WP Engine Review (2023): Is it Really Worth?

wpengine review
  • 13 Minutes to read

Table of Content

  1. Introduction
  2. Why Would You Choose WP Engine?  Is WP Engine worth it?
  3. The Pros and Cons of WP Engine
  4. Why use WP Engine vs Another Host?  Alternatives to WP Engine
  5. WP Engine Review – The Final Verdict

Introduction

In 2010, Jason Cohen, Ben Metcalfe, and Cullen Wilson came up with the idea for WP Engine. The main office is in Austin, Texas, but the company has servers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. It is a privately owned company with three data centres in London, Tokyo, and the United States. Its architecture works on a global scale.

WP Engine is a premium managed-to-host service that only works with WordPress. It has advanced security features and customer service that has won awards. More than 185,000 people from more than 150 countries use the platform.

If you’re looking for a good web hosting service no matter how much it costs, you’ve come to the right place, because that’s what our WP Engine review is all about. The service offered by WP Engine isn’t for everyone, but it may be just what many bloggers and webmasters need. why?

Its hosting performance is great, and its premium services and managed WordPress make it a great choice for people who want to focus on their content instead of worrying about maintenance. It’s hard to say exactly what you want and need from a web host. WP Engine might not be the best choice if all you want is a place to put your site and don’t care much about how well it works.

But if you want the best WordPress hosting experience possible, with more options than just the bare minimum, then this is probably on par with some of the best hosts. At the end of the day, if you want to focus on making content instead of making sure your site works, or if you just need the fastest speed and most scalability, WP Engine will give you all of this and more.

Why Would You Choose WP Engine?  Is WP Engine Worth It?

It’s hard to choose the best WordPress host because the ones that are easy to use are almost always of low quality, and the ones that are good are too expensive for the average startup. WP Engine hits that sweet spot in pricing and performance.

Managed hosting is something to think about if you want to make sure your website is optimized, safe, and loads quickly without having to do a lot of work yourself. When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, WP Engine is one of the top names.

Its service has a lot of features that are unique to WordPress, such as:

  • Moving from your old host is quick and easy.
  • A free Secure Socket Layers (SSL) certificate, is a security measure that is very important.
  • Support for setting up staging sites.
  • There are many ways to track performance and figure out what’s wrong.

This managed hosting service lets professional WordPress developers build sites from scratch or make changes to sites that already exist. From WP Engine’s staging environment, developers can build, launch, and hand over the site all at once.

WP Engine only does one thing, which is to host WordPress sites in a way that is easy to use. You don’t have to choose between dedicated servers, virtual private servers (VPS), shared servers, etc. If you don’t want to deal with hosting and server management for a website with medium to high traffic, it’s hard to think of a better option than WP Engine.

 Features and Pricing

features and pricing of wpengine

Image Source: https://wpengine.com/plans

Even though WP Engine only offers one service, managed WordPress hosting, it has a number of plans for you to choose from. There are a lot of differences between these plans in terms of how many resources they offer and how many sites they support. This means that you’re getting a service that can grow with your needs.

Let’s run through each of the WP Engine plans quickly:

Startup ($24.00 per month):

With this entry-level plan, you get support for up to 25,000 visits per month, one website, 10GB of storage, and 50GB of bandwidth. You’ll also get a global CDN, an SSL certificate, and a few other important features.

Professional ($47.00 per month):

With this plan, you can set up three sites and have up to 75,000 visitors per month. Also, you get 15 GB of storage space.

Growth ($92.00 per month):

This plan gives you ten sites and increases your traffic support to 100,000. You also have access to phone support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you can import your own SSL certificates.

Scale ($232 per month):

This level is mostly the same as the one before it. It just gives you more resources, brings the number of your sites up to 30, and lets you handle up to 400,000 visits per month.

Premium and Enterprise:

These are custom plans, so pricing will vary. They give you a lot of extra resources and help, and they move your hosting from shared servers to servers that are just for you.

These plans aren’t cheap, but they give your site a lot of features and room to grow. This service is worth a look if you want to build one or more serious business or eCommerce sites.

Note – WP Engine also provides a 60-Day Money Back Guarantee if a client is unsatisfied for any reason. One can request a refund anytime within the first 60 days and we’ll refund your plan fees paid. One must request a refund as part of your cancellation notice to qualify for a refund.

Hosting Management – Is it Easy to Use?

WP Engine is more advanced than regularly shared hosting options. Because of this, some of the tasks don’t get done automatically, but there are explanations everywhere. Even though WP Engine is more advanced, it is still easy to use. In addition, the control panel looks great.

After you’ve finished signing up, this is the first thing you’ll see:

hosting management

The main dashboard for WP Engine is pretty clean and easy to use. You’ll find the tools and features you need to run your site on the left side. On the other end, you’ll find the stats for your site. Things like the number of sites, the number of visits, and how many visits are expected. This is a great way to keep track of your growth and how you use your resources.

The notification centre, on the other hand, is right in the middle. I don’t think this is really necessary. I would have liked the centre for notifications to be smaller and on the side. But, of course, this is just what I like.

I’m also a little disappointed that WP Engine’s plans don’t include emails. This is strange and disappointing, especially since even the cheapest providers usually let you use at least a basic email client. So, that’s not good or convenient at all.

Performance and Load Times

Features and customer service are important, but a web host’s performance is what makes or breaks it. WP Engine has a lot of features that make it work better, like:

  • Content Delivery Network (CDN) services are included for free in all plans.
  • A Page Performance solution that checks your site and tells you how to make it better.
  • GeoTarget is a plug-in that makes your site work better in some places.

Also, you can choose from a lot of server locations with WP Engine. There are 19, but we won’t list all of them. They are in Australia, North America, Europe, and Asia. All of this should help you do well in the real world. Let’s see if that’s right!

Page Speed Tests with Pingdom

For the next phase of our WP Engine Review for WordPress, we set up a basic site and tested its loading speeds using Pingdom Tools from various locations around the world. Here are our results:

New York: 1.61 seconds

Melbourne: 1.67 seconds

San Jose: 0.39 seconds

Stockholm: 1.60 seconds

These are remarkably consistent times (with the exception of San Jose, which is the clear standout). 1.6 seconds isn’t particularly impressive, but it’s a decent speed that remains below the all-important two-second mark.

Page Speed Tests with Load Impact

It’s always smart to test performance using multiple tools. So we also used Load Impact to simulate the effects of multiple simultaneous users on our WP Engine site. Here’s what we got:

Load Generator: Ashburn, USA

Test Server: Ann Arbor, USA

Minimum Response Time: 0.51 seconds

Maximum Response Time: 0.59 seconds

The Load Impact results of our WP Engine review for WordPress.

wpengine load impact

Basically, this chart shows that as the number of visitors increases (blue line), our test site’s page load times remained consistent (green line). That’s a good thing because it means your site will load just as quickly for the 1st visitor as it will for the 50th person visiting at the same time.

When does the WP Engine server respond?

How long it takes for your page to load can be affected by what’s on your site. For example, if there are too many images on your site, it will take longer to load. In fact, most of the bytes that can be downloaded from a site are images. Instead of just looking at how long it takes for a page to load, we decided to also test how long it takes for the server to respond, ignoring the page’s content.

Bitcatcha is different from Pingdom in how it works. Bitcatcha doesn’t care about the content of your page. Instead, it keeps track of how long it takes your page to load from eight places around the world: New York, Los Angeles, London, Brazil, India, Singapore, Japan, and Australia. Each spot’s speed is measured three times, and then the average of those three measurements is used to figure out how fast it is.

From the result, you can see that WP Engine server response time remained less than half a second for all geographic locations. It was particularly great in the United States. Best of all, WP Engine allows you to choose a data center when you subscribe to a plan.

Be sure to choose the nearest data center where your target audience is mostly located, which can improve your server response time. From the results, you can see that the time it took for the WP Engine server to respond was always less than half a second, no matter where it was. It was particularly great in the United States. Best of all, when you sign up for a plan on WP Engine, you can choose a data center.

Make sure to choose a data center that is close to where most of your target audience lives. This will help your server respond faster.

Security – Is WP Engine Secure?

is wpengine secure

When it comes to safety, WP Engine takes things very seriously. Each plan comes with the basics, and more advanced security measures can be added to meet different needs. Oh, and bad plugins won’t work either. WP Engine blocks all plugins that are known to cause problems.

Let’s focus on these things:

SSL Certificates are Free

Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates are included for free with all of WP Engine’s plans. This is an excellent choice for most websites. But there are other options if you have more than one subdomain and need more advanced security.

For instance, WP Engine offers RapidSSL wildcard certificates ($199) that cover both domains and all subdomains. A $10,000 warranty is also in place in case of a leak. On top of that, it’s easy to import your own SSL.

Server Monitoring: Finding Threads and Stopping Them

First of all, the provider keeps an eye on the server’s performance and traffic, which helps them find and stop threats before they reach you.

There is a firewall made by the company. This firewall is set up to automatically send good, bad, and harmful traffic where it needs to go. It works on the principle of least privilege, so only apps and protocols that have been approved can get through. But the provider won’t give any more information about the firewall because “doing so could hurt its security or lead to abuse.” Also, there is an in-house security team that can do audits and fix problems right away.

Automatic Backups Every day

The service provider offers both automatic and manual backups every day. This is an important layer of security because it can bring your website back online if you need to. When do you need it? If there is a security problem if an update to a plugin breaks your site, or if you broke it yourself while trying to make changes.

Through the user portal, you can set up and use up to 40 backup points. If you need older data, you can contact the support team to get access to the 60 most recent backup points.

Security on the Global Edge

This is a paid add-on that will cost you $300 per year. GES is a partnership between WP Engine and Cloudflare. It offers managed Web Application Firewall (WAF), DDoS mitigation, protection from the OWASP top-10 vulnerabilities, and more.

In short, when it comes to security, WP Engine pretty much has it all. But if you want all of the best features, you should be ready to pay a lot for them. The good news is that Secure Managed Hosting packages come with GES. Even though the plans themselves are more expensive, adding GES at the same time is still less expensive.

Plugin Management

WP Engine has a list of plugins that can’t be used because they interfere with their own systems or are known to cause security problems.

WP Engine handles backups and caching, so it makes sense that these kinds of plugins might interfere and cause problems. As for the rest, WP Engine carefully checks them out, and if they turn out to be unsafe or slow, they are taken off. WP Engine saved you a lot of time here because you can now choose which plugins are allowed and know that they are safe and good.

Added More Security to Accounts

WP Engine keeps the server and your account safe with features like Multi-Factor Authentication and activity logs. Multi-Factor Authentication makes sure that a password won’t be the only way to log in on a new device. Extra steps are added, like getting a code sent to your phone.

Account Permissions

If you’re working with a big team, you can give each member a different role and a set of permissions. So, all users will only be able to see and change the parts and settings they need to.

Activity logs

Everything that is done on the account is written down and can be found. This lets you know where you might have problems with permissions or security. Overall, WP Engine’s free security measures cover everything that most websites could need. Also, more advanced options are available for websites that need the most security.

Premium WordPress Themes

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 are 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!

WP Engine Customer User Experience 

WP Engine offers customers a huge range of useful features. You’ll get 24/7 access to dedicated help via phone, email, or live chat. Support options are easy to access right from your user portal once you’ve signed up. To easily manage your account and make use of these features below we shall have a look around the WP Engine user portal and the user experience of installing and managing a WordPress website.

We took a test drive of the live chat to get a feel for the support staff:

wpengine customer user experience

Agents were quick to respond, helpful, and seemed knowledgeable about the platform. They were able to answer our questions without any trouble. For even more assistance and information, there’s also a resource center and a comprehensive knowledge base with lots of well-written documentation and tutorials.

Automatic WordPress Software Updates

WP Engine will always keep your core WordPress Software up to date so your website will always be using the latest version of WordPress. WP Engine Team members will always test the new update to WordPress software beforehand to ensure its stability before it is applied to your website.

You can also delay the installation of a future WordPress core software upgrade, enabling you 30 days to evaluate the new version before it is automatically applied to your site. In contrast to some managed WordPress web hosting, however, plugins are not automatically updated on your behalf, leaving you with this responsibility.

Automated WordPress Website Backups

Along with keeping your Software up to date WP Engine also keeps your backup updated at regular intervals. It includes all your website’s theme files, core files, plugins, and database, to make sure if anything goes wrong with the website and data needs to be restored, it can be easily available.

automated wordpress website backups

Using the WP Engine user portal manual backup can also be taken at any time. Before updating or installing a new plugin or theme or making any changes in core files a manual backup can give you a quick way to roll your site back to normal. You can always download zip files for your safety from the portal.

WordPress Development and Staging Environments

The staging section enables you to clone the live version of your website and make modifications or test new plugins and themes. Nothing you do in the staging area will impact the live website. This capability lets developers work on websites without affecting the functionality or user experience of the live site to set up an efficient development workflow.

wordpress development and staging environments

WP Engine makes it easy to create development and testing environments for your website.

The Pros and Cons of WP Engine

pros and cons of wpengine

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.

Why you should choose WP Engine

Security: WP Engine has many advanced security features that other hosts don’t have that keep your site safe.

Fast Loading Times: The servers are set up to work well with WordPress, and WPEngine’s Evercache technology makes sure that your website loads quickly. You also get access to CDN, which improves performance even more.

Reliability: The front-end layer system that is unique to WP Engine can easily handle traffic spikes without slowing down your site.

Support from WordPress Experts: All of WP Engine’s support staff are trained, WordPress experts.

Customer Reviews: WP Engine is a very popular host that gets great reviews from many customers for being reliable and having great customer service. Glassdoor Reviews, TrustPilot Reviews, and Reviews from Forums such as Reddit from customers are also available which can justify the advantages of WP Engine.

Why you shouldn’t choose WP Engine

Disallowed Plugins: WP Engine doesn’t let you install certain WordPress plugins on your site because they conflict with or duplicate WP Engine’s features or cause a high server load. This includes a lot of plugins for caching, backing up, related posts, and other things.

No Domain Registrations: WP Engine only offers hosting services. It does not sell domain names. This means you’ll have to register your domains with a different company, which may be inconvenient for some users.

Higher costs: Compared to shared hosting, WP Engine is more expensive, but the services they offer are well worth the money.

Why use WP Engine vs Another Host?  Alternatives to WP Engine

WP Engine is an excellent hosting option for those with a reasonable budget. However, it is quite costly (especially on the higher tiers).

If WP Engine is beyond your pricing budget but you enjoy it in theory, there are alternatives you might consider. SiteGround is an excellent WordPress-specific host, and DreamHost provides reasonably priced managed hosting. For additional information, please see our comprehensive post on alternatives to WP Engine.

With an estimated 330,000 web hosting companies in the world, you have a multitude of possibilities. In this article, we’ve selected seven of the most popular web hosting companies and compared them based on their pricing, hosting packages, and basic plan features. Our study gives impartial information on each service provider, allowing you to select the most suitable one for you.

Web HostPricingHosting PackagesBasic Plan Features
WP Engine
Rating [4.8]
$23 to $233/monthShared
WordPress
WooCommerce
Dedicated
Cloud
1 website
10 GB storage
50 GB bandwidth
Free SSL certificate
SiteGround
Rating [4.5]
$3.99 to $400/monthShared
WordPress
WooCommerce
Cloud
Reseller
1 website
10GB storage
Unlimited bandwidth
Free SSL certificate
Free email
DreamHost
Rating [5.0]
$2.59 to $279/monthShared
WordPress
WooCommerce
Virtual private server (VPS)
Cloud
Dedicated
1 website
SSD storage
Unlimited traffic
Free Domain
Free SSL certificate
Bluehost 
Rating [5.0]
$2.75 to $119.99/monthShared
WordPress
VPS
Dedicated
1 website
50 GB SSD storage
Custom themes
Free domain for 1 year
Free SSL certificate
InMotion Hosting
Rating [4.0]
$3.99 to $539.99/monthShared
WordPress
VPS
Dedicated
Reseller
2 websites
100 GB SSD storage
Unlimited bandwidth
10 free email addresses
Free SSL certificate
Hostinger
Rating [4.4]
$1.87 to $3.99/monthShared
Cloud
VPS
Managed
1 website
30 GB storage
100 GB bandwidth
Free SSL certificate
Free Domain
GoDaddy
Rating [3.5]
$5.99 to $399.99/monthShared
VPS
Dedicated
1 website
100GB storage
Unlimited bandwidth
Daily backups
Free Domain

WP Engine Review – The Final Verdict

WP Engine is designed for specific categories of customers, including developers, marketers, SMBs, agencies, and enterprises, and it provides the appropriate combination of capabilities to enable these businesses to expand their markets rapidly and easily. For instance, they make it easier for developers to concentrate on development and design rather than hosting upkeep. Using the built-in capabilities, marketers can construct and customize their website without worrying about maintaining it up-to-date.

  • WPEngine invests significant time and resources in educating, employing, and managing a top-notch support team, so you can rely on them when you need them.
  • WPEngine is the ideal option if you are looking for a managed WordPress hosting solution that makes it simple to design, publish, and customize your website.
  • If you have a limited budget and a small website, the WP Engine basic plan should suffice.
  • It offers more functionality for the price than the majority of its competitors, including additional security elements that WordPress users should find extremely handy.
  • WP Engine is an excellent solution for anyone who owns a website and wants to enhance the customer experience or protect it from threats.

Additionally, if you are just starting with WordPress, support solutions such as Autoinstall can facilitate a smooth transition. WP Engine is almost everything you would expect from a top-tier hosting service: dependable performance statistics, excellent uptime and load times, and an excellent technical support team. WP Engine is an excellent alternative for hosting WordPress websites. As a managed platform, it provides everything you need to run your website with no work and no configuration. Lastly, WP Engine could be a good option if you want to manage your site on all levels according to our review.

wpengine review
Neil Jordan
Hey! I'm Neil Jordan, a technical consultant with extensive experience in web development, design, and technical solution management. My research focuses on web development and various technologies. I have a diverse background in providing various IT service consulting.

1 comment

  1. author_image
    Ricky Johnson

    I have read your article carefully and I agree with you very much. This has provided excellent help to me and solved all my doubts regarding it.

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