WPEngine Hosting Review : Is It Worth It? (*Hint: This Site is Built on it...)

You've probably heard of WordPress when it comes to building and managing your website, but this same company also offers WPEngine hosting. This service comes with a variety of features and pricing options, including security updates, guaranteed uptime, and traffic allowances with plans that start as low as $25.

If you have a WordPress site and need a host, or if you are looking to build your first company website or a personal blog, you can use WPEngine for hosting to save money, frustration, and time. WPEngine has listened to consumers and tweaked their product to reflect the feedback they've received, which means a better assortment of features and value.

If you are looking to migrate a site you have that isn't a WordPress site, WPEngine can help with aspects of that as well, so read on to see what we love about this hosting service, and why it's the VIP choice for so many entities.

Best for: VIP hosting with an optional website builder

Overall Rating: 4.5/5 Stars

Pros:

Provides a very high level of uptime
Supports small businesses and global enterprises equally well
Premium themes included in WPEngine plans
Annual and monthly payment plans available

Cons:

Can't buy a domain as part of the package
Limited storage and customer support for the Startup level plan
You'll have to pay more if your traffic levels go up

Ease of Use: 4.5/5 Stars

Value for Money: 4.5/5 Stars

Design Flexibility: 4.3/5 Stars

Features: 4.4/5 Stars

Help and Support: 4.7/5 Stars

Customer Score: 4.7/5 Stars

Overview of WPEngine Hosting Review

WPEngine Hosting is managed hosting from WordPress that promises impressive features, high uptime, and an excellent website building experience. WPEngine offers users the chance to use their well-programmed templates to create professional-looking sites for businesses that are small to global in scale.

WPEngine is different from the traditional WordPress platform you may be familiar with or the WordPress Editor that is also commonly used. WPEngine focuses on hosting WordPress sites, but there are many more features and partnerships that allow you to use this service or migrate your non-WordPress site.

The WordPress Platform

The WordPress platform comes with the award-winning customer service that the company is known for, and their established relationship with partners and other developers can power custom websites or less complicated web pages with equal ease. When you start using WPEngine, you gain access to an entire array of site-building and management tools.

These tools allow users to be as creative as they want to be with their site while also enjoying cloud hosting and security features. You can also find several optimization tools that provide ongoing and valuable insights. WPEngine uses WordPress's own APIs and other integration solutions from partners that allow for any type of digital experience.

The WordPress specific hosting also allows you to scale up quickly without sacrificing speed, and there are speed testing tools made available to users to ensure their website is performing well. The staging environment used also allows users to clearly see what their site will look like and correct any mistakes before anything goes live.

Integration Solutions

These integration solutions mean that users have few limits on the type, complexity, and the customer experience they create with their site. These solutions also mean that each website is customizable to help you reach your goals faster, and you can revise, change, and add to them whenever you wish.

WPEngine works with Google Cloud, AWS, New Relic, Cloudflare, and HubSpot, just to name a few. These technologies not only work with your WordPress site and WPEngine hosting, but ongoing updates enable them to optimize how well they work.

One drawback to the integration with WPEngine is that there are strict limits on the number of emails sent per hour from a single account. If you wish to send mass emails often or send out newsletters and other emails to an extensive list, you'll want to work with a third-party application.

There are a few reasons why WPEngine doesn't allow mass emails, and it mostly has to do with how the emails get sent. If messages get flagged as spam, that reflects poorly on WordPress but, more importantly, could result in blacklisted IPs that affect multiple customers. Email hosts also offer better tracking and deliverability that WPEngine doesn't have for users.

Lastly, the WPEngine servers are configured for optimal hosting and not for sending out lots of emails. Many of the default emails sent from WordPress to users are auto-generated, which means they are generic, and there are no guarantees regarding deliverability or consistency.

Pricing, Value, and Innovation

It's also worth noting that WPEngine offers a wide array of pricing plans so you can save money when starting out small, and scale-up without worry. WPEngine also takes full advantage of open source technologies that allow for faster innovations for your site than you'll find on any other closed or proprietary service.

To give you an idea of how popular WordPress is, 35% of all websites currently online are built using WordPress, and 60% of sites that use CMS also use WordPress. There are over 100,000 WordPress developers out there that you can work with, and out of the top 10,000 most visited websites, 27% of them use WordPress.

There is also immense value in the fact that WPEngine allows you to customize the Content Management System (CMS) to fit your business instead of changing the way you do business to use its version of CMS effectively.

WPEngine Hosting Review Video

WPEngine Hosting User Reviews

Users love WPEngine hosting for it's excellent customer service and generous hosting features. This hosting service also allows users to plan for added expenses such as higher traffic volumes and switch plans when it suits their needs. The pricing is also very fair for what customers enjoy, and WPEngine consistently innovates to keep their customers' data safe.

See what users are saying about WPEngine when it comes to their website needs and hosting.

Source

How Easy is WPEngine Hosting to Use?

WPEngine is relatively easy to use because it features four pillars to help the platform run smoothly and prioritize its customers' value. The four pillars are:

Creative Agility
Ecosystem Integration
Enterprise Performance
Actionable Intelligence

Within each pillar, there are points of focus for categories like site building, open-source content, scalability, and site analytics.

Getting Started

If you already have a website, you can migrate it to WPEngine without needing a lot of technical knowledge or any specialized software. WPEngine has partnered with a company called BlogVault to offer a migration plugin specifically for WordPress that automates the process of moving WordPress sites to WPEngine.

This plugin allows you to do other things while it processes your site and transfers all of the necessary files and data. You won't need to worry about importing a database, looking up domain values, or any of the other technical aspects of website migration that aren't as well handled by competing services.

If, at any point, during this process, you get stuck and need assistance, the WPEngine Technical Support is available around the clock to help and even walk you through the process in detail. For more complex sites, this free service is invaluable, and it can save you tons of time.

Customer Satisfaction

WPEngine users notice how well their site performs on WPEngine, and they also hear it from their customers. With almost no downtime, users can make the most out of their websites, and when they have issues, they find the solutions with the award-winning level of customer service they receive.

Customers also like that they can focus on building their site, instead of optimizing a platform with little to do with their business. WPEngine does all the work that isn't related to running the actual business so customers can focus on their priorities without worries about security, attacks, downtime, or performance tweaks.

If you want to see customer success stories, you can find a number of them on the WPEngine website that details the specific challenges faced and the solutions that WPEngine experts figured out for their customers. WPEngine doesn't take customer's issues lightly, and their examination of the problems and their answer is both thorough and comprehensive.

It's also worth noting that the experts at WPEngine are well versed in at least one of 14 different subject areas, and many customers don't realize they can tap into this resource. Customers that have used this knowledge base they have access to have reported increases in traffic, better readership, higher incomes, and greater security.

Who is WPEngine Best For?

WPEngine is ideal for a variety of businesses regardless of their size or the industry where they operate. WPEngine offers excellent out of the box style technology so any company can create a digital experience to suit their precise audience.

WPEngine hosting also provides automatic updates and regular maintenance as part of their managed hosting, which means you won't have to waste time doing that work yourself or hiring it out. This robust hosting service is excellent for those that aren't the most tech-savvy as WPEngine is user friendly and widely used for:

Business websites and applications
Personal websites and landing pages
Blogging (for personal and business)
Ecommerce stores and related companies

WPEngine hosting is also ideal for those that are looking for a scalable solution to their hosting and website needs. With WPEngine, you can start with one tier of their pricing and upgrade or downgrade as your traffic and needs fluctuate.

Businesses of all Sizes

You can use WPEngine hosting regardless of the size of your business, and even enterprise-level companies can enjoy the same benefits as smaller firms. It doesn't matter how much traffic is directed to your site each month as there's a plan that can accommodate any volume, and custom plans are available for any sized firm.

A Good Value for Performance

WPEngine is also a good choice for businesses that are more budget-conscious, or who are looking to collaborate with an expert team on a few issues related to how their company uses their website. For example, WPEngine is clear about how to handle traffic spikes, but it also offers consulting services with developers and other experts to address specific concerns.

You also don't need to worry about site performance suffering due to the pricing plan that you're subscribed to as all of the WPEngine hosted sites are on the same servers with the same uptime, security, and updates.

Migrating Websites and All-in-One Service

If your business needs to migrate a website, you can do that with WPEngine, but there are a few migrations that require expert help. WPEngine can also help alert you to various ways to improve engagement with your site, which makes it an ideal all-in-one style hosting solution for businesses looking to grow and develop themselves further.

How Good are WPEngine Hostings' Templates?

WordPress templates are customizable and very well-programmed, so your site will run quickly and smoothly no matter how many different components you add. Several free templates come with your subscription plan, and with more than 36 to choose from, you'll be able to experiment with different themes until it's just right for your needs.

Many of the setup tools are single click style items, and the intuitive administrative side of things for your site makes launches easier. With WPEngine, you'll use the latest WordPress framework, templates, and development tools and also monitor and optimize your websites with the powerful tools provided for the Administrator.

Design Customization

WPEngine offers a lot of customization, particularly when you take advantage of their Multisite features that let you take several subsites and combine them into a network that makes sense. This feature puts all of those sites into one instance of WordPress, which means that the network shares a file system and database for sharing information.

Multisite also comes in two types: subdomain and subdirectory. Administrators can also use existing subsites and custom domains as needed. Multisite is available with the Growth, Scale, and dedicated hosting subscription plans but is sadly not available for the Startup plan.

Managing your Multisite also allows you a new user level called a Superadmin, which means you can decide which administrators have access to different sites. An administrator can access one or more subsites in your network as assigned, but the default allows them to access all sites until the Network Admin Settings get changed.

WPEngine Hosting Tools and Features

WPEngine provides many tools and features to its customers, and the customer service offered is top-notch as well. Besides having a variety of hosting plans to choose from that are specific to your business's size and needs, you can also request a custom package from WPEngine if you need something more specific.

There are also thousands of WordPress plugins you can use, and subject matter experts on staff as part of the support team. You can also expect optional onboarding instruction at the enterprise level, and educational articles, FAQs, and support are available to all customers regardless of your location.

WPEngine also partners with other innovators, so you'll always have the most up-to-date tools at your disposal and masterful integration of different technologies so you'll never need to worry about your site being “broken” when changes get made. This hosting service also cares about collecting useful intelligence for better page and application performance.

Other features include cloud services, data center redundancy to keep your data safe, guaranteed uptime, proprietary caching designed for speed, a managed global content delivery network (CDN), and scalable architecture so you can change plans when your site is seeing more traffic.

There are also core updates and associated patches and multi-factor authentication that keeps your website and data safe. WPEngine also has a dedicated team for security, and they perform regular code reviews and audits so users can skip that step.

Their security team also works to detect potential threats, create plans for recovery in the event of a disaster, and all traffic gets encrypted with SSL. It's also worth noting that WPEngine also provides automated backup services that you can perform manually.

There are also restore points built-in, and this data gets stored offsite in an encrypted format. You can contact customer support at any time to gain access to any of the last 60 most recent backups for your site.

Help & Support

When it comes to customer support, you'll instantly appreciate the world-class service that you get with WPEngine, but many are surprised to find out that not all of the plans come with the same customer service features. For example, the most basic plan offered comes in at an affordable $25 and has customer support via chat, but does not include phone support.

While this is rarely a deal-breaker for many companies and individuals using that tier, it's worth noting as you make your decision. The customer service chat should work seamlessly for most issues, but some users prefer phone communications.

WPEngine also offers access to several different experts in different subjects to ensure you have every possible resource for your thriving business or website. There are also many developers available that support WordPress sites, which means there are a variety of ways for you to get help with your website, and support for improving various functions.

WPEngine Hosting Pricing and Value for Money

WPEngine Hosting allows you to enjoy the benefits of managed hosting with WordPress and the option to build your site with one of their templates. WPEngine also allows its customers to pay for their services monthly or annually with a discount for annual subscriptions when paid in full. Each plan comes with a sixty-day risk-free trial and access to customer service.

There are a number of different tiers, and each plan comes with slightly different services. The available plans are priced like this:

Startup: $30/monthly, or $25/per month annually ($300/yr)
Growth: $115/monthly, $95.83/ per month annually ($1150/yr)
Scale: $290/monthly, $241.67/ per month annually ($2900/yr)
Premium: $400/monthly, $368/ per month annually ($4416/yr)
Premium 1: $600/monthly, $552/ per month annually ($6624/yr)
Premium 1.5: $900/monthly, $828/ per month annually ($9936/yr)

Each plan comes with a sixty-day risk-free trial and access to customer service. You can also switch plans as needed or budget in advance for overages when you might experience a traffic spike.

WPEngine Review: Summary

WPEngine is an ideal hosting solution for many businesses that are looking to grow and develop their brand through the use of their website and audience. If you want an all-in-one solution that is both scalable and affordable, then the feature-packed WPEngine will certainly not disappoint.

This service offers a vast number of features tailored to the needs of a business or personal website, and their support and knowledgeable experts are both incredibly skilled and effective at providing customized solutions. There is also so little downtime and such impressive performance when it comes to the traffic that many customers immediately notice a difference.

FAQ's

Can I use WPEngine if I have a non-WordPress site?

Yes, you can use WPEngine for your site, but you'll need to migrate it to WordPress during the process. Many users find this to be an ideal time to take advantage of one of the many templates offered by WordPress, and although it sounds like a lot of work to transition to WordPress, the process is straightforward.

If you get stuck or want specific help or advice, the WPEngine support team can walk you through the whole process, step by step until it's complete, and give you pointers along the way.

How difficult is it to migrate my site to WPEngine hosting?

Migrating your website isn't difficult at all with the migration tool that allows you to make a few clicks and then relax while it does the work. When you use the migration tool, it makes it easy to copy over the relevant data and other files, so your new site has all of the same information.

Migration typically doesn't take long, but you can expect to have to tweak some things after the process is complete, and the support team is available 24/7 to answer any questions that pop up.