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Product Reviews

WPEngine Review: Does it Really Make Your Site Load Any Faster?

Last Updated on: January 6, 2021 Sourav Kundu 40 Comments

WPEngine Review: Does it Really Make Your Site Load Any Faster?

WordPress currently powers just over 26% of the web – a pretty amazing statistic.

From TED to TechCrunch to an 11th grader’s short poem blog – WordPress provides an endless list of possibilities.

Part of what makes WordPress so amazing is that not only can it power TED.com, but it’s also suitable for an 11th grader’s blog. From millions of visits daily to just a few visitors per month – WordPress can get the job done.

If your website generates serious traffic, you should definitely consider managed WordPress hosting. WordPress.com VIP hosting is perfect for MNCs like BBC and Time, but it requires a substantial investment – plans start from $3,750 per month.

Enter one of the most reputed and popular WordPress managed hosting solutions – WP Engine.

In today’s article, I’m going to try and produce a fair, all-around review of WP Engine.

WP Engine was founded by Ben Metcalfe and Jason Cohen back in July 2010. Their current CEO is Heather Brunner who has moved up from the COO position. Heather Brunner was previously COO at Bazaarvoice and according to WP Engine, “She’s been an amazing force to help us grow and keep improving our customer service as we grow.”

And that’s true, considering that fact that they have have emerged into one of the most reputed WordPress-only managed hosting companies in the industry. In just a little under three years, they’ve generated over 21.7k Twitter followers and 9.3k Facebook fans.

WPEngine Review

We’re more likely to remember the stuff we see – than the stuff we read. I’m going to bore you with more reading later 😛. To grab your attention, I thought it’d be a good idea to start off with the gallery first! Some of the images are resized, so please click on ’em for a full-screen preview.

The WP Engine Combined Dashboard gives you a bird’s eye view of the WP Engine’s capabilities– clearing the database cache, CDN control, user role permissions, error logs, and some other advanced configuration.

wpengine review

The User Portal allows you to view and manage (add/delete) users in your WP Engine account. It’s clean, easy and gives the stuff you need to work in a collaborative project.

WPEngine_User_Portal

The Installation manager is another great tool that lets you add/manage multiple WordPress installations and configure advanced options for each of them.

WPEngine_Installs

Saving the best for last is the WP Engine Control Panel.

WPEngine_Dashboard

Why WP Engine?

Three reasons – site speed, scalability, and security. WPEngine places a primary focus on those three issues. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Why is Site Speed So Important?

Your website’s speed – i.e. the amount of time it takes to respond to the request and deliver the content – is a major ranking for Google and other search engines. On top of this, there are case studies that demonstrate the relationship between site speed and revenue generation:

  • Amazon concluded that they increase revenue by 1% for every 100 milliseconds they decrease their loading time.
  • Yahoo increased traffic 9% for every 400 milliseconds of improvement.

The bottom line, a faster website increases your chances of being well ranked.

Tech Specs:

  • WPE uses EverCache technology to make sure that your website stays safe (and active) during traffic spikes.
  • WPE uses MaxCDN for their CDN – one of the leading CDN providers in the globe.

2. Security

One of the greatest fears that all webmasters face is that of having their site hacked. A successful attack on a busy website can result in enormous traffic and monetary loss. This is the reason that larger website spend considerable time and effort protecting their websites.

Most WordPress website are the victim of automated attacks where the hackers attempt to hack the username and password for the admin account. If a hacker gains access through your admin login, they can wreak havoc. As a WordPress enthusiast, there are 2 main preventive measures which come to mind – proper security plugins and daily backups – both of which WPEngine manage for you.

LoginLockdown

Here are some key features:

  • WPEngine uses sFTP instead of traditional FTP. sFTP is basically FTP over a secure tunnel (SSH).
  • Get the username/password wrong three times in a row and bam – your IP is blocked. You’ll have to get in touch with support to fix it!
  • WPEngine takes daily redundant backups of your website – one is kept on their server and a full backup is stored in Amazon S3. Head over to their Support Garage to find out more.
  • Plus, if your site gets hacked, WPEngine will fix it for free.
  • WP Engine manages all WordPress security patches and also provides a one-click core upgrade as well as the ability to defer until the next update.

3. Scalability

WPEngine’s pricing structure is based upon your website’s monthly visits – starting at $35 for 25,000 visits/month.

Let’s try to understand scalability with an example. Suppose you ran a promotion campaign in Facebook and the traffic you received from the campaign was much higher than expected. Or suppose your blog’s article was accepted in Smashing Mag which caused a short-term spike in the number of visitors. In situations where your website experiences a traffic spike, it’s possible for your site to go offline.

If you’re on a shared hosting server or a VPS server, you risk is greatest. Shared hosts have little tolerance for websites that consume more resources than they are entitled to. Fortunately, when you’re on a managed hosting service like WP Engine, a surge in traffic wouldn’t cause any downtime although it might incur extra charges for that particular month because of the additional resources required.

Managed hosting is one of your top choices when it comes to dealing with the possibility of an unexpected traffic surge, WPEngine does not place restrictions on your website caused by traffic spikes or unusual events– they simply serve the page requests as normal – quickly and efficiently.

Technical Info:

It’s important you understand how ‘visits’ are counted. You could also visit their blog for a detailed explanation.

Our pricing is based on visits to your site, so it’s important that we make it clear what counts as a visitor so that it makes sense how we bill sites. There are different ways to define a visitor, and depending on which service you’re using, Google Analytics, for example, visitors may be defined and measured differently. We take the number of unique IP addresses seen in a 24-hour period as the number of “visits” to the site during that period. The number of “visits” in a given month is the sum of those daily visits during that month.

In simple terms, the number of visits in 24 hours equals to the number of unique IP addresses that visits your site in that time span of 24 hours. Similarly, the number of unique IP addresses logged in 30 days is the total number of visits in that month. If the total no of visits exceeds 25,000, then there are special “overage packages” available, so you can simply pay for the traffic you exceed.

Cool Features You Should Know About:

Now that we’ve covered some of the general features that are most common to every hosting company, let’s focus our attention to what makes WPEngine a leader in the managed WordPress hosting industry.

1. Staging Area:

This is one feature I absolutely love about WP Engine. It’s perfect for geeks like us who love to fiddle around with a theme’s CSS. It’s a great tool for theme and developers to test out the site before incorporating changes in the main site. What the staging area does is clones a copy of the site on a separate sub-domain, where you can test new plugins and theme modifications. If a plugin breaks the site, you can simply create a new clone and start again. Once your changes are complete, you can roll the new version of your website – easy-peasy!

2. Curated Plugins:

The folks over at WPEngine are very good at what they do. They only hire well-known WordPress experts and developers in order to keep the quality of service and security top-notch. That’s the reason they’ve come up with their list of featured plugins – and a list of disallowed plugins.

3. Managed WordPress Updates:

I remember one time, when I updated to version 3.5 (the version with the new Media Manager), the Edit Post page stopped working. I literally couldn’t create new posts or edit old ones. I had to roll back to the last available backup. I quickly emailed the theme developers. Thankfully, this issue was persistent with the top theme companies and subsequent theme updates were released quickly.

Thanks to this experience, I’ll always be a bit nervous about pressing that final Update button. But with WPEngine, I don’t have to get nervous before clicking the Upgrade button.

That is because WPEngine comes with managed upgrades, i.e. when WordPress gets updated, the new version will be tested by WPEngine first, and then rolled out to you, the client. This ensures major plugin and theme compatibility. Even if you did manage to somehow wreck something, WPEngine’s daily backups can restore your site in a flash and make that mistake disappear!

4. Built-in Login Lockdowns:

Security is a top priority at . Using the Limit Login Attempts Plugin, you can control the number of failed login attempts before banning a user or taking a variety of other actions:

Lockouts5. Support

This is one of the most crucial factors in any business and WPEngine nails it. It uses one of my favorite support panels – ZenDesk. This means all my tickets are both private and secure – and I can keep track of them easily. They also have email and phone support ( 1-877-WPENGINE) along with a detailed FAQ. Most importantly, they have the highest ratio of support personnel to customers compared to any other hosting provider. And they’re all WordPress experts.

6. Git Version Control

The company constantly tries to improve their quality of service and their developer-friendly features. Recently, they had introduced a new feature – Git Push. Git is a source-code synchronization tool for developers. It was originally developed by Linus Torvalds – the founder of the Linux Operating System. He used Git to control and maintain the revisions of the operating system’s code. Git can be used to write any form of code and control its revisions. This means you can write custom WordPress plugins, themes and custom versions of WordPress using Git. WP Engine allows you to leverage the power of Git in your site with version control.

7. Automatic Backups

Backup are a serious matter and all webmasters know it. WP Engine takes their customer’s backups very seriously and offers a host of other features that makes them one-of-a-kind.

WP Engine conducts a daily automatic backup of all your files in your account and saves them to their servers along with another copy in AWS Glacier servers. WPEngine retains up to a 30 day backup of your site.

WPEngine_one_click_restore

8. 1-Click Restore Points

With automatic backups, WP Engine has also introduced 1-Click restore points. With this feature, you can select any one of the 30 backups and with a click of a button, you can restore your site to that state. If you manage to break your site with a new plugin, and you can’t get it back to a working state – the 1-Click Restore Point feature is a painless lifesaver!

Word of Caution: When you restore your site to an earlier date, all your new data will be erased. This means any new comments and posts that you might have published (from the time of the selected restore point), will be lost. Always make a current backup before restoring to a previous version.

8. GeoIP Lookup

This feature lets WP Engine know where your visitors come from – whether it’s the tropical islands of Hawaii or the freezing horizons of Alaska. In case your website has content specific to different geographical areas, you’ll serve different versions based upon your visitors location. For example, if it’s the 4th of July, then you might want to offer a sale to visitors from the US.

Earlier, you would have to use 3rd party services for GeoIP lookup. But with this new feature, you can directly obtain it by querying WP Engine’s API. Read more about this feature in their blog post.

9. Transferable Installs

If you’re a developer, you’ll love this feature. Transferable installs allow you to get started on a project before a client has even set up their hosting. If you choose, you can work on a project to completion and then simply “push” or transfer the install into your clients account. This feature has the added bonus of allowing you, the developer to retain control of the install until your final bill is paid. Less hassle, less risk and easier workflow!

Pricing

Many argue that the pricing model of the Managed hosting isn’t really quite compatible with new websites or ones with decent traffic. Yes, the pricing seems high, but when you consider the sheer number of features that are included – ninja-like security, uber fast site speed, and expert WordPress support – it’s actually a steal!

It’s also worthwhile to note that WP Engine’s Growth plan ($115 / month) offers the highest number visits for the money of any other managed host. So it’s fair to say that the value for your money is actually quite high.

WP Engine Labs

 WP Engine Review

This is the division of WP Engine that brought you the awesome new Git Version Control feature. I want to discuss two of their current projects:

WP Engine Search

WP Engine Search is a project designed to improve the user experience when it comes to searching on your website. Using a plugin by ElasticSearch, searching your website will no longer require searching the database. Results will be nearly real-time, highly accurate and sorted based upon the age of the post. Integrated with WP Search is a feature that will allow you to display related content below each post, improving time-on-site and overall user experience.

PHP with HHVM

If you think WP Engine is fast now, HHVM should take that to a whole new level offering improved reliability and performance that is up to 5.6 times faster. HHVM is essentially an open source project designed to run PHP code significantly faster that standard PHP 5.5. The specific platform will be called Mercury and you can expect a sizable boost to performance for higher traffic sites and an improved ability to handle things like traffic spikes.

Speed tests with popular WordPress Themes

So I’ve been rambling a long time about how fast WP Engine is. I thought, why not do a site load time test with two hosts – one being HostGator and the other, WP Engine.

  • Theme used: Vertex from ElegantThemes
  • Data: Default/demo data provided with their theme.
  • Benchmark Tool: Pingdom and GTmetrix

GTmetrix

Host 1: WP Engine >> Personal Plan >> Managed WordPress Hosting

GTmetrics - WPE

Download Performance Report

Host 2: HostGator >> Baby Plan >> Shared Web Hosting

GTmetrics - HGBP

Download Performance Report

Pingdom

Host 1: WPEngine >> Personal Plan >> Managed WordPress Hosting

Pingdom - WP Engine Review

Download full Webpage

Host 2: HostGator >> Baby Plan >> Shared Web Hosting

Pingdom - WP Engine Review

Download full Webpage

WPEngine and Community

In my years of scouring the Internet, I have come across very few company blogs that take an active interest in giving back to society. WPEngine is a family which in currently experiencing rapid growth. This means their entire network is serving around 20 million visitors every day! All of these hits delivered in the fastest possible time!

Even with this rapid growth, the company hasn’t stopped giving back. Whether it’s celebrating Veteran’s Day with the military veterans working at WP Engine or providing care packages for the homeless, or installing a new sign on their building,

WPEngine is a closely knit family of individuals working toward progress.

Final Review – Do You Really Need WP Engine?

WPEngine is one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers out there. Here’s a quick summary of their primary features:

  1. Super fast hosting – thanks to caching technologies.
  2. Highly secure, malware protected hosting.
  3. Expert WordPress customer support.
  4. High scalability.
  5. Competitive pricing.
  6. Tons of user friendly features.

The only drawback I could find is that, in the CDN add-on, music, and videos aren’t included – probably because they consume massive amounts of data. Other than that, its a great ride.

So should I switch over to WP Engine?

Still not convinced, check out what Jerry Low has to say about WPEngine:

Extremely reliable and fast hosting; user satisfaction in server performance guaranteed since 2011. And, not to mention that WP Engine’s uptime is backed by SLA – you get refunds if the host is not serving you enough uptime.

You should switch over to WP Engine if:

  • You have around 20-25,000 visitors a day.
  • You generate sufficient income from your WordPress site.
  • You’re going to continue with your site in the foreseeable future.
  • You don’t like handling WP errors and optimization techniques.
  • You’re paranoid about hackers.

You should wait before shifting to WP Engine if:

  • You’re receiving fewer than 15,000 visitors per month.
  • You generate none to moderate income from your website.
  • You only publish content occasionally.

That’s it for our WPEngine review.

Hope we’ve been able to motivate you enough to switch over to WPEngine (if you meet the above criteria). If you’re already on WP Engine, do share your experience – we’d love that!

If you’re interested in giving WP Engine a try, use the below link to get 20% exclusive WPEngine discount or 4 months free.

Visit WPEngine »

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Disclosure

Sourav Kundu

Sourav is a WordPress enthusiast, an avid gamer and sitcom collector. He's into heavy metal, electronic, and new age music. When he's not online, he's spending quality time with his friends and family.

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40 Comments Leave a Reply
  1. Reneé Klein says

    May 5, 2013 at 7:12 pm

    That’s a very nice option indeed and will be great for many people! That of course doesn’t work for embedded URLs nor does it help for people who develop locally so they can use an IDE with a debugger. Now if WPEngine can create an interaction that merges a local deploy too then it will really be something.

    Reply
  2. Ian Cleary says

    May 13, 2013 at 2:08 pm

    I moved to Wpengine a couple of weeks ago and love it. I love the staging to live functionality, just brilliant!

    Reply
  3. ZK says

    June 25, 2013 at 6:17 pm

    Hosting is an important aspect for any website. Without a great host you ‘ll have serious downtime issues. wpengine is one of the top hosting firms ..highly recommended

    Reply
    • Sourav says

      June 26, 2013 at 7:23 am

      Indeed, ZK. Care to tell us how long you’ve been with WPEngine?

      Reply
  4. Eddie Mayan says

    June 26, 2013 at 2:41 pm

    WPENGINE is one of the best provider of Managed WordPress Service. Even it rank on top providers of this category. CloudReviews Indicates at 2nd position with their complete performance and details. Review out this precious information before buy it.

    Reply
  5. Adam Connell says

    June 26, 2013 at 9:12 pm

    Hey Dev,

    Great review bud – I’ve been seeing a lot of buzz around WP Engine lately, looks like they’ve got this WordPress thing nailed down for sure!

    Reply
  6. Sourav says

    June 27, 2013 at 6:07 pm

    Hi everyone,

    It gives me a sense to pride to say this – we were contacted by the community manager from WPEngine, and we updated this article. We had the history a bit wrong, so we fixed it. We also added some more screenshots and a a few thoughts on WPEngine’s pricing model.

    Hope that helps.

    Cheers,
    Sourav

    Reply
  7. Sandy Allen says

    June 30, 2013 at 12:40 am

    We are just now completing our transition to WPEngine – and I think you missed two other important facts. On the plus side: you really didn’t cover the ease of creating and restoring backups from the User Portal. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of a plugin update getting your site stuck in ‘maintenance’ or breaking your theme, you will appreciate how fast and easy restoring your site is. Also, you can use Amazon S3 to store your large files outside of the account storage limits with seamless integration.

    On the downside – currently, this service is exclusively WordPress. I run separate, non-WordPress gallery software for client photo reviews and purchases – large numbers of high-res photos and limited traffic. We decided that the WPEngine performance was worth splitting this up and putting the gallery software on an Amazon E2 instance.

    Reply
    • Sourav says

      July 9, 2013 at 6:57 pm

      Thanks for the tips Sandy.

      I don’t think WPEngine is going to move to any other CMS – they’re exclusively WordPress.

      Reply
  8. The Savings says

    September 12, 2013 at 6:42 am

    WP Engine is best wordpress hosting. I have a number of sites hosted with WP Engine.

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      April 27, 2014 at 3:19 am

      Good to know that so many people are using WPEngine. We are using WPEngine for many of our sites as well and still loving it.

      Reply
  9. Ben says

    October 5, 2013 at 9:34 am

    I have had nothing but a great experience with WP Engine. Thanks for the honest review.

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      April 27, 2014 at 3:17 am

      No problem. Thanks for the comment, Ben :).

      Reply
  10. Tim says

    December 28, 2013 at 8:56 am

    I spent a good amount of time researching WPEngine, Pag.ly, Pressable, and SiteGround as potential hosting providers for my site. And after 3 months of research, I ultimately went with WPEngine. I love WPEngine!

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      April 27, 2014 at 3:17 am

      Awesome. Let us know your experience Tim! It has been around 8 months and we are still using WPEngine for our site.

      Reply
  11. DBS says

    April 3, 2014 at 1:04 am

    We are planning to move to fastest wordpress hosting so found your site. Thanks for all the great info and review.

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      April 27, 2014 at 3:14 am

      No Problem DBS. You should definitely give WPEngine a try, we have been using it for 8+ months and never had any problem.

      Reply
  12. Jack says

    April 3, 2014 at 1:09 am

    I don’t suppose you have a coupon code as well do you please? I’ll be signing up this weekend and so please let me know if you have a coupon code.

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      April 27, 2014 at 3:29 am

      I am pretty sure you have already made the purchase, but in case you haven’t here’s a new offer that will give you a 2 months free hosting.

      Alternatively, you should also keep an eye on our coupons page for discounts on other WordPress related products.

      Reply
  13. WP Speak says

    April 29, 2014 at 8:43 pm

    How about downtime?

    You haven’t provided any figures about downtime.

    So your review only includes the Pro’s and not the Con’s.

    You can monitor downtime using one of Jetpacks modules.

    You’ll find there will be multiple periods of downtime every month when hosting on WPEngines servers because they use a 3rd party Datacenter Provider.

    Jetpacks Monitor feature proves this.

    Better to find a real review before signing up for WPEngine.

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      May 1, 2014 at 7:01 pm

      You’re absolutely right, this review doesn’t include any figures about downtime. We should have included some kind of information about the downtime and Con’s. But that does not make this review any less real.

      Anyway, I will be modifying the post to include that information. So you should keep an eye out.

      Reply
  14. Vinay says

    February 1, 2015 at 4:12 am

    Best Web hosting for wordpress ever

    Reply
  15. Scott Hartley says

    June 30, 2015 at 5:12 am

    Something I want to point out in the pingdom speed test your website was faster on the Baby Plan despite the performance grade increasing. I think this was not completely a fair test as you could easily have used the Baby Plan, with W3TC Auto Optimize, and CloudFlare save a ton of money each month and have the same if not better performance.

    Reply
  16. Reginald Chan says

    September 8, 2015 at 2:30 pm

    Hey Devesh,

    Great article and thanks for sharing. A long time fan of WPEngine!

    Oh yes, I got to say, the information you shared is really up to date and perfect (to be honest)!

    Good job and just shared this as well 🙂

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      September 12, 2015 at 2:47 am

      Glad to see you here, Reginald.

      I am a big fan of WPEngine myself, they are one of the oldest hosting providers in “Managed Hosting” space.

      Thanks for comment. Enjoy your rest of the weekend.

      Cheers,
      Dev

      Reply
  17. Danny Brown says

    September 8, 2015 at 10:44 pm

    Hi there Sourav,

    Nice overview, and appreciate you offering the comparison at the end of the post as to whether your should use WP Engine or not. I’ve been considering them for a while, along with Pressidium – but there’s one major stumbling block for both of them, and that’s the control over what plugins are used.

    While I can see the reasoning behind it, I also think that a host should be a “silent partner”, and simply ensure your site is up and running, while you decide the engine behind it. Given, they’re managing plugins as part of their own hosting – but I can’t help but feel it takes away from the open source mindset of WordPress, and feels more like a WordPress.com or Blogger.com restricted options choice.

    Anyhoo… great overview, again, cheers!

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      September 12, 2015 at 3:42 am

      Hi Danny,

      Dev here :). Pressidium looks like a great hosting provider and one that I plan to write a review about. You’re right about the plugins issue on WPEngine, they have a long list of plugins that are not allowed on their server. But then this is something that every “Managed Hosting” provider does, with the exception of SiteGround and Kinsta.

      Pressidium also has a list of plugins that are banned — http://github.com/pressidium/banned-plugins

      Thanks for stopping by.

      Reply
    • Katie Keith says

      October 7, 2015 at 10:04 am

      I have always seen the ‘plugins issue’ as a benefit of WP Engine rather than a hindrance. If you read their Disallowed Plugins page (http://wpengine.com/support/disallowed-plugins/) then you can see that there are very good reasons for all the plugins that they have banned – for example they have banned plugins that double up on WP Engine functionality (e.g. caching or backups) or will slow down your website (e.g. broken link checker or most backup plugins). The disallowed plugins list is therefore an opportunity to improve your website, not something to put you off.

      Reply
      • Danny Brown says

        October 7, 2015 at 11:03 am

        Hi Katie,

        I disagree. WPEngine and other managed hosts are protecting themselves, understandably. But for them, or any other managed hosting solution, to say which plugins are best and which aren’t takes away the very open source choice that WordPress has become popular for.

        When you pay for a premium service, your choices shouldn’t be limited by what a third party deems best for you, as opposed to what actually is.

        Reply
        • Katie Keith says

          October 7, 2015 at 1:11 pm

          I think that’s why it’s called “managed WordPress hosting” – you are asking them to manage elements of your website and provide the best possible environment for running a WordPress site. Maintaining the fast load times and security does involve banning some plugins. If you want full control then a dedicated server or VPS which you manage yourself is a good option, but this is a lot of work and I think WP Engine offer a good happy medium as they’re so much better than shared hosts, and do everything for you. But yes, this can mean that you have to make a few compromises.

          Reply
          • Danny Brown says

            October 7, 2015 at 1:16 pm

            Oh, for sure, and for many folks, it’s fine – but for those of us who don’t want that level of “interference” (for want of a better word), it’s not worth giving up the control.

            Perhaps micro-managed WordPress would be a better name for it. 😉

            Reply
  18. thatjeffsmith says

    September 9, 2015 at 1:51 pm

    Great review, I’ve been using WPEngine happily for 4 years or so.

    But, “Linus Travolta”?

    Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      September 12, 2015 at 3:45 am

      Glad that you liked the article, and that you have had a great experience with WPEngine.

      You can read more about Linus Travolta here — http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-millenium-technology-prize-finalist-linus-torvalds/

      Reply
      • Mark V says

        December 3, 2015 at 4:11 am

        Torvalds – not Travolta

        Reply
  19. Katie Keith says

    October 7, 2015 at 10:01 am

    A nice comprehensive review thanks. In the past, the main gap in WP Engine’s service was the lack of free migrations, as a lot of hosts will migrate websites to their servers for free. The main feature of WP Engine that your review has overlooked is their new Automated Migrations plugin which makes it really easy to move a website to WP Engine. I have written a post about this which you can read at: http://barn2.co.uk/free-wp-engine-website-migrations/. This fills the previous gap in WP Engine’s offering and makes them an even better option than they were before.

    Reply
  20. Michelle says

    November 23, 2015 at 10:00 pm

    Some WPEngine staff have been caught deleting content from blogs who write about WordPress,

    They do is in support or thier keyword competitors in the U.S.

    They only delete posts from sites owned by non Americans because they know they can get away with it.

    Reply
    • Danny Brown says

      November 24, 2015 at 2:56 am

      Wow, really? Are there links to articles about this, or examples where they’ve been caught?

      Reply
    • Devesh Sharma says

      November 24, 2015 at 5:20 pm

      Hey Michele, I’d love to see some proof (maybe an example / article). Though, they did follow some questionable practices in past, one of them was including links in the homepage without asking permission of user.

      Plus there were some privacy and SEO concerns as well. But I think most of that was addressed last year.

      Reply
  21. Luke Cavanagh says

    August 30, 2017 at 2:39 pm

    EverCache from WPE is just Varnish.

    https://varnish-cache.org/

    Reply
  22. Doug Ludemann says

    March 22, 2018 at 3:27 pm

    Once upon a time, WP had a product that was unique. Now everybody offers the same product; most cheaper, most better. Better in terms of the value and the customer support, both of which are poor with WP.

    WP technology is no longer novel, with alternatives currently available that exceed the offerings of WP Engine, with the added advantage of LIVE customer support.

    With WP, tech support is no more than a few email exchanges and a day or two away. Did that sound acceptable? Then maybe WP is for you. For those who like to fix their problems immediately, without excuses or scapegoating, DON’T choose WP.

    Their service is comparatively expensive…meaning their value is poor. Their service agents are arrogant, and negative feedback will cause them to non-stop email you in an attempt to compensate for the poor service their company offers.

    Lastly the “speed” they offer you is a pipedream. My site had a D rating for speed, despite having paid extra for their apparently useless CDN software. I was advised to add a plugin. Couldn’t I have done that on a shared server? Did I really need to pay a premium price for 18 months for you to tell me the speed I was paying for was ultimately determined by a 3rd party plugin?!

    As I started to see the poor value that I was getting from WP, I asked them to outline what exactly I was getting from WP. What I discovered is that they do not manage anything at all. In fact, they don’t even do DNS. (You’ll have to get your DNS from a third-party.) They’ll keep your WordPress software updated, and keep a daily backup of your site. But that is it. For what they charge, I’d assume they would offer services that are beyond what the free plugins would accomplish. Guess I was mistaken.

    When directly confronted with WHAT they had actually done for me, they balked. I requested, in writing, a rundown of the services they offered. He copied the text from their webpage into an email. Clearly, he had no respect for me…or apparently customers of WP in general.

    Lastly, the same web development professional that introduced me to WP acknowledged that the company has gone downhill significantly as it pertained to customer service in the time I’d been with them. (Going on two years). That same web development professional recommended I get the same product for less money at any number of outlets.

    So let’s see, WP is comparatively expensive and a notably poor value. WP’s customer service is somewhere between poor and none. WP doesn’t live up to hype or expectations that they themselves promoted. And everything they offer is available from their competitors for equal or less money. In short, there’s no longer anything special about WP…except its poor value.

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