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About WP Engine
WP Engine is a WordPress web hosting company that was founded in 2010 with its headquarters located in Austin, Texas, United States. They claim it is their employees who have made the company successful today. One of the interesting facts is 30% of there do not have a college degree. They are also an award-winning team that works relentlessly for the success of people.
Let’s have a look at the pros and see whether WP Engine is right for you for not.
The pros of WP Engine:
Ease of Use.
If you want to start a new site of your own then WP Engine makes it simple. Production, Staging, and Development are the areas that you will be shown to set up. The process is simple with also advanced options that will be perfect for building your site. As you maintain your site and grow your business it reduces disturbances over time. Many sidebar options are available in WP Engine’s platform for smooth service.
Those who are professionals will find it easy to use and straightforward. First-time users might find it difficult in the beginning but soon will get to once they learn how to use it.
Good page loading speed –
No matter from whichever part of the world you use Engine, their page loads fast within three seconds.
For maximum speed of your site, a combination of SSD technology, CDN, and NGINX web extensions are used by WP Engine. Your site’s visitors and the request from the bot are differentiated by the host. More priority is given to human visitors than bots so that they get the best experience when they are using your site. CDN on the other hand reduces the heavy traffic by delivering the contents quickly by following the visitor’s location.
Uptime guarantee-
WP Engine’s average uptime is very good with 99.95% with downtime of four to five hours in a year. If the performance goes down they run tests to optimize the site performance and make improvements. Site optimization is enhanced more with GeoTarget add-on that works with the visitor’s location.
Server locations–
The servers of WP Engine are located across North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia that including four continents. So more server location means fast page loading speed.
Security–
A free SSL certificate is provided by WP Engine so you don’t have to buy it. Basic security like malware scan is done regularly to check for threats and block them. It also has a firewall that keeps away unnecessary and unauthorized traffic away and provides safe communications. Your website is also protected with daily backups, 24/7 site monitoring, plugin notification and data encryption and many more.
Advanced security is also provided through Global Edge Security which protects your site from cyber attacks.
Though protection is guaranteed if your site is ever hacked, it will be fixed for free by the company.
Money back guarantee-
60 days money back guarantee is offered by the company to try out their services. If you are unhappy with their services you can cancel within 60 days and ask for a refund.
Excellent Customer support-
WP Engine offers its award-winning customer support through phone, email, and live chat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. There is one except that except for Startup Plan, phone assistance is provided rest for of all their hosting plans. The live chat is connected by a bot at first until they connect you to an expert. The agents are friendly, knowledgeable, and courteous and they also respond quickly.
They also have support articles where you can read regarding various topics if you don’t need their help.
There are some drawbacks like it is expensive. So now let’s take a brief look at the cons.
The cons of WP Engine:
WordPress hosting only-
Apart from WordPress, if you are using any other content management system, then WP Engine is not ideal for you even though it is a popular website builder. There are other CMS that many web hosts are providing but not for WP Engine. WordPress is the only web hosting that they provide.
From the perspective of business, it works as they are focusing in a niche community and they offer their superior WordPress hosting services only for this single market. But WP Engine could be missing out a large market of people who would benefit by using their services.
Email hosting not available–
Email and domain registration is not provided by WP Engine if you wish to do so. You will have to resort to other third-party for domain registration or email hosting.
WordPress pricing plans are too high–
Although WP Engine offers the best hosting for your WordPress site by no means they are cheap. Their starting price $20 per month for the ‘Startup’ WordPress plan and the most expensive one is ‘Scale’ WordPress plan is will cost $193 per month.
Some plugins are not allowed–
You cannot install certain WordPress plugins on your site as WP Engine will restrict you. This is because certain plugins like caching, backup, related post email plugins etc adversely impact performance and security as claimed by them. So in order to keep the site safe and boost the performance by not slowing down these plugins are disallowed.
Overall review
WP Engine is no.1 platform for WordPress and they are a very consistent and reliable site with good uptime and fast page loading speed. It also has excellent customer support with 97% of customers being satisfied.
WP Engine’s all the hosting plans offer lots of advanced features but drawbacks that it is expensive. Because of its advanced features and functionality, you may not need to use WP Engine if you run a single website or you are a beginner.
People would be serious to use WP Engine when they run multiple websites and has huge visitors and traffic that is making them grow their business rapidly.
Do we recommend WP Engine?
Yes, we do. If you want to use only for WordPress without any trouble then WP Engine is an ideal choice for you. If you don’t want to go in-depth into technical details WP Engine is also superb even if you are a beginner, bloggers or businessman. It also provides ample room for growth for small businesses when their traffic increases. Professionals like developers who constantly needs WordPress development for clients can relax as their time will be saved with the advanced features of WP Engine
Does WP Engine offer share hosting plans?
No, WP Engine does not offer shared hosting plans or any similar services related to it. Rather WP Engine offers Managed WordPress hosting plans.
How do I choose which WordPress hosting plan is the best for me?
Their Startup plan is for small businesses, bloggers and beginners. So if you are one of them, then choose ‘Startup’. Professional, Growth or Scale plans are for professionals and developers with multiple websites or someone who need to manage various installations.
Are there any other better alternatives to WP Engine?
DreamHost, Bluehost, SiteGround and Hostinger are other better alternatives to WP Engine.
