wpengine-logo-hostingreview

WP Engine Hosting Reviews

Overall Score
★★★★★
★★★★★

Review Summary

Updated: January 7, 2023

All of WPEngine’s hosting plans are optimized for WordPress, fully managed, and suitable for all experience levels and business sizes. With over 120,000 customers worldwide, WPEngine is the platform of choice for those looking for premium performance and support features with their hosting packages.

Pros

Cons

The WPEngine Platform

Hosting Plans

    • Product
    • Multiple Sites Whether you can host multiple domains on this hosting plan.
    • Disk Storage
    • Bandwidth Recommendations:
      – Basic sites: Upto 10GB
      – eCommerce sites: 15GB+
    • Visitors A similar metric to Bandwidth, each-time a visitor views your website they use bandwidth.
      – General rule of thumb:
      Visitor Limit = Bandwidth x 3
    • Email Accounts Plans with email accounts included save you the hassle of having to setup your own email hosting.
    • Price The monthly cost for this plan, including discounts
    • View Product

WPEngine’s platform is geared towards the creator. Whether it’s a blogger, a small business, or a large enterprise, all of WPEngines WordPress hosting solutions are flexible and easy-to-use. All hosting plans are as managed and inclusive as you want them to be. If the pre-packaged hosting plans don’t fit your needs, WPEngine is also prepared to customize a plan to accommodate your unique situation.

All hosting packages come with WordPress pre-installed, a free global CDN, and 35+ premium StudioPress themes that are built specifically for their Genesis framework. This combination of specialized servers, framework, and themes, all optimized for a one-of-a-kind WordPress experience, is why WPEngine is considered one of the best hosts for WordPress.

For developers, all WPEngine plans also come with Development, Staging, and Production environments. WPEngine makes it easy to switch between environments while you’re working on the site. WPEngine also manages all WordPress updates, so your websites are always running the most recent version of the software.

Plans

Startup

For startups and small businesses looking to host a single website, WPEngine’s Startup plan has everything you need for $30 per month. Storage for this plan is limited to 10GB, which is enough to hold files and media for one static website with basic features. The Startup plan includes 50GB of monthly bandwidth to serve your site to up to 25,000 visitors per month. It would be great for an online portfolio or CV, a blog, small business landing pages, or any other website that isn’t too media intensive.

All together, this should be enough storage and bandwidth for most basic blogs or landing page type websites. As far as guaranteed resources go, WPEngine’s Startup hosting package is almost six times more than comparable WordPress web hosting packages from other providers. However, they have unique security and performance features that may add value to you.

Growth

For established businesses, WPEngine’s Growth plan offers considerably more guaranteed resources and a few added security features for $115 per month. With this plan, you have 20GB storage and 200GB of bandwidth for up to 100,000 visits per month. This plan is also great for developers or startup agencies because it allows for 10+ websites and the WordPress Multisite add-on. With these numbers, you could easily hold several full-featured e-commerce or membership sites with optimal speed and performance.

WPEngine’s Growth hosting plan does have a high price point, about ten times higher than other hosts with similar packages. Where WPEngine excels is having a “set it and forget it” approach to web hosting. All of your plans come fully-managed, pre-installed with WordPress, automated SSL, and CDN, plus free premium WP themes that are easy to set up. If you’re new to WordPress, WPEngine makes it very easy to get started with little or no experience.

Scale

The Scale plan is the largest of them, all starting at $290 per month. Because of its high price point, this plan is probably best for developers and agencies who need to host and manage websites for several clients. WPEngine’s Scale plan comes with 50GB of local storage and 500GB of bandwidth for up to 400,000 visits per month. These resources can be shared with over 30 websites under the same hosting account. The Scale plan comes with all of the features of the smaller plans, including the 35+ free StudioPress themes, imported and automated SSL certificates, and 24/7 phone, chat, and ticket support.

Custom

Need more bandwidth or storage? If any of WPEngine’s plans don’t meet the specific needs of your large business, custom options are available. With WPEngine’s custom WordPress hosting solution, you can have up to 1TB of local storage and 400GB+ bandwidth for millions of visits per month. When you’re ready to set up your custom WordPress hosting package, WPEngine will set up a complimentary consultation and onboarding call to help you get your site up and running.

Agency

For agencies of all sizes, WPEngine offers free partnerships for verified digital agencies who host with them. The partnership platform itself does not have any added cost. You are only charged for your hosting plan and any add-ons. Agencies will have access to valuable add-ons like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform to better manage your websites and boost performance.

Enterprise

WPEngine prides itself on being the only enterprise platform built specifically for WordPress. Large companies love WPEngine because their custom plans are easy to scale up or down as needs change without having to restructure your hosting account. Some of their most notable enterprise clients are Microsoft and FindLaw. As with the agency plan, those who wish to use WPEngine’s enterprise platform will need to contact them directly for a free consultation and quote.

Top Features

Creative Agility

For those who have very little experience setting up websites, you could opt to have your WPEngine plan pre-installed with a free StudioPress theme. All you have to do is login and create. WPEngine comes with robust dev and design tools and an easy-to-use dashboard for site management. Their auto-migration plugin can move your website to the WPEngine platform in just a few clicks. Automated daily, weekly, and monthly backups are included and can be restored with one click. For developers who would like a little more control of the backend, SSH access, and a file manager is included with every WPEngine plan.

Enterprise Performance

Larger companies and agencies can access a full catalog of add-ons for increased speed and performance. Partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform gives WPEngine’s already optimized resources a little extra to accommodate those who need more.

Actionable Intelligence

WPEngine is one of the only platforms to include actionable insights to help you improve page speed, plugin performance, and overall website metrics. You can view reports for content, pages, and plugin performance that include suggestions for creating a better digital experience.

WPEngine Server Performance

Average Review Score
★★★★★
★★★★★

To test WPEngine’s hosting performance we used a few Pingdom reports. Over the span of a year, Pingdom’s probes (located across North America) performed daily checks, on a basic website (less than 100KBs) hosted on WPEngine’s shared server environment. Additionally, there was no throttling added to these checks, so slower response times can be expected for 3G or 4G connections. 

Yearly Server Performance:

  • Average Uptime

    100.00%

  • Average Response Time

    0.00ms

  • Monthly Downtime

    No Downtime

Data shown as monthly Uptime averages for a basic Godaady website

Server performance can affect all aspects of your site. Case studies have consistently found that customer wait times (page load and response times) directly affect everything from SEM, revenue, and traffic growth. By a lot too, here’s just one example: 

For Mobify, every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed worked out to a 1.11% increase in session-based conversion, yielding an average annual revenue increase of nearly $380,000.

Security

The Included security on WPEngines hosting plans is arguable the best on the market if we’re talking WordPress specific hosting. Here are a few advertised security features you’ll benefit from with WPEngine.

Disk Write Protection and Limitations

WPEngine limits the number of processes that can write to disk. By doing this, malicious code within a theme or a plugin is harder to be exploited. Moreover, any attempts to write to the disk are also logged for identification and blocking.

Disallowed Plugins

It’s natural for some plugins to expose a website to vulnerabilities, whether it be due to a lack of updating or simply a newly discovered vulnerability. To mitigate any malicious attacks, WPEngines system searches, and scans your site for any flagged plugins and automatically disables them.

Proprietary Firewall

WPEngines firewall is able to automatically detect and filter real human traffic, search engine crawlers, or any traffic that may act with malicious activity or scraping bots.

Customer Support Review

WPEngine offers one of the best customer support services for WordPress hosting on the market. With 24/7/365 customer support via chat, phone, and tickets, there are many channels for you to reach a support agent. Moreover, some customers might appreciate that WPEngine has an in-house support team based in America and Ireland.

WPEngines’ technical support team are all specialists in WordPress and are able to help with a range of issues from Configuration, platform features, or even setting up your DNS. WPEngines live chat and ticket support is separate from the sales channel chat box you’ll see on pricing pages and is accessed via the User Portal. Like most hosts, Live chat is available 24/7 and is a queue-based support system.

As for phone support, customers have said WPEngine you’ll typically be on hold for no longer than two minutes with when contacting phone support. The team also makes clear the type of tasks outside of customer support scope, with these being site design, web development, debugging, custom coding, and user or database management.

WPEngine also has a rich knowledge base for everything related to your hosting plans and even setting up aspects of your WordPress site. Moreover, their System Status dashboard is also a nice feature, not all hosts offer, providing full transparency on server uptime and performance.

Finally, WPEngines Agency Directory is also a great bonus you’ll get as a customer and works by helping you find the right companies and solutions to grow and expand your site or business.

Support Tickets

WPEngine offer ticketed technical support, which can be accessed via the User Portal.

Live Chat

WPEngine offers a customer exclusive technical live chat support.

Knowledge Base

WPEngine has a rich knowledge base to assist with site setup or troubleshooting.

Migration Support

WPEngine provides new customers with detailed migration guides and a free migration plugin.

Community Forums

WPEngine does not have a dedicated community forum for customer support and troubleshooting.

Phone Support

WPEngine does not offer technical customer support via phone.

Multilingual Support

WPEngine does not mention offering customer support across multiple languages.

Premium Support

WPEngine does not offer a specialized technical support channel for specific hosting platforms or problems.

Customer Reviews

has no customer reviews yet. Be the first to leave a review in the form below.

Write a Review on GoDaddy

Performance(Required)
Reliability(Required)
Features(Required)
Support(Required)
Value(Required)
(Required)