WP Engine is an industry leader in providing premium, fully managed WordPress hosting. They are pioneers in the industry of managed WordPress hosting, and they boast an impressive customer list, which includes companies such as Yelp, Asana, National Geographic, and PBS. MyFitnessPal is also one of their clients.
WP Engine is an excellent option for users who want premium WordPress hosting without the hassle of other management tasks. You should read our in-depth review of WP Engine to determine whether or not it is the best option for you.
Everything you need to launch and grow a popular website or blog is included in their WordPress-optimized hosting. To find out if WP Engine is the right host for you, read our comprehensive review.
This in-depth review of WP Engine will put their claims to the test. We will investigate the following:
Reliability: Will your website be available 24/7 or there is chance of downtime in the middle of the night or on the weekend?
Performance: When hosted by WP Engine, how quickly will your website load?
Pricing: Do they offer competitive prices? If there are any discounts available for WP Engine?
Customer Support: Is WP Engine reliable when you need immediate assistance with your website?
Features: Do they provide everything you need to create a website?
This is going to be an extensive review of WP Engine, in which we will take a comprehensive look at the services they provide. If you do not wish to read the entire review, then the following is a condensed version of the overall score for our WP Engine review.
WP Engine Review Summary
Performance grade A+
Average load time 677ms
Average response time 125ms
Free domain No
Free SSL Yes
1-click WordPress Yes
Support Phone / Live Chat / Knowledge base
About WP Engine
WP Engine is currently considered to be among the most prominent managed WordPress hosting companies on the market. The company was established in 2010. WP Engine was founded by Jason Cohen, a serial entrepreneur, after Cohen recognised the growing demand for specialised WordPress hosting due to the proliferation of WordPress websites.
The headquarters of WP Engine are located in Austin, Texas, and the company also has offices in San Antonio, also in Texas; London, England; Limerick, Ireland; Brisbane, Australia; and Krakow, Poland (Poland).
The company has been recognised on multiple occasions as the Best Place to Work in Austin, and its employees make consistent contributions to the core and community of WordPress.
Pros and Cons of WP Engine Hosting
WP Engine is a well-known web hosting provider, but its services might not be suitable for all customers. Before deciding on a course of action, you should think about both of these aspects.
Let’s start with pros of taking WP Engine hosting.
Pros:
Security: Your website is safeguarded by a wide range of cutting-edge security features that other hosts don’t provide, but WP Engine does.
Quick loading time: Your website loads quickly thanks to WPEngine’s proprietary Evercache technology and servers that are optimised specifically for WordPress. In addition to that, you will have access to a CDN, which will further improve performance.
Expert support: The entirety of WP Engine’s customer support team is comprised of WordPress professionals who have received extensive training.
Reliability: The proprietary front-end layer system used by WP Engine can easily handle traffic spikes without causing your website to become less responsive.
Moneyback guarantee:
WP Engine provides a generous money-back guarantee of sixty days’ worth of service. You have the option to cancel your account and receive a full refund within the first sixty days if you do not find their service to be satisfactory.
The guarantee is only applicable to billing plans that are paid for annually.
Free WordPress premium themes:
WP Engine recently completed the acquisition of StudioPress, a well-known premium WordPress theme provider.
Now, all customers of WP Engine have access, at no additional cost, to the renowned Genesis framework as well as more than thirty-six premium StudioPress themes.
The Genesis Framework is well-known for producing high-performance themes that are also friendly to search engines. The functionality of their site has not been sacrificed in order to achieve faster page load times in their code base.
It’s true that you won’t have to pay anything extra to get access to all of these professionally designed and well-coded themes, which add up to over $2,000 worth of value.
Great reviews from customers: WP Engine is an extremely well-known web hosting service that has earned high marks from a wide variety of clients for the dependability of their systems and the quality of their support offerings.
Cons of WP Engine hosting
No domain registration: WP Engine is only able to provide hosting services and does not offer domain registrations. Because of this, you will be required to register your domains with a different company, which may prove to be inconvenient for some users.
Higher prices: When compared to shared hosting, WP Engine’s prices are higher; however, the services they provide make the additional cost more than worthwhile.
Restricting the use of Plugins: WP Engine does not permit you to install specific WordPress plugins on your website. This could be because these plugins cause a high server load, are incompatible with other WP Engine features, or conflict with other WP Engine features.
This includes a large number of plugins for caching, backup, related post, and other functions. Here you will find a complete list of the plugins that are not permitted.
WP Engine Performance Test
Our reviews have earned the trust of WordPressRush readers because we only recommend goods and services that we have personally tried and tested. We go to each of the top WordPress hosting companies and sign up for their services so that we can thoroughly test their claims using our own industry-standard testing procedures.
WP Engine Speed Test Results:
After preparing our testing website, the first thing that we did was the speed test. We tested our sample website using the Pingdom tool on the servers provided by WP Engine.
The following are the findings:
Our specialised test website loaded in less than a second. This is an impressively good result.
WP Engine Hosting Plans and Offers
Only managed WordPress hosting is available through WP Engine. The following hosting options are available with their managed WordPress plans.
- Managed hosting plan: An environment that is managed and is appropriate for use by blogs and small businesses.
- eCommerce hosting plan: Hosting with WooCommerce, including an advanced store search, eCommerce templates, and more
- Advanced hosting plans: Unlock enterprise-grade security, premium performance, and enhanced support for your organisation.
All plans include unlimited data transfer. The plans vary based on the following factors:
- number of websites that use WordPress
- disk storage amount
- The necessary amount of bandwidth
Each plan on WP Engine has a predetermined cap on the total number of visits that can be made to your hosting account. In the event that your account surpasses those limits, you may be subject to overage pricing for any additional visits.
WP Engine gives users of WordPress access to a variety of special features that the majority of web hosts either don’t provide or charge extra for. These unique characteristics are as follows:
- Instant staging sites for testing environments
- Transferring your WordPress installation from a free account to a paid account is simple.
- Git version control
- Free access to SSH as well as SSL certificates
- Technologies on the cutting edge, including the most recent version of PHP
As part of our WP Engine review, we came to the conclusion that the company provides the most cutting-edge and all-encompassing managed WordPress hosting features.
Enhanced and cutting-edge safety measures:
Additionally, WP Engine provides its users with a selection of premium security options. You won’t need to worry about keeping up with core WordPress updates because they are done for you automatically.
Before implementing any significant core updates for their customers, WP Engine performs exhaustive testing. They can stop any DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, malware, JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, and more with their proprietary intrusion detection and prevention system.
In addition to this, they collaborate with independent security companies to carry out routine code reviews and security audits.
Because your security is guaranteed, if your website is hacked, WP Engine will fix the problem at no additional cost to you.
WP Engine Customer Support and Service
WP Engine has a support team made up entirely of WordPress industry professionals. They boast a customer satisfaction rate of over 97% despite having thousands of interactions with customers every single day.
All customers have access to 24/7 live chat support. Support is provided. With the exception of the Startup plan, all other plans include round-the-clock access to phone support. The customer service staff will open an internal support ticket for you if they are unable to resolve an issue immediately over the phone or via chat.
Enterprise customers have access to email-based ticket support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, Premium and Enterprise customers have the opportunity to participate in a consultative one-on-one onboarding experience.
Additionally, WP Engine has a specialised team devoted to the customer experience operations. They work hard to make the WP Engine user experience better for customers all the time.
In addition to that, they provide users with an extensive library of articles from their knowledge base, how-to guides, and tutorials that can be used by users who want to fix things on their own.
Bottom Line
After going through our comprehensive WP Engine review and looking at the performance scores, you might be wondering if WP Engine is the web host that’s best suited for you now that you’ve had the chance to do so.
After conducting an in-depth analysis of WP Engine’s services, we have determined that they deserve the title of “Best Managed WordPress Hosting.”
If you want to host your WordPress website without having to deal with any hassles at all, WP Engine is the best option available to you. WP Engine is an excellent choice for WordPress beginners, bloggers, and businesses that want to stop wasting time on technical details and find a host that works without any additional configuration. WordPress freelancers and developers will find that the advanced features offered by WP Engine will save them time while working on client projects involving WordPress development. And as their customer base expands, growing businesses won’t have any trouble expanding their hosting space to accommodate the additional demand.
Are you prepared to begin working with WP Engine? You can choose your WP Engine plan right now by clicking here.