WP Engine specializes in managed WordPress hosting. As pioneers in the managed WordPress hosting industry, they boast an impressive customer list, including AMD, National Geographic, Dropbox, SoundCloud, HelloFresh, Texas A&M, and more. WP Engine is ideal for those looking for hassle-free premium WordPress hosting. Read our expert WP Engine review to see if it’s the right choice for you.
This will be a detailed WP Engine review, which will take an in-depth look at their services. If you don’t want to read all of it, here is a quick summary of our WP Engine review score.
| WP Engine Review Summary | |
|---|---|
| Performance grade | A+ |
| Average load time | 656 ms |
| Average response time | 123 ms |
| Free domain | No |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| 1-click WordPress | Yes |
| Support | Phone / Live Chat / Knowledge base |
| Start with WP Engine | |
Bottom line: In our WP Engine hosting review, we found them to be one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers. They offer the best platform, with faster servers, security, and peace of mind that users need from a managed WordPress host.
That said, let’s get into the details and examine how we reached this conclusion.
About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now one of the leading managed WordPress hosting companies. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to its rising popularity.
WP Engine is Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices in San Antonio (Texas), London (England), Limerick (Ireland), Brisbane (Australia), and Kraków (Poland).
The company has won multiple Best Place to Work in Austin awards and consistently contributes to the WordPress core and community.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. Their managed WordPress plans have the following hosting options:
- Managed WordPress hosting – Fully managed hosting environment suitable for small businesses and blogs
- Managed WooCommerce Hosting – WooCommerce hosting with powerful store search, eCommerce templates, and more
- Secure Hosting – Additional security layers with website firewall and DDoS protection
- Custom Solutions (Enterprise Hosting) – Premium plan for enterprise customers with dedicated resources, white-glove onboarding, advanced security, and more.
Customers can choose a plan level based on the number of websites, bandwidth, disk space, and other resources they use.
WP Engine plans differ based on:
- The number of WordPress installs
- Traffic volume (Monthly visitors or number of visits per month)
- Disk storage amount
- Bandwidth requirement
Each WP Engine plan has set limits on the number of visits your hosting account can get. If your account exceeds those limits, you may be charged overage pricing for extra visits.
WP Engine includes some unique features for WordPress users that most hosts don’t offer or charge extra for. These special features include:
- Git version control
- Staging environment: instantly staging sites for testing
- Easy transferable WordPress installation from free to paid accounts
- Free SSL certificates and SSH access
- Cutting-edge technologies, including the latest PHP version
Our review found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and comprehensive managed WordPress hosting features.
Advanced Security Features
WP Engine also offers several premium security features. The WordPress core is automatically updated to the latest version for you.
WP Engine thoroughly tests any major core updates before upgrading their customers. They have a proprietary intrusion detection and prevention system to block any DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, malware, JavaScript/SQL injection attacks, and more.
They also partner with third-party security firms to conduct regular code reviews and security audits.
Your security is guaranteed, so if you get hacked, WP Engine will fix it for free.
Customer Support and Service
WP Engine has a dedicated support team of WordPress experts. They boast over 97% customer satisfaction with thousands of customer interactions daily.
Support is available 24/7 via live chat for all customers and 24/7 via phone for all plans except the ‘Startup’ plan. If an issue can’t be immediately resolved via chat or phone, the support staff will create an internal support ticket for you.
Enterprise customers get access to 24/7 ticket support via email. Premium and Enterprise customers receive a consultative one-on-one onboarding experience as well.
WP Engine also has a dedicated Customer Experience Operations team that works to improve the customer experience continually.
In addition, they have an extensive library of knowledge-based articles, how-to guides, and tutorials for users who want to fix things themselves.
CDN for Even Faster Loading
WP Engine offers a CDN (content delivery network) using Cloudflare’s Edge Network. This innovative cloud network has a global network of servers.
With low latency, blazing-fast speed, and built-in security, this CDN network ensures your website performs well regardless of where your customers come from.
36+ Premium WordPress Themes
WP Engine acquired the popular premium WordPress theme company StudioPress.
Now, all premium StudioPress themes and the famous Genesis framework are available to all WP Engine customers for free.
All StudioPress themes have their code base optimized for faster page load times without compromising functionality.
Yes, you get all these great-looking and well-coded themes at no additional cost—that’s over $2000 in additional value for free!
Money-Back Guarantee
WP Engine offers a generous 60-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not happy with their service, you can cancel your account within the first 60 days and receive a full refund.
The guarantee only applies to annual billing plans.
Pros and Cons of WP Engine
WP Engine is a popular web hosting company, but it may not be right for everyone. Before choosing a plan, consider these pros and cons.
Pros of Choosing WP Engine
- Security – WP Engine protects your site with many advanced features that other hosts don’t offer.
- Fast Loading Times – WP Engine’s Evercache technology optimizes servers for WordPress, ensuring that your website loads quickly. Plus, you get access to CDN, which further boosts performance.
- Reliability – WP Engine’s proprietary front-end layer system can handle traffic spikes easily without slowing down your site.
- WordPress Expert Support – WP Engine’s support staff is made up of trained WordPress experts.
- Rave Reviews – WP Engine is an incredibly popular host with great reviews from many customers for its reliability and excellent customer service.
Cons of choosing WP Engine
- Disallowed Plugins – WP Engine does not allow you to install certain WordPress plugins on your site, either because they conflict with or duplicate WP Engine’s features or cause a high server load. This includes many caching, backup, related post plugins, and others. You can see the full list of disallowed plugins here.
- No Domain Registrations – WP Engine offers only hosting services, not domain name registrations. This means you’ll have to register your domains with another company, which some users may find inconvenient.
- Higher Costs – When compared to shared hosting, WP Engine is more expensive, but the services it offers are well worth the investment.
WP Engine Performance Tests
WPBeginner users trust our reviews because we only recommend products and services that we have used ourselves. We go and sign up for each top WordPress hosting company to thoroughly test their claims with our own industry-standard tests.
For this review, we created a WordPress website on WP Engine. Using the default theme, we filled the website with dummy data, including media and images. This way, our test site looked and behaved like an actual average WordPress site.
WP Engine Speed Test Results
After setting up our test site, we first ran the speed test. Using the Pingdom tool, we tested our sample site on WP Engine servers.
Here are the results:
Our test site loaded in less than a second. This result is quite good, considering that we didn’t need to install any performance optimization.
WP Engine Stress Test
Next, we wanted to check how WP Engine servers respond under peak traffic. To measure this, we used a tool called K6 by Grafana Labs. We gradually built up to 50 unique visitors to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.
Here are the results:
The light green line represents response time, and the gray line represents the number of users on the site. As you can see, our test site performed well with minor spikes. It maintained an incredible response rate throughout the test.
The uptime remained steady, with no downtime recorded during the stress test.
WP Engine Server Response Time
Next, we tested the server response time from different geographic regions using a tool called Bitcatcha.
Here are WP Engine’s server response time results:
As you can see in the screenshot, the WP Engine server response time remained less than half a second for all geographic locations. It was particularly significant in the United States.
Is WP Engine Right for You?
Now that you have read our entire WP Engine review and examined the performance scores, you might be wondering whether WP Engine is the right web host for you.
After reviewing WP Engine’s services in detail, we award them the title “Best Managed WordPress Hosting.”
WP Engine is an ideal choice if you’re looking for a completely hassle-free web host for your WordPress site.
WP Engine is perfect for beginners, bloggers, and businesses that want to stop wasting time on technical details and find a WordPress host that just works.
Developers and freelancers will find that WP Engine’s advanced features save them time when developing WordPress websites for clients.
And growing businesses will find plenty of room to scale up their hosting as their traffic increases.
Ready to get started with WP Engine? Click here to select your WP Engine plan today.
WP Engine Coupon
WPBeginner users get an exclusive 20% discount on their first three months with our WP Engine coupon code: wpbeginner20
Additionally, you will also get two months free, which effectively gives you a 40% discount on the annual plan.
All you have to do is click on this link to purchase. The discount will be auto-applied.
Frequently Asked Questions About WP Engine
We have been answering reader’s questions about WordPress hosting services for a long time. Here are some of the most often-asked questions about WP Engine that we hear from our users.
1. Is WP Engine a shared hosting company?
No, WP Engine is not a shared hosting company, and they do not offer services similar to shared hosting plans. WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting company offering WordPress-specific hosting solutions.
2. What is managed WordPress hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting is like the concierge service for your WordPress website. WordPress is a powerful content management system and website builder. Managed hosting companies offer an optimized solution where they take care of updates, security, backups, caching, and more. This leaves you with time that you can then spend on growing your business.
Managed WordPress hosting is slightly more expensive than shared hosting plans.
3. Is WP Engine worth your money?
Yes, WP Engine is worth your money. Especially if your business has outgrown the limitations of shared hosting services and shared VPS plans, then WP Engine is the best scalable upgrade option.
It allows you to easily manage updates and security and scale your website as your business grows.
4. Why is WP Engine so expensive?
WP Engine is more expensive than shared hosting plans because it offers premium performance, advanced security, and expert support. These features cost money but improve customers’ experiences.
5. Where are WP Engine servers located?
WP Engine uses Google Cloud servers and Amazon Web Servers as their data centers. This allows you to select data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific.
6. How does WP Engine compare to other hosts?
We are often asked about how WP Engine compares to other best WordPress hosting companies.
When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, WP Engine has a slight edge over competitors like Kinsta, Flywheel, and other options, mainly due to better technology, user experience, and customer support.
WP Engine pricing is more expensive than shared hosting providers like Bluehost, Hostinger, HostGator, GoDaddy, InMotion Hosting, DreamHost, and SiteGround.
For more information, see our detailed comparison of SiteGround vs. Bluehost vs WP Engine.
6. Does WP Engine support WordPress multisite?
WP Engine supports WordPress multisite as a paid add-on for Growth and Scale plans but does not support it for Startup plans. It is also included in ‘Custom’ plans for agencies and enterprise clients.
7. Can I cancel WP Engine hosting and get a refund?
You can cancel your WP Engine hosting service at any time from your account dashboard/user portal.
They offer a full refund during the first 60 days of hosting for users with pre-paid annual pricing.
8. Which WP Engine hosting plan is right for me?
If you are hosting a single website, you can sign up for their Startup plan. However, if you have a busier website or need to manage multiple installations, you can choose the Growth or Scale plans.
WP Engine is offering a 20% discount to WPBeginner users. Click here to start with WP Engine.
THANKGOD JONATHAN
Although WP Engine does not provide free domain it is one of the best wordpress hosting I have seen.
They have experience customer support and good performance as well.
Ralitza
Incredibly kind and professional service by Matt Dewhurst from solutions team and Jennifer P from billing team. Both went above and beyond everything that I was expecting and helped me resolve urgently my problem even though it was not directly related to their work. I am so grateful!
Vincent Rio Serviad
What you pay what you get. WP Engine works well for me. Plus StudioPress theme is awesome.
Niall Flynn
WPE servers are great, support is a little off the mark. Longer wait times than I like for what you pay. Support is slow too, these guys are doing 3-4 tickets at once. No ticketing system really so issues need to be watched, you sit on chat till its solved. Not ideal imo. They try but seems like a lot of red tape etc. Simple things like SSL take a long time.
Shane Clark
I live WPEngine for the “drama free” existence I get. Any other host I step away from a computer and a site, break they are waiting for me to get back to fix it. I have trained many project / office manager to full revert back a site. In most cases it’s “chat to WPE, I promise they will fix.
Alanna Risse
As a developer and manager of my company’s custom wordpress site, I can’t say enough good things about WP Engine’s chat support. I’ve needed help with technical questions and troubleshooting several times since taking over the site and the chat tech support specialists are always excellent. I get really clear answers in a very timely manner and they often think of things I haven’t even thought of yet. All of my experiences at WP Engine have been great! I often recommend them to others as a fantastic service with superior customer support.
Cameron
Easily the best host I’ve ever used!
Its worth it just for access to their support team. They’re all WP experts – and not just with regards to WP Engine. I’ve had support team members help me fix issues with my theme, plugins etc. They’ve probably saved me thousands in outsourced developers!
I can’t recommend them highly enough (and I’m not the kind of person who normally says this!)
Joan
WP Engine is great. It’s one of the best Managed WordPress out there. It is pricey but you get what you pay for. They offer the best support, WP features like staging and caching, and easy backup/restore.
The only downside is that they don’t offer IonCube on their new PHP 7. This should be the basics and something they should have considered when they installed PHP 7 on their site.
Manoj M S
I have been working for our client and for the last one and half years also being a part of WP engine. WP engine sounds really awesome for me. 24/7 support, Daily Backups, Best Restore points, Free SSL Certificate, Inbuilt Security Checkups and etc etc etc. In all the way, i will suggest WP Engine to anyone who prefer to host WP sites.
agaub
I found WP Engine exceedingly expensive, its staff very unresponsive to resolving technical issues and , when you point this out to them, they force you to terminate hosting contract in 1 week, in total breach of their own T&Cs. WP Engine is highly unprofessional, techically unskilled and unlawfall, not to mention their ourageously high cost. Stay away
Rafael
Interesting. I have never had an issues like that with them. Out of curiosity, which hosting would you recommend?
Sue Davis
I have had used almost all the major hosting, hostgator, 1 and 1, green geeks, dream host ….many of the hosting sites are all one big conglomerate…
But I have found 1 that is smaller, US based, and their technical people are on top of everything, immediately….We use vps and most of our clients eventually transfer to them. MD Hosting…truly their support is in a class of their own. Privately owned and very competetive pricing. We have been on their hosting for over 2 years…its what hosting should be.
Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
I’ve had a wonderful relationship with them so far and find no reason to complain yet. I have actually recommended it to several people.
Rafael
WP Engine is exceptional. We operate an online news website and we have been with many service providers on both VPS and Dedicated hosting environments. For a site that generates over 20k visitors per day, WP Engine has never failed us in any area. Exceptional staff treat you like you are family.
Mahbuber Rahman
Not too easy to get approved affiliate account and may be better wp hosting. Pretty much fees for hosting.
Michael Cohen
The team at WP Engine is exceptionally responsive. We switched from VPS.net because expert support, in WordPress, was and IS a top priority. Five stars, no doubt!
David Stroud
I have to say that ‘DAMN’ your support and customer service is good! No, really! I don’t know if you guy’s are spoiling me or that every other hosting service that I have used in 15 years were BAD! The difference so far has been like chalk and cheese.
David Stroud
I just stumbled across this review I gave for WPE back in 2012.
I can’t remember posting it here but have to say, 5 years on and still feel the same way about WPE – Great speed, service and support across all my sites.
Martin
Any serious WordPress site needs four things: security, speed, scalability, and service. Usually you can find a company that gives you one or two of these. Occasionally three, almost never four. WP Engine excels at all four. They are not just a hosting company, they are your partners in success. I’m always raving about them and give them my absolute best recommendation. On a scale of one to ten, I give them an eleven!
David V
My site was under attack from a Distributed Denial of Service attack on my old shared host. I was getting 1.5 million requests per hour that took my site down and 20 other sites who were also hosting on the same server. It took the old host three days to identify the problem, and even then offered no real solution. I switched to WP Engine and within hours the DDOS was dealt with *and* my website was loading about four times faster. I definitely recommend WP Engine!
Brad
WP Engine knows how to optimize for WordPress and it shows everyday!
Joe King
The WP Engine support has been excellent. I now see the difference between paying $5 or $10 per month for hosting vs a group that charges $29+ but specializes in WordPress and delivers fast, reliable support. Well worth my investment.
Ivan Blatter
WP Engine is not only a good hosting provider but has also a great and fast support!
JB Sauer
It’s nice to concern ourselves with the content and growth of our blog rather than trying to be our own IT department
Asher Parducci
We had an expensive server that we had to maintain because we needed plugins and scalability. WP Engine let us leave that box, keep our plugins and still scale.
Rob Berns
WP Engine support rocks. Ultimately, you get what you pay for. I know first hand their support rocks, they’ve have tolerated me all this time.
Asham
I self-hosted WordPress for years until I started experiencing crashes every time a post made it to the first page of Hacker News. I switched to WP Engine right before speaking at a major event. Not only did my blog survive the traffic spike, but I’ve doubled the number of subscribers since then and haven’t experienced a single outage yet. It’s nice to pay someone to handle all the hosting BS that we’re no good at. They’re WordPress Pros.
Eric B
WP Engine has amazing customer support, and if you contact these guys for anything. They will respond quickly and friendly. One of WP Engine’s philosophies is, “Kicking ass at your job is the only salesforce we need,” and I think WP Engine exemplifies that.” After all is said and done, WP Engine is a solid host, and now my host of choice for any new web development projects I have
L. MacPherson
After using upwards of 7 different hosting companies plus experiencing many other hosting environments with our clients I can say that for hosting WordPress websites, WP Engine is second to none. All the team are extremely passionate and they are doing amazing things, I’m really keep to see where they are headed.
Brian
Had a client with 100k+ monthly views migrate to @wpengine from shared hosting. Everything went great and they are happy
Mark Smatch
I sure do love working with @wpengine for WordPress hosting. super responsive on customer support. great when you have no in-house staff!
Mason
I knew from the start that the #1 single most important decision would be the hosting provider. There’s loads of options out there and my business partner and I tested several of the key players in the market. Ultimately we went with WP Engine…while not the cheapest option out there, they offer the most impressive list of features. Add to that the quick responses we get from WP Engine’s support team and you’ve got a solid win.
M. Johnson
Today, I am running 100% of this site on WP Engine’s WordPress hosting…and I love it. I seriously can’t rave about these guys enough. If you are in the market for the absolute best WordPress hosting available, then you need to take a look at these guys. They simply offer the best WordPress hosting I know of.
Paul Tyson
I’ve signed up and been blown away by the site speed. Been running WP site for over 3 years with well over 20 sites (although culling this soon) and I’ve never had a better host. The difference in speed alone makes switching to you worthwhile but I know you do a lot more.I first heard of WPE via Woo Themes after the nasty attack they had and they were singing your praises. Very impressed so far.
Nick N
Traditional Hosts: Beware of this new breed of hosting. WP Engine removes the need for a caching plugin. They’re faster than 97% of all websites tested by Pingdom. WP Engine enables your site to be as fast without the optimization tricks. Their support has earned an A+ in my book. The WP Engine staging area is a favorite of my development team, no more developing on a live platform. That gives them a hat trick.
Aaron M
After switching to WP Engine we saw site response times improve drastically from an average of 2100 milliseconds to 210 ms. Our previous host experienced regular outages, but since moving over to WP Engine we’ve seen reliability improve to 99.99% up-time. We would recommend them to any businesses or WordPress users looking for a scalable, responsive and secure hosting solution.
Felix B
We moved to WPEngine because of downtime/sluggish performance that we experienced with the previous hosting provider. Not only do we now have top notch performance, but Google DOUBLED crawl rate, instantly!
Ryan
In a world where milliseconds matter, WPEngine’s unmatched technology delivers WordPress sites at incredible speeds with incredible value. By bringing high technology to the masses, WPEngine is truly a pioneer in the WordPress industry
Mark D
Nothing but positive things for WP Engine. Honestly, it is refreshing to see a service that does deliver on what it promises. There is a reason that we list this service atop our rankings right now! The experiences here have been nothing but positive and there is no beating the lightning speeds that you get here.
Jerry L
I have no doubt that WP Engine is one of the best WordPress hosts in market. Personally I think the recent updates – of not charging on bot visits and increasing support team size, are very positive.
Nicole
We have run many clients on Wordpress Engine and have had mixed reviews with our last experience ranging in the “awful” category. DO NOT go to them if you run a high profile client. Use Linode or similar. They use Rackspace for their hosting (which sucks) so any large scale sites will need to go to a better host since they don’t actually manage their own servers. Here are some issues we’ve run into:
1) Can’t get a db over 700MB or posts records > 50k rows
2) Cron jobs – forget about it
3) Any server to server needed to use ssh2 instead of ssh or command line tools
Just know what you’re getting into.
Brendan Tully
Big fan of WPEngine, we have 100s of client sites running on our WPE environment.
Pros – high uptime, high performance (sites can handle 100s of visitors at once without nose diving performance), patches are taken care of, CDN is awesome, snapshot and staging site saves our developers 100s of hours of time, site migration plugin makes moving sites easy, support is responsive and 24/7 (a few years ago it wasn’t some there are conflicting things around the web on this)
Cons – some quirks around SEO which are easily fixable, some plugins not allowed but that’s the price pay for security vs convenience, some quirks around caching if you’re using session cookies on the front end, eg if you’re using woocommerce
Dano Manion
I’ve seen this comment about SEO in a few other places, but no direct example of what it is. What are the issues with SEO so that I can be better informed on how to fix them?
David Green
“some plugins not allowed” That’s something that wouldn’t have occurred to me; do you know which plug-ins? is there a list somewhere to find out what they currently are?
Robby
WP Engine is ok. They have different ways of doing things and are a bit limiting. e.g. will not allow certain plugins. The support is responsive and they will work to resolve your problems. I found them nice for the most part.
They make things seem easier than they are at times, to sell people on their service. e.g. the idea of instant transfer to them as if DNS delay does not exist. They have some poor recommendations at times. e.g. CName instead of A-Records. This sort of thing benefits them but is not best practice as you cant assign an apex domain to a CName. I found this sort of thing would happen often… they really sell people on the idea that their way is easier and better than everyone else, but going so far as ignoring best practices. This is noticable in their caching as well, which is how they get such great numbers in regards to speed, however it is not best practice to cache so aggressively.
Overall, they are decent. I did not find support any better than other places and was often just thrown a link to a website page when I was searching for answers that intended to dig a bit deeper. The speeds are a bit of an illusion. All said, the pricing is a bit high when you get down to reality.
Greg
WPE is over-rated. They have a lot of issues that people not in the know are unaware of. The canonical name wpengine.c causes double indexing on google and DESTROYS SEO. If you try to point the name back to your domain you run into issues with looping. They also force a no index in robots.txt without alerting anyone of doing so. This disallow gets copied over to the live site causing your site to not be indexed by google. Again DESTROYING your SEO. They added this disallow to solve the problem of double indexing, which does not work anyway because google still indexes it (the correct way is to use htaccess). So in the end the site winds up not being indexed and gets points against it from google.
If you approach them with any issue, they blame it on the developer. This is so they can sell you developer services, getting your current developer fired. Imagine your coding a website for someone and someone comes in when you are not looking and puts a disallow on the site. You know the default is to only disallow the admin panel and you never created a robots.txt file, nor do you even have access to the robots.txt file from the sftp. As far as you are concerned it does not exist. You then get a call from your client screaming saying that they spoke with WPE who says it is a common mistake by a rookie developer. As far as I am concerned the only person responsible for the disallow is the person who puts it there. You cant force code and not take responsibility. What other code has been forced that the developer will get blamed for?
We have slower speeds with WPE in comparison to a cheaper route with a collo or digitalocean. Also if you run ads on your site, they have no solution for you. You still need to find a host for your ads, in which case you might as well host wp there as well. Its that or allow yourself to be a part of the game where WPE steals clients with shady business practices that hurt not just the developers but also their own customers.
The site I worked on had great SEO until switching to WPE. The site speeds slow to a crawl at certain points of the day. Not surprising since you are sharing the server with many other sites and they are tightly managing your percentage of that server. Any large spike that happens and you cant serve those requests. They just cant get to it fast enough. They were honest about this from the beginning so kudos to them for not hiding this.
Overall, I do not have all the answers to why we experienced such a large SEO hit. We came from a very fast server and a noticeable slowdown can be seen on analytics once we switched to WPE. This along with the canonical name issue and forced disallow done behind the developers back has definitely not been good for us.
All this said, for someone starting out with less than 80k views a month, WPE may work just fine. If you have high traffic and want to have control over your sites SEO, rather than being grouped into decisions made for hundreds of thousands of sites which may not be right for you, look elsewhere.
Tinelle Louis
Thank you for this review. I have always been curious, but never used it on any of my clients site’s because I wasn’t sure. I do believe some people have liked it, but it depends on what they’re needs are. Based on your comment I will pass.
Catherine
My experience is similar to Greg’s. I think WPE is great for people who don’t really “get” WP, but WPE actually refuses to support the file system customization I usually do. You *must* use wp-content to use their system, if you change your content directory, they won’t support it. I wonder how people using skeleton work with them?
And yeah, they like to blame the “rookie developer”. I don’t think 9 years of almost exclusively WP custom plugin and theme development makes me a “rookie”, but hey, what do I know…I want to change my directory structure. I must be insane.
Neil Patel
Wpengine has its own benefits as well as cons. I used it and it worked pretty well for me.
Chris
What are you using now, Neil?
Editorial Staff
Last time I talked with Neil, he was still on WPEngine
Admin
AaYaN
Neil Sir is still on WP Engine
Jon
Neil… somewhat surprised to see your comment here :), i see your site is hosted by wpengine. i switched my site see how it goes. so far customer svc has been a mix.
John
Following are some cons that I experienced with WPengine
I am pretty experience in WordPress, and have tons of experience on Hosting companies… wpengine is just not right hosting company for experience users.
– slow ftp upload speed (i am using 11mbps internet upload speed ISP, so i know)
– site migration (nightmare and confusing)
– not 24/7 customer support
– limited control and options in dashboard.
– display their ads on people ‘s website without permission…
Jack Venturi
I have used quite a few big name hosting companies through the years but they were all the hosting companies that sell their service by price and with the 99.9% uptime promise which is usually pure BS. After years of issues with downtime over an hour at a time slow speed spells and tech support totally denying there was a problem, I switched my main WordPress site which is a life insurance website to WP Engine. The change was like going from driving a Pinto to a Mercedes Benz. I now have consistent super speed, great security which is a major factor for a WordPress site and a team of people that handle all of the updates and actually maintain the website. They even keep track of everyones plugins to make sure none of the plugins are prone to problems that consume heavy resources or become security risks. The only thing I can say is you get what you pay for. I wish I new about these people years ago. It could have saved me a ton of aggravation. When you think of the thousands of dollars you can invest into website design, it only makes good sense to use good hosting. A hosting company can either make or break a nice website.
Rebecca
WP Engine seriously has the best support out there. They are always professional and get back to you quickly. I host a couple of ecommerce sites with them and it is well worth the money for the peace of mind. Having the staging site is so helpful and easy to use instead of having to set up and maintain a separate dev site myself. The daily restore points and being able to make manual restore points has helped me out tremendously when I’ve accidentally broken things lol It really does feel like having an army of WordPress experts at your side. I highly recommend them!
Keith Brenner
I am thinking of using them for a client who uses woocommerce for his ecommerce site. What ecom program are you using and could you please provided a link to your sites. I want to see how fast they are?
Thank you,
Keith
Steve
WP Engine is awesome.
I have a number of sites hosted with them.
Super fast, easy backup/restore, staging area to play with changes, and fantastic support.
Hosting is definitely an area where you tend to get what you pay for.
If you have a site that you really care about or that you’re trying to actually make money with, then WP Engine is a no-brainer and absolutely worth it.
Greg Turner
I would be careful about saying that WPEngine makes a site practically hacker proof. Because the user has to do their part, too. And if they don’t, like using an easy password into admin, well, the site can be hacked. And WPEngine can not prevent that. Other than that, I love WPEngine.
Editorial Staff
Agreed which is why we used the word practically. Theoretically all websites can be hacked
But WPEngine does monitor and prevent a lot of server related hacks.
Admin
Mike
WPEngine requires users to use a strong password. You can’t even set up a user with a “medium” strength password. Just saying
Shalom
I switched to WPEngine, they are professional, when I call they answer the phone (even on their cell), and I feel they listen to their customers. The only thing they promise is to work hard, and I think they’ve kept their word.
Thomas
WP engine and its support staff have been the best in the industry and I can say this as a user of Pagely, web synthesis and Zippy kid so I do know what good support is and I will tell anybody that wants to know is that WPEngine has the best support.
Jean
I highly recommend WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting services. Uptime has been excellent, and the guys at support have always gone out of their way to help me whenever I had any questions or trouble with the site.
Mason
I spent the first 6 months of this year researching WP Engine, Page.ly, and ZippyKid as potential hosting providers for build my service platform at WP Valet. After 6 months, I ultimately went with WP Engine
Tim
I’ve worked with various hosting providers over the years and WPEngine has provided, by miles, the best support ever. They helped us improve the management and quality of our site massively, particularly through the suggestions surrounding management of staging environments, spam signups/rogue traffic reduction and general maintenance. Furthermore, our site is running smoother than ever, despite continuing to grow in size.
– Tim