Wpengine Review

Wpengine Review: Whenever we talk about Managed WordPress Hosting, Wpengine is the first name that comes to our mind.

But the question is “Should you really buy Wpengine?” , “Is Wpengine a scam?” or it is the right solution for you.

In this detailed Wpengine Review, we tried to highlight Wpengine Pros & Cons, so that you can take a wise decision about Wpengine managed WordPress hosting services.

Introduction

The last decade saw huge changes in the way the web has evolved. One of the significant ways its evolution has impacted the common population is through the blogging industry.

The rise of websites like blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr gave rise to custom blog software’s like b2evolution, expression engine, and numerous others.

However only a few have passed the test of time and one among them is WordPress. After the modified release from b2evolution, WordPress has now become one of the most used and widely appreciated content management systems on the web.

It overtook previous market giants like Drupal and Joomla due to its intuitive interface, the active development community, high stability and widespread support among millions of users all over the world.

Today, you can literally build any of type of website with WordPress. Its widespread adoption has slowly started an industry ranging from the custom plugin and theme development to WordPress website development, customization and management along with full time dedicated WordPress hosting solutions.

The majority of the top web hosting companies provide dedicated WordPress hosting with additional features to support website development. Hosting companies have now gone even further to include dedicated WordPress theme and plugin developers to sell their themes and plugins on major marketplaces or through the hosting control panels.

Although the models might be highly volatile in the fast-changing web industry, they have definitely attracted the attention of today’s consumers by allowing them to build sophisticated websites through drag and drop widgets.

One such dedicated WordPress hosting company is WpEngine.

It’s industry standard infrastructure along with excellent server optimizations for WordPress has made it one of the top WordPress dedicated hosting companies in all over the world.

Today it has millions of customers with WordPress sites ranging from all kinds and sizes. Along with award-winning features and quality server maintenance, the company has definitely made its mark and is now competing for head-on with hosting giants like Godaddy and Bluehost who are not limited to a single content management system.

Let’s dive deeper into what makes WpEngine tick and find out how it could be of use to your requirements.

Wpengine Plans and Pricing

Pricing competitively while at the same time focusing on the numerous features and add-ons is quite hard for any web hosting company in the tough market conditions.

Therefore, pricing according to the quality often turns out to be much costlier than the competitive pricing. WpEngine, fortunately, doesn’t consider much for its competition and therefore sets its pricing according to the quality and services it provides.

Being a dedicated WordPress hosting company, it cannot focus on providing cheap hosting packages expecting users to host static website and then compensate the profits in dynamic and high resource consuming plans.

Let’s take a deeper look into the plans and pricing provided by WpEngine and which one would suit your requirements.

wpengine pricing

  1. Personal: Priced at $29/month the plan is ideal for all kinds of websites ranging from normal blogs and corporate websites to portfolio websites and other application oriented websites that require high performance oriented server architecture. You can host only a single website on this plan but can handle up to 25k visitors. The plan comes with 10GB storage and 60 days’ money back guarantee that should be enough for you to try and test your website on the production environment. You can upgrade the servers to higher plans in case you need more resources. Along with the resources, users get unlimited data transfer and also the flexibility to build any kind of website or application along with custom themes, plugins and other features ideal for their requirements.
  2. Professional: Priced at $99/month, the plan comes with 20GB local storage along with 10 WordPress installs and 100k visitors. You can easily host up to 10 websites with unlimited data transfer. The plan is ideal for growing websites and applications that require higher resources and also features that are not generally available with smaller plans. You can expand on the resource consumption and therefore host high performance oriented websites that are highly customizable. You can also create WordPress based social networks on buddy press or forums ideal for all kinds of purposes.
  3. Business: Priced at $249/month, the plan comes with 25 WordPress installs and therefore is ideal for all kinds of websites. You can host up to 25 websites along with subdomains and therefore create a huge network of websites that can serve numerous purposes. With up to 400k visitors per month and 30GB data storage, servers allow you to host any kind of website or WordPress based application as per your requirements. It is ideal for business users and is therefore mostly used by large corporate websites and blogs that often get millions of visitors every month. You can also customize the server configuration along with numerous other allowed optimizations to further speed up your production.
  4. Premium and Enterprise: Meant for custom server configurations, these plans are not for the average customers. They are specially designed and configured to suit user requirements and may often cost more than the traditional cost of website hosting. You get up to 150 WordPress installs and the ability to customize the plans as per your requirements.

Wpengine Hosting Features and Add-ons

All features and add-ons that come with the plans are specifically created to suit the requirements of the expert WordPress developers.

WordPress requires a set of hardware and software features that are quite hard to comply with. Therefore, WpEngine has configured customized WordPress servers that are ideal for all kinds of WordPress websites. You can also build custom WordPress-based API consuming applications with the help of custom API’s and other technologies.

To support such development, the company provides all necessary features for developers and therefore goes leaps and bounds on the traditional WordPress hosting platform.

wpengine plans comparision

Some of the defining features included in all WordPress plans are: A minimum local storage space of 10GB even in the lowest priced plans, staging servers to test your website in production environments and therefore create the best solution among the available possibilities achieved through testing.

It also comes with transferable installs which help you transfer your WordPress website from one host to another without any kind of server or database configuration.

Wpengine Performance and Reliability

Traditional web hosting companies that provide a host of features and support all kinds of content management systems often tend to falter when it comes to performance in any one of the content management systems.

As each CMS has its own set of optimization-related requirements, it becomes quite impossible to configure the servers to support all of them. Therefore, specialized hosting companies fare much better when it comes to CMS performance.

You will always notice the difference in page speed and server performance when comparing specialized hosting companies and all in one hosting companies.

WpEngine being one of the most sought-after WordPress specialized hosting companies, its performance and server architecture is also top notch and can easily accommodate any kind of WordPress installation to serve customers in any region or locale.

Along with backups, firewalls, server-side caching, content delivery networks and SSL ready server configurations, the WpEngine servers manage to handle any amount of traffic within the prescribed limits without any performance related issues.

Let’s dive deeper into each of the aspects of server performance to further analyze the effectiveness of WpEngine.

We tested one of the very popular websites hosted with WpEngine and got amazed to see the results. The Wpengine server responds really fast. See below the screenshot of the test.

wpengine server performance

Wpengine Page Speed

WpEngine fares wonderfully in its page speed result with its average at 1.76s measured with and without the content delivery network.

Without the content delivery network provided by WpEngine, the web pages load at around 1.96s but the page speed goes down up to 1.64s when tested along with the CDN. Although the difference is not that much, it becomes highly important when front-end web pages are much heavier than expected.

Along with high scalability and resource optimized delivery mechanisms, WpEngine definitely stands as one of the top web hosting companies when it comes to page speed optimization.

wpengine page speed test

When compared with other web hosting companies like Godaddy or Hostgator, their page speed results are often twice that of WpEngine.

Even their dedicated WordPress hosting plans along with external content delivery networks tend to take up to 3.8s.

This is quite disappointing when it comes to hosting resource hungry web pages with a huge amount of front-end code that could likely take up much time even in the fastest load environments.

Wpengine Serve Uptime and Downtime

One of the striking characteristics of cloud-based hosting architectures is that they can easily scale, transfer data and adapt to changing customer requirements or even during their maintenance periods.

Replicating all data across geographical locations often makes it easier for companies to deliver the same content from different servers across the world without ever having to suffer downtime.

This cloud-based architecture has been successfully implemented at WpEngine as they proudly announce their 100% uptime guarantee.

wpengine uptime

As uptime is quite a challenging parameter to control taking into factor the numerous applications running on the server along with hundreds of clients and processes that often tend to exceed allocated resources, it still suffers a bit to maintain its uptime record.

However, the overall track record of the web host is much better than the competition and is, therefore, one of the highly regarded WordPress hosting companies on the web today.

Wpengine User Experience and Customer Service

An appealing user interface is a must for any kind of web application. With the web moving towards its reinvention, it has become highly important that all web hosting companies also reinvent their backend interface to match for their frontend presentation.

Customers no longer want to work on command lines when a competing web hosting company provides a customizable interface to accomplish the same tasks with the click of a button. Thankfully, the WpEngine dashboard is one of the best control panels among all the web hosting companies.

It does not use any traditional web hosting application like Softaculous or CPanel and instead manages its own custom-built web content management system. This allows them the flexibility to modify their interface as they see fit.

Without a good customer service ready to take on even the most challenging questions from its customers, it becomes nearly impossible to satisfy customer demands.

Each customer has their own set of requirements and often tend to face troubles when it comes to setting up basic or complex server applications.

Fortunately, WpEngine has one of the best customer service team who is highly skilled and are always at your disposal.

They can quickly solve most problems and often help you manage your server right from their control panel instead of making you do everything.

Customer Testimonials

wpengine customer testimonials

Conclusion

Over the years, I have used WpEngine to host a variety of WordPress based websites that often tend to break all allocated limits of the purchased plans.

However, the instant scalability in WpEngine has never let me down and is one of the best features of the web hosting company.

As WpEngine is a specialized hosting company, it costs much more than traditional web hosts but the features and performance improvements it offers are definitely one of the most sought after in the market.

If you want to host a small website or perhaps a blog that may not see that many visitors, then you are better off with traditional web hosting companies.

They often provide all the necessary features that could easily satisfy your requirements and also cost much less than specialized web hosting companies.

But if you are about to host high traffic websites that would serve a lot of customers or perhaps run an e-commerce website that expects high resource consumption, then you must go for WpEngine that offers one of the best hosting platforms for specialized WordPress installations.

Due to its custom setup and configuration to suit its platforms requirements, the company also provides a set of additional tools and plugins that greatly enhance WordPress functionality and performance.

You can easily build on the existing architecture and use any of the millions of plugins and themes available for WordPress.

This level of flexibility is unprecedented in any hosting company and therefore WpEngine is one of the top WordPress hosting platforms on the web.

Frequently Asked Questions

Question: How do I know WpEngine Status?

Answer: To know WpEngine status, just visit the site https://wpenginestatus.com/ . Here you can see the status of WpEngine platform, customer support, and features like BackUp, Staging, CDN & GIT.

Question: What is WpEngine Staging Feature?

Answer: WpEngine has a unique feature that they market extensively. The feature is known as staging. This feature allows you to make changes to your website or blog without making them live. Using the feature you can make any changes to your blog and can see them before actually publishing them live.

Question: Does WpEngine offer SSL?

Answer: Yes, You can purchase SSL certificate through WpEngine.

Question: How much does WpEngine SSL Cost?

Answer: Below is the prices for WpEngine SSL

  • Standard SSL certificates = $49 per year
  • Wildcard SSL certificates = $199 per year

Question: How to Cancel your WpEngine account?

Answer: There is an option available to your admin panel to cancel your account with WpEngine. Using the option you can create a ticket to cancel your account with WpEngine. A member of the Billing team will process your request and the site will be queued for overnight cancellation.

Question: How to get Wpengine Coupon code?

Answer: Usually WpEngine market their coupon codes on their website. You can apply that coupon code during checkout to get your discount. These coupons are available to new customer only.

Question: What are some good WpEngine Alternatives?

Answer: Pagely, FlyWheel, Pressable, WebSynthesis, WordPress.com VIP are some good WpEngine Alternatives available today.

Question: Does WpEngine provides migration assistance?

Answer: Migrating your site from other host to WpEngine is quite easy. WpEngine provides a free plugin to do so. Using the plugin your can migrate your site yourself with just a few clicks. If you’re ready to move your site, Download WP Engine Migration Plugin from WordPress plugin database.