WP Engine Review PROS & CONS (2023) – Best Managed Hosting?

WP Engine

8.9

Easy to use

9.1/10

Settings

9.2/10

Price

7.9/10

Overall quality

9.2/10

Pros

  • Fast speed and performance
  • Security features
  • Amazing support
  • Optimized for WordPress
  • Site staging
  • Malware scanning and firewall protection
  • Daily backups

Cons

  • Not for every pocket
  • Monthly visits cap
  • Only managed hosting plans available
  • There are certain plugins you can't install

WP Engine helps your sites be faster with the first of its kind WordPress Digital Experience Platform. The WP Engine reviews claim that this is the best hosting provider and the fantastic developer experience that it has been offering over the years is a proven fact. In this WP Engine review, I will cover both the positives and the negatives.

The unparalleled speed, 100% reliable architecture, scalability, and security of your website from all possible threats, have made this the number one choice for bloggers and businesses today.

A major chunk of the success of this hosting platform can be attributed to the four pillars of WP Engine, which are agility, performance, intelligence, and integrations. So, with WP Engine, you can easily set up your sites, enjoy stress-free launches, ensure hassle-free workflows, and get effortless maintenance from the support staff, if needed.

 

WP Engine Review

We live in a digital world, and in this world, every day a several thousand websites get launched. A lot of these websites are launched on the WordPress platform. However, it can bring your website and you a lot of trouble if you did not give a requisite thought to the hosting provider chosen for your website before its launch.

There are many hosting providers such as Cloudways, SiteGround, HostPapa, InMotion Hosting, GreenGeeks, 10Web, Kinsta, Host Armada, Digital Ocean, etc., on which you can rely.

 

best free wordpress hosting

 

However, in the arena of WordPress hosting providers, there’s another name that has earned a lot of fame. Yes, we are talking about the WP Engine.

So, if you are planning to host your new blog or website on WP Engine, this WP Engine review can be beneficial for you.

Not many of you might have used a WordPress-specific host, but WP Engine is an amazing host that offers managed plans that are fully optimized for the platform. Despite having a humongous competition both in managed WordPress hosting and general hosting, the WP Engine is still at the top in the market because of its vast features.

 

Why Choose WP Engine For WordPress Site?

In this scenario, when you wish to host a WordPress site, you know that there are many options available for you to choose from.

Here are some of the primary reasons why WP Engine is recommended for your blog or website:

  • Security – With the use of the WP Engine, the WordPress security issues are well taken care of.
  • Speed – Using the WP Engine, the scaling can be up to 10x faster.
  • Support – The WP Engine offers you a handy, WordPress-specific support option.
  • Tools – There is a multitude of WordPress-specific tools available.
  • A Staging environment – With the WP Engine, you can easily spot mistakes before your customers do.

WP Engine features

Let’s read through some of the features of the WP Engine which makes it a fine choice for WordPress websites:

  • Over 500,000 digital experiences are powered by WP Engine today.
  • A minimum of 5% of the users online have at least one experience with WP Engine daily.
  • With the WP Engine, over 2 Million attacks are blocked every day.
  • It has a trusted customer base of more than 120,000 customers spread across 140 countries who have chosen WP Engine.
  • WP Engine is endowed with CDN for incredibly faster loading of your sites.
  • It comes with some magnificent and premium WordPress themes for you to choose from.
  • You get a no-questions-asked 60-day money-back guarantee.

Of course, today, many companies promise the best managed WordPress hosting services. But are they all capable of delivering it? Well, frankly, No!

However, many trust WP Engine because it has a 150+ strong support team that has your back 24/7/365. Further, the research and the development team associated with more than 100 WordPress experts are working day in and day out to ensure that the servers of the WP Engine are constantly running fast and your websites stay safe and secure.

In addition to all this, WP Engine also delivers new tools and integrations to ensure that you are getting the perfect WordPress experience.

It removes the headache and hassle of WordPress hosting from the customer. The trained technical support staff of the WP Engine is there to help the customers at all steps along the way.

 

WP Engine Managed Hosting

From the small to the top-level companies, the WP Engine can provide the assistance that you need without any hassle.

WP Engine has partnered with several big market players like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. These will help you provide an exciting and affordable range of enterprise-grade solutions which assure a blazing fast, highly secure, scalable, and reliable experience.

WP Engine is continually ensuring that your hosting is configured properly for your business. This is necessary to ensure that your website supports real-time security and is capable of threat detection. Further, you get free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, the Ever Cache proprietary caching technology along a global CDN.

Just like for SMBs, WP Engine is incredibly useful and assures a breakthrough experience for enterprise hosting.

 

cloudways managed hosting Performance stats

 

With the help of the open-source framework of WordPress, you can customize the CMS, keeping in view the needs of your business. Further, WP Engine helps you increase the productivity of your team given features and power-packed tools such as Dev, Stage, and Prod Environments, SSH Gateway, and Git integration.

The WP Engine is extremely helpful for the developers at every step while catering to their WordPress projects. It comes equipped with an easy setup, fast builds, smooth launches, and effortless maintenance. Further, with the accelerated WordPress development kit, developers can easily make the launches for their products.

 

Hosting Features

This will include the optional object caching as well as the regular website caching for caching database queries.

  1. Content Delivery Network (CDN): All of the Engine’s plans come with CDN access at no additional cost.
  2. PHP: You get the ability to switch between PHP version.
  3. HTTP/2.0: Reduce latency.
  4. SSL: You get a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. Further, you can even import your own certificate or buy one through WP Engine.
  5. SFTP: You can create multiple secure FTP accounts to access your site to edit and upload the files.
  6. Server file manager: There is no online file manager. All you have is FTP access to your server space.
  7. Database access: phpMyAdmin can be used for accessing the WordPress website database via a browser.
  8. Email service: Sadly, there isn’t any email service on any of the plans of the WP Engine.
  9. WordPress website management: All the software updates of WordPress are installed automatically. However, you can also defer an update for 2 months.
  10. Plugin restrictions: WP Engine has disallowed plugins, including the caching, backup, and optimization plugins that can interfere with their hosting optimization.
  11. Security measures: There are certain security measures included to keep your website protected from external threats. For this, the website is scanned for the safety issues like malware, and the support team of the WP Engine will take the requisite action if anything untoward is detected.
  12. Datacenter locations: The WP Engine has several data centers across the globe. You can opt for a server of your choice across the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Further, all of the servers come with Google Cloud Platform.
  13. Staging sites: All of the plans of the WP Engine include the staging and the development environment along with the production environment using the easy site transfer between the different environments through the user portal interface.
  14. WordPress website migration: With WP Engine, you get a free plugin using which you can migrate your WordPress website to the hosting platform of WP Engine.
  15. Visitor analytics: At all times, with WP Engine, you can easily view the data on your website traffic and allocation usage via the user portal dashboard.
  16. Uptime checks: At all times, the front end of your website is monitored for downtime. On the other hand, the back end of your website is monitored to ensure that the overall health of your site is maintained.
  17. Support channels: On all the plans of the WP Engine, a 24/7 live chat channel is available. There is also 24/7 phone support available on all plans except for the entry-level StartUp plan. There is also 24/7 ticket support.

 

How To Migrate Website To WP Engine?

Those who already have a WordPress website, but are planning to move from another hosting provider to WP Engine, can do it for free. WP Engine provides the complete section which will offer you the step-by-step migration guide through snapshots, videos, and easy-to-follow instructions.

However, if you don’t want to do it all, you can use the WP Engine Automated Migration plugin, which will automate the entire process for you. You can also use the free Duplicator plugin.

If you have any queries and need one-to-one assistance, you can contact the WP Engine’s support team, and they’ll help you in the migration of your WordPress website.

 

WP Engine Security Solution

With the WP Engine, you get Global Edge Security. It is basically a high-performance advanced security solution with DDoS protection and a Web Application Firewall (WAF).

This Global Edge Security has been designed to ensure that your sites always stay secure. Further, with Global Edge Security, the security benefits include two-factor authentication, managed core updates, and daily backups.

So, as a customer, you can get full advantage of the built-in expert rule sets from the combined intelligence of Cloudflare and WP Engine. Together all of it will work to keep your website free from all the emerging threats.

 

managed wordpress hosting security

 

Moreover, with Global Edge Security, you get the best in class security protection against DDoS attacks, OWASP security vulnerabilities, and the compromised data, which might black out the performance of your digital business.

With more threat types than whatever existed back then, it is also critical to ensure that at all times, your website and business stay protected for it to grow to its full potential. This can be best achieved with the multi-layer security offered by the WP Engine for all of your sites.

The properly managed WAF includes rule sets tailored and managed to protect WordPress by mitigating threats at the edge. However, it can do a lot more than just blocking the specific IP addresses or ports.

It will inspect the web traffic for signs of XSS or SQL injections. Further, the updates are carried out automatically to respond to the emerging threats and minimize the possible risks from hackers by employing new and improved techniques.

Global Cloudflare Anycast network will absorb all the highly distributed attack traffic to maintain your presence online. The origin infrastructure of the network is protected by dropping and detecting the volumetric attacks at the edge. Further, the shared intelligence spread across 10M websites is beneficial in proactively blocking all the known bad signatures.

Global Edge Security is extremely capable of caching both static and dynamic content, including CSS, high-quality images and video, and javascript. Together all of this will assure you an improved customer experience.

 

Premium WordPress Themes With WP Engine Plan

WP Engine has acquired StudioPress, and now you get all their themes with WP Engine hosting plan. Now, you can build an incredible digital experience for your WordPress site with the easy-to-use premium themes of StudioPress.

 

StudioPress themes WP Engine.

 

With the Genesis Framework, all the themes of the Studio Press are search-engine-optimized with locked-down security features. In addition to this, every theme of StudioPress is Gutenberg-ready, which is incredibly helpful for you to simplify the content design and editing process even more.

 

Hosting Plans

There are 4 hosting plans with WP Engine. However, there is also an option of going with a custom plan. These plans are variable in terms of the allowed WordPress installations, storage, and traffic capacity. So, you can choose the plan depending on your need:

  • The StartUp plan supports one WordPress site, comes with 10GB of storage, and can handle 25,000 monthly visitors.
  • Professional plan is intended for max 3 sites with 15 GB of storage and allowed 75,000 monthly visits.
  • In the Growth plan, you can install up to 10 WordPress sites, including 20GB of storage and support for 100,000 monthly visitors.
  • Scale plan lets you manage up to 30 sites, plus you’ll get 50GB of storage. Such a plan seems ideal if your website is already getting traffic of up to400,000 visits every month.

All the plans of the WP Engine come with certain limits on the visitor numbers and the bandwidth. So, what would happen if you tend to cross this allowance?  If this happens, you will have to bear an overage cost of $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors on any of the plans.

 

Website Staging

Staging a website means creating a clone of the website. This means that you can test the themes, custom code, and plugin before making all of these changes live with the use of this.

With the website staging, you can actually preview the possible changes before you go live with these changes. The staging site is not public, so you can try out all your website ideas before implementing them on your actual website. This is incredibly helpful for testing out what will work for your website and what won’t.

Whatever be the mistakes concerning your website, they can be rectified before your potential client or customer sees them.

With WP Engine, you get a “one-click staging.” This means that all you have to do is click a button in your hosting control panel and your staging site is ready.

One of the most incredibly valuable assets for your business’s online presence is your website. It is the first and the foremost thing that your online customers will notice, and it is just as important as your physical storefront.

So, when you are using the staging function, it allows you to perfect the content before making it live. Thus, with WP Engine Staging, you have space and the time to make your website look better and test some revisions for your business.

 

WP Engine Pros & Cons

Here are the advantages and disadvantages of WP Engine:

PROS

  • With the WP Engine security, you are secured and safe.
  • WP Engine servers are optimized just for WordPress websites hence fast loading.
  • The proprietary front-end layer system of the WP Engine is extremely capable of handling the sudden rise in traffic.
  • WordPress Expert Support staff of WP Engine is extremely capable of handling your queries round the clock.
  • There is no doubt about the popularity of the WP Engine proof is the rave reviews that it has got from the agencies, companies, and customers.
  • WP Engine is well-optimized for WordPress users.
  • Simplified process of managing your website.
  • Provides solid, consistent performance.
  • 60-day money-back guarantee.
  • Site staging is included as a standard feature.
  • Automated site migration plug-in.
  • Automatic daily backups and plug-in updates.
  • Malware scanning and firewall protection.

CONS

  • WP Engine has a list of disallowed plugins that you can’t install if you are hosting a site on WP Engine.
  • WP Engine is more expensive than some other hosting options.
  • Only managed hosting plans are available.
  • Traffic is caped with every plan (monthly visitors).

 

WP Engine Review Conclusion

Now that you have read through the detailed WP Engine review and seen through the various aspects, we have come to the final and the most crucial question. Is the WP Engine right for your website or business? Should I be hosting my site with WP Engine?

When comparing all the aspects of the WP Engine with the other hosting providers in detail, it is hard not to tell that WP Engine is one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers.

WP Engine is a perfect choice if you are seeking a hassle-free experience to host your WordPress website. Be it for bloggers or high-end businesses, who do not want to waste any time on the technical aspects, WP Engine is just perfect.

Both regular users and developers will find the advanced features of the WP Engine very time conserving when they want to develop a WordPress site for their clients.


DISCLOSURE: Posts may contain affiliate links. If you buy something through one of those links, I might get a small commission, without any extra cost to you. Read more about it here.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top