WP Engine: 2020 Review and Opinions

WPEngine is a specialized WordPress hosting recognized by the industry. It offers fast and robust server plans for any size website.

With WPEngine, your website is practically hack-proof, and its quality customer service makes you feel like a VIP. They offer automatic security updates, daily backups, one-click restores, automatic caching, and more.

WPEngine is like having an army of WordPress experts at your side to help you with your internet project. Brands like HTC, FourSquare, SoundCloud and many others use WPEngine‘s services for their WordPress hosting. If you are a company that doesn’t want to deal with the technical part of running your site or blog under WP, then WPEngine may be a good solution for you, if you can afford!

Let’s review this host to see if it offers good value for money or not.

About WPEngine

WPEngine was founded in 2010 with headquarters in Austin, Texas. Since then, the company has grown considerably and now operates data centers in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Japan, and the United States.

The goal behind the creation of WPEngine was to introduce WordPress-specific hosting to the industry with a high level of security, speed and scalability. It is safe to say that the company has achieved its goal.

WPEngine is a web host that therefore provides specialized and fully managed WP specialized hosting.

The company does not have its own hosting hardware – they have hired and highly customized existing cloud computing configurations to optimize them for the WordPress CMS.

Its hosting solutions are based on the infrastructure of Amazon and Google Cloud, most of them using Google Cloud servers. Therefore, any trace route to these servers simply returns Google’s IP addresses.

This WP Engine review will walk you through everything you need to know about the hosting company.

Free StudioPress for WP Engine clients!

Following the acquisition of StudioPress by the ER WP engine in July 2018, the Genesis theme framework and 35 premium StudioPress themes are now available free of charge to WPEngine customers.

WPEngine datasheet

• Optimized hosting for WordPress
• Easy to use control panel
• Free site migration
• No contract and 60 day money back guarantee required.
• – 50% promotion on your first payment with our coupon (monthly or annual plan)
• 99.9% availability guarantee

WPEngine is a premier web host that provides optimized and fully information-managed WordPress hosting. There are many things we appreciate about this company, such as its powerful architecture built for speed. With many features included, the company has everything you’d expect from a high-end WP hosting company, with the fees that go with it.

WPEngine technical features

Optimized hosting for WordPress

Given that the WPEngine is entirely focused on WordPress hosting, it would be foolish not to talk about what makes them so good in this area.

First of all, convenience. With WPEngine MANAGED hosting, customers won’t have to worry about WordPress installs, updates, plug-ins, or security patches.

All you have to do is do a one click WordPress installation when you start. The WPEngine staff will take care of everything technical for you. This makes their hosting services extremely easy to use.

Enhanced technical support and one-click setup allow you to focus on your project, eliminating unnecessary stress.

With its unique technology, WPEngine guarantees excellent levels of security under WordPress, super fast page load times, a daily backup system and the ability to automatically update your WordPress plugins. Among the characteristics that distinguish them, we observe pre-production or staging.

Performance and safety

The results of the speed tests of 

We do benchmarking to determine which is the best WordPress hosting service. For the performance test, WPServeur has quite contrasting results, but overall very good. He came in fourth place in speed test 1, but stayed very close to the top 3. He finished first in site tests with plugin (test 2) and Load Impact (test 4). For the final score, WP Engine finished on the podium, third behind WPServeur and WPXHosting.

Please note that WP Engine hosting plans are generally the most expensive in our selection.

Demanding architecture and WordPress caching

WP Engine is proud of its architecture. Designed to meet business requirements, its servers provide seamless hosting solutions for almost all web projects. In fact, its technology allows websites to run 4-6 times faster than other hosting environments.

Every WP Engine plan has a solid server architecture

Its architecture is based on EverCache (native server cache system). It is one of the most scalable systems for WordPress caching. This means that your website will be able to handle traffic spikes without experiencing performance issues.

Another thing that makes WPEngine WordPress hosting incredibly fast is your overall CDN. As we have already mentioned, it is included in all plans.

In developing its hosting environment, WPEngine used custom code to connect WordPress events to its Nginx-based systems. What does that mean? That caching your site can be aggressive without reducing responsiveness when updating your website.

WPEngine has even added additional protection, protecting your site from crawler scanning robots and wasting bandwidth on your website.

Restriction on the use of plug-ins

WPEngine performs regular installation scans to ensure that you do not use certain plug-ins that are not compliant with or compatible with your environment and could affect the performance and security of your sites.

WPEngine data centers:

United States, Germany (the best speed level option according to our tests for France), Belgium, United Kingdom (2nd best speed level option according to our tests for France), Canada …

Security is a very important element for WP Engine. E-commerce companies will appreciate the presence of free SSL certificates that guarantee the security of customer data. As part of its commitment to client security, this host continually updates its firewalls and constantly tracks malware.

WPEngine main features overview

• SSL certificates included
• 24/7 WP support
• MySQL and InnoDB database
• Remote MySQL connections and PHPMyAdmin tool
• SSH access
• Automatic installation software with one click
• Excellent availability guarantee
• Automatic site backups
• Third party application integration
• Guaranteed satisfied or refunded 60 days

Easy to use

Easy navigation through the control panel

When you log into your WPEngine account for the first time, the company welcomes you with a free migration option from their site. This option will show you how to get your automated migration plugin to easily switch your website to your servers.

From here, I can see all the WordPress installations that I have in my account. And I can add additional workspaces to keep them organized. For example, if you hosted multiple WordPress websites, you could create a separate workspace for each of them. Or, I would make a workspace for all WordPress sites of the same type. Of course, this would be more useful for people who host for clients and manage multiple projects.

You can select a WordPress project and see general information about it in the “General information” tab.

This will give you up-to-date information on how many visitors to your website, how much bandwidth you use, and how much storage you have used on the server.

You will also be notified of WordPress updates that you can install with a single click.

For each website, you can also view all of your backup points. Remember that WP Engine performs daily automatic backups of your websites.

From there, you can select the backup points to download in order to keep them in a safe place. Or, you can simply click Restore to return the site to that previous checkpoint. You can see in my screenshot that WP Engine even backed up my website before a recent major WordPress update.

Developers or other more advanced users will want to use phpMyAdmin to manage MySQL database administration. You can easily access it from the user portal.

From the user portal, customers will also have access to the page performance tests. Run a performance test on your website to check load times and page speeds. WP Engine will give you a score that represents the quality of the caching of your page. They will also show you how long the page takes to start loading, how long before the page is fully visible to the site visitor, and how long it takes to fully load.

Based on the results of the performance test, WP Engine will provide some recommendations for optimizing content caching and helping to load the page faster.

WP Engine Pricing

The WP Engine Base Package is designed to host individual websites on a shared server. The first thing you will notice when you look at their plans is a limit on the volume of visits to your website.

Many hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space, making it a great place to launch new projects. When these companies go beyond their shared architecture, they do not have to pay additional charges. Instead, your hosts will simply help you move to a more resourceful VPS plan.

But with WP Engine, when you exceed your traffic limits, you will be charged. This means that users will have to monitor their website statistics to make sure they don’t experience too much traffic. While WP Engine servers can handle spikes in traffic, you don’t want to be hit by high overhead charges when you start to have more success. If so, you will have to add a CDN network to your site to absorb the extra traffic!

For a hosting company that doesn’t do this, check out LiquidWeb. They will not limit the number of monthly visitors to your site and will not charge you extra. But be aware that your personal hosting options are more expensive than WP Engine.

Monthly visitors authorized by WP Engine should be more than is necessary for any small business or personal site to start. The number of site visits you can expect will depend on the purpose of your website and your audience. WordPress blog sites will receive more traffic than business websites. Ecommerce sites can experience periods of growth and periods of decline.

Reliability and support

WP Hosting Support Test Results

We do benchmarking to determine which is the best WordPress hosting service. For the support test, WPEngine came first thanks to its phenomenal response time and the speed with which the technical staff was able to solve the problems. The support essentially works by live chat and connects you to a technician almost instantly. The downside is that it only exists in English, so a good knowledge of the language is required. If not, turn to WPServeur or Infomaniak instead.

The best-in-class WP Engine customer service team includes WordPress experts who know the content management system (CMS) from top to bottom. These support assistants have been trained in WordPress. They continue to practice providing a specialized service when they help thousands of customers every day. Given the number of people they help each day, you know that your team is well informed in terms of attendance.

Your customer service team will not only help you when you have a problem, but can also identify performance barriers to prevent problems before they occur. Just give them a call or launch a support ticket, and a team member can look at your website and find ways to get it working faster.

When it comes to safety and reliability, WP Engine covers you. They offer you automatic backup and restore, so you don’t have to worry about losing data.

One thing we really like about WP Engine is its instant backups. This will allow you to make changes to your site without worrying about making major mistakes. With instant backups, changes don’t need to be permanent.

A snapshot is what WP Engine calls a quick backup of your website. There is no risk in changing your website:

• Log into your hosting account
• Go to your personal user portal
• Look for the snapshot backup option
• Create an instant backup of your website in seconds
• Make the desired changes to your website

If you regret the changes you’ve made or ruined something, simply restore your website from your backup snapshot with a single click.

These snapshots can be downloaded, allowing you to save them in different places. These backups include all of your website content, themes, and plugins. This means that you don’t have to worry about losing valuable customer reviews or dealing with reloading blog posts if your website is facing a major issue.

WP Engine automatically performs daily backups for you. They will also make sure to make a backup before updating WordPress. Should the new WordPress update wreak havoc on your website.

They also offer, like Siteground, a free WP migration plugin!

• 24/7 support
• Phone, email tickets and live chat
• WP Engine Support Center
• Many videos

Our opinion on WP Engine

The best thing to remember about WP Engine is the speed and security its servers offer. With facilities designed to meet the requirements of large organizations, WP Engine can handle almost any WordPress problem. The company’s customer service team is another good reason to consider them for your hosting needs if your portfolio allows!

Businesses and individuals will benefit from fast WordPress hosting on its advanced and optimized WP infrastructure. Customers will be able to sleep in their own two ears knowing that the WP Engine covers all their security concerns. That will be the case if they are, of course, willing to pay money for their rather expensive hosting plans in our opinion.

Compared to other web hosting services, the prices charged by WP Engine are somewhat high and will surprise more than one webmaster or WP user.

However, if you are looking for a high level info-managed hosting experience for your WordPress site, WP Engine is worth a visit to us. With its ultra-fast, well-established servers, fast-moving data, and strong account security features, WP Engine offers more than just WordPress hosting.

WP Engine can be a great option for companies of different sizes that operate a website that runs under the most popular CMS on the market. Its architecture is built for speed and security. 2 essential criteria if you want to be well positioned in Google in 2019 and beyond!

The fees charged are however the biggest black point of its offer and we recommend our readers to take a look at the offers of the excellent WPServeur that is coming out big winner of our WordPress Hosts comparison and to practice more prices Competitive!

If your project is aimed at English speaking or foreign markets, choose a WPX Hosting board that offers much better performance and will cost you less.

Hopefully this presentation and review at WP Engine will help you decide if this business is right for your hosting needs.