, Japan and the US.

WP Engine’s goal was to develop WordPress-specific hosting with a high level of security, speed and scalability. We can say that the company has achieved its goal.

WP Engine is a web hosting company that provides optimized and fully managed WP hosting.

The company does not own their own hardware for hosting – they have contracted and heavily customized existing cloud configurations to optimize them for the WordPress CMS.

Their hosting solutions rely on Amazon and Google Cloud infrastructure, with the majority using Google Cloud servers. Therefore, any traceroute to these servers simply returns Google IP addresses.

After the acquisition of StudioPress by hosting company WP Engine in July 2018, the Genesis theme framework and 35 StudioPress premium themes are now available for free to WP Engine customers.

 

Main features

WordPress optimized hosting

Since WP Engine focuses entirely on WordPress hosting, it would be foolish not to talk about what makes them so good at it.

First of all, convenience. With WP Engine’s managed hosting, customers won’t have to worry about installations, updates, plug-ins or security patches for WordPress.

All you have to do is perform a one-click WordPress installation when you start up. WP Engine’s staff will take care of all the technical stuff for you. This makes their hosting services extremely user-friendly.

Enhanced technical support and one-click setup features allow you to focus on your project, eliminating unnecessary stress.

With their unique technology, WP Engine guarantees excellent levels of WordPress security, super fast page load times, a daily backup system, and the ability to automatically update your WordPress plugins. Among the features that set them apart is staging.

 

Performance and Security

Demanding architecture and WordPress caching

WP Engine prides itself on its architecture. Designed to meet the demands of business, their servers provide seamless hosting solutions for almost any web project. In fact, their technology allows websites to run 4-6 times faster than other hosting environments.

Every WP Engine plan benefits from a robust server architecture

Their architecture is built on EverCache (native server caching system). This is one of the most scalable systems for WordPress caching. This means that your website will be able to handle traffic spikes without experiencing performance issues.

Another thing that makes WP Engine’s WordPress hosting incredibly fast is their global CDN. As we mentioned before, it is included in all plans.

When developing their hosting environment, WP Engine used custom code to connect WordPress events to their Nginx-based systems. What does this mean? That their site caching can be aggressive without reducing responsiveness when you update your website.

WP Engine has even added an extra layer of protection, shielding your site from crawlers that scan it and waste your website’s bandwidth.

Restrictions on the use of plug-ins

WP Engine performs regular scans of your installation to ensure that you are not using certain plugins that are not compliant or compatible with their environment and could affect the performance and security of your sites.

You can see the list of extensions banned by WP Engine here:

https://wpengine.com/support/disallowed-plugins/

 

Many datacenters

United States, Germany (the best speed option for France according to our tests), Belgium, United Kingdom (2nd best option for France), Canada…

Security is a really important element for WP Engine. E-commerce companies will appreciate the presence of free SSL certificates that guarantee the security of customer data. As part of its commitment to customer security, this hosting company continuously updates its firewalls and constantly tracks malware.

Overview of the main WP Engine features

• SSL certificates included
• 24/7 WP support
• MySQL and InnoDB database
• Remote MySQL connections and PHPMyAdmin tool
• SSH access
• One-click automatic installation software
• Excellent uptime guarantee
• Automatic site backups
• Third party application integration
• 60-day money back guarantee

 

Ease of use

Simple navigation via the control panel

When you log into your WP Engine account for the first time, the company greets you with a free site migration option. This option will show you how to get their automated migration plugin to easily switch your website to their servers.

From here, I can see all the WordPress installations I have on my account. And I can add additional workspaces to keep them organized. For example, if I were hosting multiple WordPress websites, I could create a separate workspace for each one. Or, I would make one workspace for all WordPress sites of the same type. Of course, this would be most useful for people who host for clients and manage multiple projects.

You can select a WordPress project and view general information about it in the “Overview” tab.

This will give you up-to-date information about the number of visitors to your website, your bandwidth usage and the storage space you have used on the server.

You will also be notified of WordPress updates that you can install with a single click.

For each website, you can also view all your backed up points. Remember, WP Engine performs automatic daily backups of your websites.

From here, you can select which backup points to download for safekeeping. Or, you can simply click Restore to take your site back to that previous checkpoint. You can see from my screenshot that WP Engine even backed up my website before a recent major WordPress update.

Developers or other more advanced users will want to use phpMyAdmin to manage MySQL database administration. You can easily access this from the user portal.

From the user portal, customers will also have access to page performance testing. Run a performance test on your website to check the loading times and page speed. WP Engine will give you a score representing how well your page is cached. They will also show you how long it takes for the page to start loading, how long before the page is fully visible to the site visitor, and how long it takes for the page to fully load.

Based on the results of your performance test, WP Engine will provide some recommendations to optimize content caching and help your page load faster.

 

WP Engine Rates

WP Engine’s basic package is designed to host individual websites on a shared server. The first thing you’ll notice when you look at their plans is a limit on the volume of visits to your website.

Many hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space, making them a great place to launch new projects. When these companies go beyond their shared architecture, they don’t have to pay additional fees. Instead, their hosts will simply help them upgrade to a VPS plan with more resources.

But with WP Engine, when you exceed your traffic limits, you will be charged. This means that users will have to monitor their website statistics to make sure they don’t experience too much traffic. While WP Engine’s servers can handle traffic spikes, you don’t want to be hit with high overhead charges when you start to experience more success. If that happens, you’ll need to add a CDN to your site to absorb the extra traffic!

For a hosting company that doesn’t do this, check out LiquidWeb. They won’t limit the number of monthly visitors to your site and won’t charge you extra. But keep in mind that their personal hosting options are more expensive than WP Engine’s.

The monthly visitors allowed by WP Engine should be more than enough for any small business or personal site that is starting out. The number of site visits you can expect will depend on the purpose of your website and your audience. WordPress blog sites will receive more traffic than business websites. E-commerce websites can experience periods of growth and periods of decline.

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Reliability and Customer Support

WP Engine’s best-in-class customer service team includes WordPress experts who know the content management system (CMS) inside and out. These support assistants have been trained in WordPress. They continue to practice providing expert service as they help thousands of customers every day. Considering the number of people they help every day, you know their team is knowledgeable in terms of support.

Not only will their customer service team help you when you have a problem, but they can also identify performance barriers to prevent problems before they occur. Just give them a call or start a support ticket, and a member of the team can review your website and find ways to make it work faster.

When it comes to security and reliability, WP Engine has you covered. They offer automatic backup and restore, so you don’t have to worry about losing data.

One thing we really like about WP Engine is their instant backups. This will allow you to make changes to your site without worrying about making major mistakes. With snapshot backups, your changes don’t have to be permanent.

A snapshot is what WP Engine calls a quick backup of your website. There is no risk involved in making changes to your website:

• Log in to your hosting account
• Navigate to your personal user portal
• Search for the snapshot backup option
• Create a snapshot of your website in seconds
• Make the changes you want to your website

If you regret the changes you made or if they messed up something, simply restore your website from your backup snapshot in one click.
These snapshots are downloadable, so you can save them to different locations. These backups include all your website content, themes and plugins. This means you don’t have to worry about losing valuable customer reviews or facing reloading blog posts if your website faces a major issue.

WP Engine automatically performs daily backups for you. They will also make sure to make a backup before updating WordPress. Just in case the new WordPress update wreaks havoc on your website.

In addition, they, like Siteground, offer a free WP migration plugin!

• 24/7 support
• Phone, email tickets and live chat
• Many videos

 

Our opinion on WP Engine

The best things to remember about WP Engine are the speed and security offered by their servers. With facilities designed to meet the demands of large organizations, WP Engine can handle almost any WordPress issue. The company’s customer support team is another good reason to consider them for your hosting needs if your portfolio allows!

Businesses and individuals will benefit from fast WordPress hosting on their advanced and optimized WP infrastructure. Customers will be able to sleep soundly knowing that WP Engine covers all their security concerns. This will be the case if they are willing, of course, to shell out money for their rather expensive hosting plans in our opinion.

Compared to other web hosting services, the prices charged by WP Engine are somewhat high and will surprise more than one webmaster or WP user.

However, if you’re looking for a top-notch managed hosting experience for your WordPress site, WP Engine is worth a look in our opinion. With their well-tuned, ultra-fast servers, data that transfers very quickly, and solid account security features, WP Engine offers more than just WordPress hosting.

WP Engine can be a great option for businesses of all sizes running a website on the most popular CMS on the market. Their architecture is built for speed and security. Two essential criteria if you want to rank well on Google in 2020.

However, their pricing is the biggest drawback of their offer and we recommend to our readers to have a look at the excellent WPServeur which came out as the winner of our 2020 WordPress host comparison and has more competitive prices!

If your project is aimed at English-speaking or foreign markets, consider WPX Hosting which offers much better performance and will cost you less.

Hopefully this overview and review of WP Engine will help you decide if this company is right for your hosting needs.

 

WP Engine – Get 3 months free on WP Engine’s new eCommerce plans with coupon code ecommwpe10