WP Engine Review

I first learned about WP Engine long time ago. Back when the company first started in 2010, I did an online interview with its cofounder Jason Cohen.

Not many have heard about the name “WP Engine” back then, but the company was growing exponentially. Many well known bloggers and businesses (including HTC, FourSquare, Balsamiq, Sound Cloud) were switching over.

A year after the interview, I got a free account and moved WHSR over. The migration process was very smooth and my site load time was halved instantly. Needless to say – I was very happy and stayed for more than 2 years.

Shortly after Google Penguin (which WHSR took a big hit), I decided to change and started rebuilding everything from ground zero. The idea was to grow WHSR into a web service provider, build a community around ourselves, and rely less on Google traffic. That was the time when WHSR Uptime Monitor was made and we switched back to conventional VPS hosting environment.

The year was 2013.

Today's WP Engine

Over time, WP Engine has grown into an extremely popular WordPress hosting.

Many things have changed since WHSR shifted out. Various new features were added as technology advances, the company is funded by a large group of investors including Automattic (the folks behind WordPress.com), and many bloggers and WP experts regard them as one of the best managed WordPress hosting (there were also some who go against them, more about that later).

Is WP Engine as good as the words from streets? Let's find out.

Review Summary

WP Engine Alternatives

Users who are considering WP Engine might also want to check out Kinsta, Pressidium, or SiteGround.

Quick links 

Learn more about my experience and review of WP Engine hosting from different perspectives:

• WP Engine Server Performance
• WP Engine Pricing
• Customer Service & Support
• WP Engine Features
• Verdict: Should you host at WP Engine?

WP Engine Platform Performance

Our Experience & Thoughts:

WP Engine Platform Uptime (Feb 2018): 100%

Older Server Uptime Records

* Click to enlarge image.

Personal Experience (2012 – 2013)

As I mentioned earlier, I shifted WHSR to WP Engine in 2012/13. My personal experience with WP Engine at that time was nothing but WOW.

Site's response time improved 100% according to Pingdom right after the site migration. Note that no other fine-tuning was made when this was measured.

WP Engine Bitcatcha Speed Test Results (Mar 2018): A+

WP Engine Bitcatcha Speed Test Results (Jun 2017): B+

WP Engine Speed Test at WebpageTest.org

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WP Engine Customer Care

Our Experience & Thoughts:

Pro-active live chat support

My recent live chat experience with WP Engine support was good. WP Engine's live chat support is one of the best five according to my studies in 2017.

Huge knowledge base at WP Engine support section.

 

User Complaints on WP Engine Support (Mainly in 2014/2015)

WP Engine supports was top class during my stay (2012 – 2013). Every support single staff that I spoke to was a WordPress wizard. And they were so passionate with their job – that you can tell from how quick they reply your emails – their ticketing support system was like a live chat where I got almost instant responses every time.

But things obviously has changed later if you search around and you’ll noticed that here were quite some complaints on WP Engine customer support in 2014, including this lengthy review by Matthew Woodward. The complains, generally speaking, focus on two things –

• Uninformed / inexperienced support staffs,
• Slow responses (some even said their requests were ignored), and

WP Engine's Response 

Mounting criticism of the company has prompted the response by WP Engine founder Jason Cohen in this blog post in May 2014 – Growth is Hard.

To address the issue, seven immediate actions were taken, including hiring new support staffs (they have increased the support team by 50% since then) and allow customers to reach out the company’s engineer directly (read quotes below).

1- Hiring

We closed our Series C financing in January and immediately put it to work in hiring in the Support Team. We’ve increase the team by 50% since then. It’s very hard to hire quickly and yet maintain our standards of both attitude (culture) and aptitude (ability). We’ve even hired additional internal recruiters to help us accelerate this process.

2- Direct-to-Engineer

Some of our customers are highly technical, so whenever they contact us, it’s with difficult, interesting problems—not ones that can be solved with a knowledge base article or a simple, obvious response. Therefore, we started creating pathways for those customers to get to engineers faster—people who can work on the mind-bending stuff. Of course we don’t have that 24/7 yet, like we do with regular support. Fortunately, those problems are usually OK to be solved during normal business hours, so overall this approach has been effective.

Updates: User feedback after Jason's message

Recent user feedback (after Jason's message) indicates that the quality of WP Engine customer support is coming back.

Feedback from BRet Wegner, Drive Social Now

Extremely likely, between the simple setup, automated migrations and great support when you need just a little more control, WP Engine has not failed me yet. There seems to be times when the admin side of a site seems a bit sluggish. This is usually during peak hours, but if your site is on a server with other sites that have heavy loads, you can become affected. But you can usually ask them to move your site to another server and they’ll take care of getting you to a more reliable environment. – Bret Wegner, Drive Social Now / quoted from Fit Small Business.

Feedback fromDave Warfel, WP Smack Down

Live chat wait times [with WP Engine] will depend on a few factors; mainly, time of day and if they are experiencing any server issues. I think the longest I’ve had to wait is 15 minutes. A majority of the time, I get a response in less than 5 minutes. Compared to other hosts, I’d rate this as very good (8.5/10) – Dave Warfel's WP Engine Review.

WP Engine's Visit Counts

A few years ago, one complaint you often hear about WP Engine is how they charge their customers. WP Engine users are charged based on visit. WP Engine entry plan, for example, allows up to 25,000 visits per month. If your blog attracts more than 25,000 visits in a month, you’ll need to pay more.

So, more visits = more CPU resources usage = higher host fees. Fair?

Nope. Because WP Engine is also charging on bots visits and has not implemented any measures to block bad bots (unlike conventional hosting, users can’t setup their robots.txt to block bad bots at WP Engine). Users were forced to pay overages due to bots visits.

WP Engine's Response 

WP Engine removed bot visits from their billable visits calculations in October 13, 2015.

Learn how WP Engine define as a “visit” in this article.

WP Engine Features

Our Experience & Thoughts:

Important to know: WP Engine is for WordPress Sites Only

Keep in mind that WP Engine is a WordPress-only hosting.

This means if your site is not WordPress base, then you can’t host your site at WP Engine.

Billing transfer

Self-help site migration

Does WP Engine provider site migration service? No.

However, WP Engine has developed a hassle-free automated migration plugin. All you need to do is provide some account details and the migration process (ie. searching/replacing values in database, updating link structure, and multiple sites migration, etc) can be done automatically with the plugin.

For detail instruction, read this post. To download the migration tool, here.

Accessing .htaccess file at WP Engine

At WP Engine, .htaccess rules are set at user portal (see image).

You'll need to go through their tech support to access your .htaccess file (for example, to copy and past a big chunk of .htaccess redirects).

Expensive add-ons

There are a lot of great features with WP Engine but they don't come free for Startup and Growth plan users.

Sending and receiving emails

WP Engine does not provide email or webmail features.

This means if you want an email address ending with your domain name (something like [email protected]), you will need to host your own email accounts.

Yes, I know you can always go with Gmail as Google provides free email hosting services (as recommended by WPEngine); but not all website owners want their data to be hosted with the big G (me included!).

However, stay no fear. I have tried a few different solutions when I switched my host to WP Engine and wrote this email hosting guide.

Studio Press Themes and Genesis framework

The acquisition of StudioPress Themes and Genesis Framework from Rainmaker Digital LLC in June 2018 further strengthen WP Engine’s platform, allowing faster time-to-market with greater ease and agility.

Genesis is a massive ecosystem of parts for WordPress and is in essence, what it takes to assemble a best WordPress site in building blocks. From speed to security and even aesthetics, there is something in the Genesis Framework that simply screams ‘professional WordPress’ – and that’s what you pay for.

StudioPress Themes, on the other hand, is a collection of more than 35 professionally designed, Gutenberg optimized, WordPress themes built with Genesis that support a number of vertical use cases.

Redirect Bots = Major SEO issue

By default, sites hosted at WP Engine with page that ends in a number, (e.g. example.com/page/1) or in a query arg, (e.g. example.com/mypage/?myproduct=name), will be redirected to the page before the number or query arg sequence begins (site.com/page, site.com/category, site.com/mypage/).* This setting, known as “Redirect Bots”, is a major SEO issue as it will limit Google bots to discover content on your site and impact website PageRank flow through your site.

Luckily – this setting can be turned off by contacting WP Engine support.

* Note: This is quoting WP Engine's exact words from this blogpost. WP Engine is selling this feature as a “benefit” as it saves up server load (and money) for the users. 

Price: Is WP Engine value for money?

Our Experience & Thoughts:

WP Engine Promo Code: WPE3Free

First time users who sign up with WP Engine will get 2 months free hosting and 10% off first payment when the promo code “wpe3free” is applied.

Startup plan after discount is priced at $22.50/mo (with annual plan).

WP Engine 2018 Price Changes: Before & After

WP Engine announced its new plans on February 28th, 2018. The original plans – Personal, Professional, and Business, are replaced by slightly pricier plans named StartUp, Growth, and Scale.

The new price ($30.00, $115.00, $290.00/mo) is slightly higher than the old ones ($27.55, $94.05, $236.55/mo).

WP Engine Entry Plan Pricing (Before & After)

* Note: On January 22nd 2020, all current customers on Startup Plans will be converted to the new price (reduce from $35 to $30) on their monthly or annual billing renewal date. For updated pricing and plan details, visit: https://wpengine.com/plans/

Costly to users with multiple sites

While the speedy server and WP expert supports are good to have; WP Engine is not exactly what you need for your low traffic, less important websites.

The Startup plan allows only one installation per account and charge $20/mo per additional site. Your hosting cost would easily racks up to hundreds of dollars per month.

Compare price: WP Engine vs FlyWheel, Pressidium, Kinsta, and Pressable

Here’s a quick comparison on WP Engine pricing with other managed WordPress hosts (plans similar to WP Engine's Startup).

* Note: I am comparing WP Engine normal price in this table. WP Engine is currently doing special promotion – you'll get 2-months free if you signup for their annual plan (that averages to $22.50/mo).

Verdict: Should you host with WP Engine?

To recap – here's the pros and cons of hosting with WP Engine:

I have no doubt that WP Engine is one of the top WordPress hosting services in market.

However, I do not recommend WP Engine to everyone.

For example – if you do not intend to run your site in WordPress, then there’s no point for you to be here.

Or, if you are new and just started, I would suggest you to go with conventional shared hosting services like InMotion Hosting, A2 Hosting, or Interserver. I believe you’ll thank me for the much cheaper option.

Or, if you need to host multiple low traffic sites, which do not need so much server resources; then WP Engine is definitely an overkill.

That said, however, WP Engine can be a gem for developers or WordPress sites with heavy traffic.

If you read Devesh's article Best Options for Managed WordPress Hosting, this is what he wrote on WP Engine –

If you want a bit of everything, go with WPEngine. This option is for you if want to scale without compromising the quality of support and loosing developer friendly tools. And at the same time, not want to spend a fortune. I have been using WPEngine for a long time and never had any problems with them.

WP Engine is recommended for:

• Users who are running a single WordPress site with medium to high level traffic,
• There is a possibility of your site go viral and hit Reddit front page,
• Your WordPress site is your main income source,
• You are always worrying about hackers and malware,
• You don’t like handling the tedious WordPress maintenance job – such as site back up and file cache tuning;

Make the move as I did with WHSR and quit worrying about your site being hacked or down due to traffic surge.

WP Engine Alternatives

If WP Engine is not for you, there are several good managed WordPress hosting to consider. Kinsta, WP Web Host, SiteGround and Pressidium are a few solutions that I have tried and recommend.

Side-by-side comparison of the popular managed WordPress services – Kinsta vs SiteGround vs WP Engine.

Order WP Engine Now

For more details or to order WP Engine, visit: https://www.wpengine.com/signup

(P/S: The links pointing to WP Engine in this page are affiliate links. If you purchase via this link, it will credit me as your referrer. This is how I keep this site alive for almost 8 years and able to add more free, helpful hosting reviews. Buying via my link doesn’t cost you more – in fact, you will discount from the given promo code WPE3Free. Your support is highly appreciated, thank you! )