WP Engine Review – Best Managed WordPress Hosting for 2024
As far as WordPress hosts go, WP Engine is at the top of our list. We absolutely love their services and consider them our favorites. When it comes to hosting a WordPress site, WP Engine truly stands out among other hosts like LiquidWeb, Bluehost, HostGator, and Flywheel. Their exceptional service sets them apart. What is the reason behind that?
Let’s dive into that in this review!
The WP Engine Difference—Are They Really Better for WordPress?
Is WP Engine really better? Are they really “worth” it? In my opinion, if you’re running a WordPress website, it certainly is. But why? Let’s explore some of the advantages it has over both traditional hosting and other managed hosts.
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#1 Enhanced Security
Everyone knows that WordPress is incredibly vulnerable comparing to a static HTML site. As it runs on PHP and connects to a database, there are vulnerabilities on multiple fronts. Traditional shared hosting isn’t the most secure option. WP Engine utilizes different strategies to safeguard against the most common WordPress attacks. Here are some strategies:
Disallowing certain WordPress plugins
It’s quite common for plugins to create massive security loopholes in WordPress. However, WP Engine takes proactive action by blocking or disallowing certain plugins that are known to have issues. This means that if you attempt to install a vulnerable plugin in your WordPress installation, their servers will prevent you from doing so.
Version monitoring and updating
WP Engine continually keeps track of both plugin versions & the WordPress core versions to guarantee that your installation remains up-to-date with the latest security patches. Typically, WP Engine will inform you about outdated versions and automatically handle the upgrade if you don’t do it within a certain time period. Sometimes, it can be a bit frustrating if the upgrade causes other issues on your site, however, it ultimately improves your security and prevents any major vulnerabilities.
Disk write privileges
Setting disk write privileges on a Linux server is usually relatively easy. However, it’s common for them to be overlooked or be above the technical capacity of someone new to web hosting. One great thing about WP Engine is that they handle this for you, preventing bad actors from gaining access to your server and compromising your website.
System scans
WP Engine regularly scans for malware and compromised files, providing you with a prompt alert when there’s a problem. There’re other add-on services available with shared hosting that can perform a similar task, but WP Engine’s scanning is much better, in our opinion.
#2 Effortless Backups, Smooth Migrations & Seamless Restoring
WP Engine Backup
One of the best things about WP Engine is the seamless process they offer for backups, transfers, and restoring. The automated backup system is incredibly efficient, making it a breeze to restore from a specific point, no need to go through the hassle of opening a ticket or dealing with unnecessary work.
Furthermore, WP Engine offers a convenient plugin that simplifies the process of migrating a WordPress site from another hosting. All you do is install their plugin, click a few buttons, enter the credentials, and you’re good to go. The plugin handles everything else for you, it even sets up the site on WP Engine’s servers for you, saving you the hassle of dealing with importing a database and other tasks. This tool is incredibly efficient and makes migrating a WordPress site a breeze.
Restoring a site is just as simple as backing it up. We believe that WP Engine, which makes backups and restores more easily, does the best job at it.
Staging Environment
WP Engine offers a fantastic feature with their staging environment, providing a great way to make changes to the site or experiment with new ideas. The staging environment is a clone of the production site, providing a perfect space for testing plugins, themes, custom code, and much more. Switching between the live environment and the staging environment is incredibly effortless.
Speed and performance
WP Engine is designed specifically for WordPress, which means it delivers fast performance for WordPress sites, making it the overall winner in terms of speed and performance. WP Engine offers a wide range of features that greatly improve the speed of websites hosted on their servers.
Page performance dashboard (addons)
WP Engine offers a unique feature: their Page Speed BOOST tool. Page Speed Boost is a site optimization tool powered by NitroPack OneClick. Using WP Engine’s industry-leading platform and OneClick’s automatic optimization features, users will see an instant impact to load times, Core Web Vitals, and PageSpeed scores. Page Speed Boost includes a holistic image optimization stack, code cleanup, and intelligent page loading to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.
Top-notch caching
There are a variety of WordPress caching plugins available, including WP Super Cache. However, the effectiveness of these plugins pales in comparison to the benefits of having a host with well-configured, built-in caching. In the realm of WordPress caching, WP Engine stands out as one of the top contenders.
We’ve experienced some incredible load times on WP Engine, some of them being under 1 second for a basic WordPress site or the default theme page.
Built-in CDN
If you’re reading this WP Engine review, it’s safe to assume that you’re already familiar with the concept of a CDN. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a fantastic web-based service that greatly improves the loading speed of static elements and content on your site.
WP Engine offers an integrated CDN (from MaxCDN) that users can conveniently enable or disable inside the user area. This greatly improves the performance of the site and makes things load more quickly.
Built from scratch specifically for WordPress
WP Engine is specifically designed to host WordPress sites, making it one of the fastest hosting platforms for WordPress compared to standard shared Linux hosting. This is a feature that makes them one of the fastest hosting platforms for WordPress. They have optimized everything from the start to ensure lightning-fast speed.
#3 Customer Support—Best Things About the WP Engine
In our many reviews, we always believe that a host should offer multiple ways of getting help, such as telephone, chat, email, and ticket support. WP Engine offers all of these things and that’s just one of the many reasons why they are fantastic. In addition, when you do need help, you won’t be interacting with a random tech who lacks understanding of WordPress and primarily focuses on database or network administration. Instead, you’ll be in contact with a WordPress expert every time you need help.
Overall, chat support has successfully resolved the issues we’ve encountered. However, some problems needed to be escalated to a ticket in order to be solved by a higher-level tech.
In most cases, we prefer to use chat or ticket support. However, in situations where we cannot afford any downtime or there is an urgent need, we’ve gone ahead and called in and received great support.
In general, WP Engine’s support is incredibly efficient and always ready to assist. It’s very easy to connect with a knowledgeable person who has a deep understanding of WordPress and can quickly grasp the issues at hand.
#4 WP Engine Pros and Cons (2024)
Pros of WP Engine:
- 60-day money-back guarantee: A dedicated team monitors its security 24/7.
- Reliable and consistent: With an uptime guarantee of 99.95%, WP Engine experiences only four or five hours of downtime per year.
- Excellent loading speeds: WP Engine uses NGINX technology, a solid-state drive (SSD), and the Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN), which offer superb loading speeds.
- Award-winning customer service: Support is available at all times through email and live chat from a great team.
- Effective staging environment: It lets you create duplicate versions of your site, which is a great place to try out new features, themes, and plugins.
Cons of WP Engine
- No email hosting: The company does not offer its own email hosting solution. You’ll have to use third-party services.
- Exclusive to WordPress: Web hosting services provided by WP Engine are exclusive to WordPress.
- Disallowed plugins: The platform claims that certain plugins negatively impact performance and security.
- Premium pricing: Although it provides the best hosting for your WordPress site, the premium pricing makes it far from cheap.
#5 Who is WP Engine Best For?
WP Engine is a managed hosting service, it’s ideal for those who would like a hands-off approach when it comes to hosting their website. There are, however, less expensive options that perform similarly to WP Engine if you manage a small blog or website with a few thousand monthly visits.
However, WP Engine is perfect for you if you’re curious about the technical aspects of web hosting but would rather not get your hands dirty. If you’re worried about things like site performance, security, backup, cloud platform flexibility, migrations, and optimization, WP Engine might be the perfect companion for you.
We suggest this web server for the following only, because to its somewhat high price tag:
- Medium to large publishers
- WordPress websites that are mostly focused on e-commerce
- Rapidly expanding startups
This managed hosting service is perfect for professional web designers and developers who want to create new websites or modify current ones. In WP Engine’s staging environment, developers can build, launch, and transfer the site with ease.
Concerning WordPress, WP Engine is singular: it offers managed hosting. There’s no need to choose between shared servers, VPS, dedicated servers, etc. No other option comes close to matching WP Engine for those who prefer a hands-off approach to server management and website hosting for medium to high-traffic websites.
#6 Is WP Engine highly recommended?
Definitely! In my opinion, hosting your WordPress site on WP Engine is the best choice in terms of the value for the money as well as the speed, performance, security, and reliability you’ll experience.
Premium WordPress hosts, although available, can be quite expensive and are primarily designed for large corporate sites or sites with high traffic.
If you don’t meet those expectations (or even if you do, considering their enterprise plans), WP Engine is definitely one of the top choices out there.
About 330,000 web hosts offer their services around the world, so you have a lot of options to choose from. It is, however, not the only managed WordPress hosting service out there. Also, WP Engine is overkill for most companies and brand-new websites.
Read this post: The fastest hosting platforms for WordPress if you want something better for new sites and newbies that won’t break the bank.
