WP Engine specializes in VIP managed WordPress hosting. As pioneers in the managed WordPress hosting industry, they boast an impressive customer list including Yelp, Asana, National Geographic, PBS, and MyFitnessPal. WP Engine is an ideal choice for those looking for hassle-free premium WordPress hosting. Read our expert WP Engine review to see if it’s the right choice for you.
This is going to be a detailed WP Engine review, where will take an in-depth look at their services. If you don’t want to read all of it, then here is the quick summary of our WP Engine review score.
About WP Engine
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Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now one of the leading managed WordPress hosting companies in the market. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to the rising popularity of WordPress.
WP Engine is Headquartered in Austin, Texas with offices in San Antonio (Texas), London (England), Limerick (Ireland), Brisbane (Australia), and Kraków (Poland).
The company has won multiple awards for Best Place to Work in Austin and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. Their managed WordPress plans have following hosting options.
- Managed hosting – Managed hosting environment suitable for small business and blogs
- Managed Hosting Plus – Includes automated plugin updates tested with AI including 3rd party plugins.
- Secure Hosting – Additional security layers with website firewall and DDoS protection
- Ecommerce Hosting – WooCommerce hosting with powerful store search, eCommerce templates, and more
Each of these hosting options has five different levels available: Startup, Professional, Growth plan, Scale, and Custom. The Custom plan also includes dedicated servers dev. environments, customer success, and priority support.
All plans include unlimited data transfer. The plans differ based on:
- number of WordPress installs
- traffic volume (Monthly visitors or number of visits per month)
- isk storage amount
- Bandwidth requirement
Each WP Engine plan has set limits on the number of visits your hosting account can get. If your account exceeds those limits, then you may be charged overage pricing for extra visits.
WP Engine includes some unique features for WordPress users that most hosts don’t offer, or charge extra for. These special features include:
- Git version control
- Staging environment: instantly staging sites for testing
- Easy transferable WordPress installation from free to paid accounts
- Free SSL certificates and SSH access
- Cutting edge technologies including latest PHP version
In our WP Engine review, we found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and comprehensive managed WordPress hosting features.
Advanced Security Features
WP Engine also offers a number of premium security features. The WordPress core is automatically updated to the latest version for you.
WP Engine thoroughly tests any major core updates before upgrading their customers. They have a proprietary intrusion detection and prevention system to block any DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, malware, JavaScript/SQL-injection attacks, and more.
They also partner with third-party security firms to conduct regular code reviews and security audits.
Your security is guaranteed, so if you get hacked WP Engine will fix it for free.
Customer Support and Service
WP Engine has a dedicated support team of WordPress experts. They boast over 97% customer satisfaction with thousands of customer interactions per day.
Support is available 24/7 via live chat support for all customers. Phone support is available 24/7 with all plans except for the Startup plan. If an issue can’t be immediately resolved via chat or phone, the support staff will create an internal support ticket for you.
Enterprise customers get access to 24/7 ticket support via email. Premium and Enterprise customers receive a consultative one-on-one onboarding experience as well.
WP Engine also has a dedicated Customer Experience Operations team. They work to continually improve the WP Engine customer experience.
Apart from that, they have an extensive library of knowledge base articles, how-to guides, and tutorials for users who want to fix things on their own.
CDN for Even Faster Loading
WP Engine offers a CDN (content delivery network) in partnership with MaxCDN, making their hosting even faster.
CDN is included for free with all WP Engine hosting plans which is a huge benefit and cost-saving.
36+ Premium WordPress Themes
WP Engine recently acquired the popular premium WordPress theme company StudioPress.
Now all 36+ premium StudioPress themes and the famous Genesis framework is available to all WP Engine customers for free.
Genesis Framework is known for high-performance and SEO friendly themes. Their code base is optimized for faster page load times without compromising functionality.
Yes, you get all these great looking and well-coded themes at no additional costs – this is over $2000 in additional value for free!
Money Back Guarantee
WP Engine offers a generous 60-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not happy with their service, you can cancel your account within the first 60 days and receive a full refund.
The guarantee only applies to annual billing plans.
Pros and Cons of WP Engine
WP Engine is a popular web hosting company, but it may not be right for everyone. Consider these pros and cons before choosing a plan.
Pros of choosing WP Engine
- Security – WP Engine keeps your site protected with many advanced security features that other hosts don’t offer.
- Fast Loading Times – Servers are optimized for WordPress with WPEngine’s own Evercache technology your website loads fast. Plus, you get access to CDN which further boosts performance.
- Reliability – WP Engine’s proprietary front-end layer system can handle traffic spikes easily without slowing down your site.
- WordPress Expert Support – WP Engine’s entire support staff is comprised of trained WordPress experts.
- Rave Reviews – WP Engine is an incredibly popular host that gets great reviews from many customers for their reliability and excellent customer service.
Cons of choosing WP Engine
- Disallowed Plugins – WP Engine does not allow you to install certain WordPress plugins on your site, either because they conflict with or duplicate WP Engine’s features, or cause a high server load. This includes many caching,backup, related post plugins, and others. You can see the full list of disallowed plugins here.
- No Domain Registrations – WP Engine offers only hosting services, not domain name registrations. This means you’ll have to register your domains with another company, which some users may find inconvenient.
- Higher Costs – When comparing to shared hosting, WP Engine is more expensive, but the services they offer are well-worth the investment.
WP Engine Performance Tests
WPBeginner users trust our reviews because we only recommend products and services that we have used ourselves. We go and sign up for each top WordPress hosting company to thoroughly test their claims with our own industry-standard tests.
For this review, we created a WordPress website on WPEngine. Using the default Twenty Seventeen theme we filled the website with dummy data including media and images. This way our test site looked and behaved like an actual average WordPress site.
WP Engine Speed Test Results
After setting up our test site, we first ran the speed test. Using the Pingdom tool we tested our sample site on WP Engine servers.
Here are the results:
Our test site loaded in less than half a second. Considering that we didn’t need to install any performance optimization this result is quite good.
WP Engine Stress Test
Next, we wanted to check how WP Engine servers respond under peak traffic. To measure this we used a tool called K6 (formerly LoadImpact). We gradually built up to 100 unique visitors at once to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.
Here are the results:
The blue line represents response time and the green line represents the number of users on the site. As you can see, our test site performed really well with minor spikes. It maintained an incredible response rate throughout the test.
As you can see in the chart, that WP Engine server performance remained steady throughout the test as the numbers of users increased. The uptime remained steady with no downtime recorded during the stress test.
WP Engine Server Response Time
The next thing we tested was the server response time from different geographic regions. For this test, we used a tool called Bitcatcha.
Here are WP Engine’s server response time results:
As you can see in the screenshot, WP Engine server response time remained under less than half a second for all geographic locations. It was particularly great in the United States.
Is WP Engine Right for You?
Now that you have read through our entire WP Engine review and looked at the performance scores, you might be wondering whether WP Engine is the right web host for you.
After reviewing WP Engine services in detail, we are awarding them with the title “Best Managed WordPress Hosting”.
WP Engine is an ideal choice if you’re looking for a completely hassle-free web host for your WordPress site. For beginners, bloggers and businesses who want to stop wasting time on technical details and find a WordPress host that just works, WP Engine is perfect. Developers and freelancers will find that WP Engine’s advanced features will save them time on WordPress development for clients. And growing businesses will find plenty of room to scale up their hosting as their traffic increases.
Ready to get started with WP Engine? Click here to select your WP Engine plan today.
WP Engine Coupon
WPBeginner users get an exclusive 20% off discount on their first 3 months with our WP Engine coupon code: “wpbeginner20”
All you have to do is click on this link to purchase. The discount will be auto-applied.
Frequently Asked Questions About WP Engine
We have been answering reader’s questions about WordPress hosting services for a long time. Here are some of the most often asked questions about WP Engine that we hear from our users.
1. Is WP Engine a shared hosting company?
No, WP Engine is not a shared hosting company and they do not offer services similar to shared hosting plans. WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting company offering WordPress specific hosting solutions.
2. What is managed WordPress hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting is like the concierge service for your WordPress website. WordPress is powerful content management system and website builder. Managed hosting companies offer an optimized solution where they take care of updates, security, backups, caching, and more. This leaves you with time that you can then spend on growing your business.
Managed WordPress hosting is slightly more expensive than shared hosting plans.
3. Is WP Engine worth your money?
Yes, WP Engine is worth your money. Especially, if your business has outgrown the limitations of shared hosting services and shared VPS plans, then WP Engine is the best scalable upgrade option.
It allows you to easily manage updates and security and scale your website as your business grows.
4. Where are WP Engine Servers Located?
WP Engine uses Google Cloud servers and Amazon Web Servers as their data centers. This allows you to select data centers in North America, Europe, Asia/Pacific.
5. How WP Engine Compares to Other Hosts?
We are often asked about how WP Engine compares to other best WordPress hosting companies.
When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, WP Engine has a slight edge over competitors like Kinsta, Flywheel, and other options. Mainly due to better technology, user experience, and customer support.
WP Engine pricing is more expensive than shared hosting providers like Bluehost, HostGator, GoDaddy, InMotion Hosting, DreamHost, and even SiteGround.
For more information, see our detailed comparison of SiteGround vs Bluehost vs WP Engine.
6. Does WP Engine support WordPress multisite?
WP Engine supports WordPress multisite as a paid addon for Growth and Scale plans. It does not support WordPress multisite for Startup plan. It is also included in ‘Custom’ plans for agencies and enterprise clients.
7. Can I cancel WP Engine hosting and get a refund?
You can cancel your WP Engine hosting service at any time from your account dashboard / user portal.
They offer a full refund during the first 60-days of hosting for users who have pre-paid annual pricing.
8. Which WP Engine hosting plan is right for me?
If you are hosting a single website then you can sign up for their Startup plan. However, if you have a busier website or need to manage multiple installations, then you can choose Growth or Scale plans.
Bottom line
In our WP Engine hosting review, we found them to be the best managed WordPress hosting provider. They offer the best platform, with faster servers, security, and peace of mind that users need from a managed WordPress host.
That being said, let’s get into the details and take a deep look at how we reached this conclusion.
WP Engine is offering a 20% discount to WPBeginner users. Click here to start with WP Engine.
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