Getting began with WordPress is simple. Most web hosts provide easy one-click installations, and a few additionally present extra succesful managed WordPress plans. However though each supplier claims nice WordPress experience, these plans are normally only a tiny a part of the general product vary, and there isn’t any solution to inform how a lot expertise of the platform a number may actually have.
WP Engine is a supplier of managed WordPress internet hosting – and nothing else. There are not any e-commerce plans, VPS, devoted servers or the rest to get in the best way, only a single-minded concentrate on delivering and managing the absolute best WordPress service.
Signing up does get you some useful advantages. The service assessments WordPress updates and patches, as an illustration, earlier than making use of them to your web site. A customized caching system optimizes efficiency. Actual-time menace detection is included, and in the event you get hacked anyway, the web site guarantees it’s going to be fixed for free.
The generosity continues with WP Engine’s Service Stage Settlement (SLA). This guarantees 99.95% service availability, and can credit score you with 5% of your month-to-month charge for each hour the goal is missed.
Heading off to the Pricing web page revealed extra particulars. The baseline Private plan offers 10GB of storage and helps as much as 25Okay visits a month. Skilled extras embrace Let’s Encrypt SSL, staging (immediately create a replica of your web site for testing), LargeFS help for straightforward integration of Amazon S3 storage, useful efficiency diagnostics, and optionally available PHP 7 for improved efficiency and useful resource utilization. These are welcome touches, however the plan nonetheless appears costly at $29 (£21) a month ($24.16 or £17 in the event you pay yearly), particularly as you do not even get e mail internet hosting.
The Premium plan helps as much as 100Okay visits a month, affords 20GB storage and may host as much as 10 web sites. There is a bundled CDN (MaxCDN-powered) to boost efficiency, you are capable of import SSL certificates out of your alternative of supplier, and also you get 24/7 cellphone help. These are additionally capabilities value having, however the Premium plan appears to be like much more costly at $99 (£71) a month, dropping to $83.25 (£59) on the annual plan.
This sample continues elsewhere. WP Engine Enterprise provides extra sources, can dynamically serve content material to guests primarily based on geography and offers easy accessibility to WordPress-optimized Google Analytics data, however we’re uncertain whether or not it is actually value $249 (£178) a month ($207.50 or £148 paid yearly).
To place these costs into perspective, 1&1’s (admittedly way more fundamental) managed WordPress offers 50GB storage, helps limitless guests, and offers you a free area for 12 months (with e mail) for simply £zero.99 ($1.40) a month for the primary yr, £four.99 ($7) afterwards.
Nonetheless, WP Engine does provide much better efficiency, reliability, and plenty of different premium advantages, and in the event you’re tempted, a beneficiant 60-day money-back assure provides you loads of time to pattern its options for your self.
Account setup
The WP Engine web site has an in depth comparability desk which lists the varied plans and makes it simple to find the suitable one for you.
Select and also you’re requested to decide on the place your web site ought to be hosted. WP Engine has information facilities within the US, UK, Belgium, Germany, Australia and Taiwan, a far wider alternative than you will get with most suppliers.
You are capable of choose month-to-month billing, a welcome plus in the event you’re quick on money or wish to hold your choices open. Alternatively, selecting the annual plan provides you two months without spending a dime, successfully chopping the worth by round 16%.
Funds are accepted by bank card solely, with no help for PayPal or the rest.
We parted with our money within the ordinary means, and the web site redirected us to a Welcome web page with hyperlinks for our WP Engine account, the admin web page for our WordPress web site, and an preliminary web site URL (yourdomain.wpengine.com by default, though you’ll be able to redirect this to a site of your individual).
The web page defined that our web site was being created, however this did not take lengthy. Seconds later we acquired an e mail inviting us to set a password for our WP Engine account. We adopted the hyperlink, entered a password and have been capable of instantly view our management panel and default web site.
The signup course of ended with the arrival of a last e mail summarizing particulars of our web site and offering useful hyperlinks to tutorials and help pages, a useful reference ought to we’d like it later.
Making a web site
WP Engine’s net dashboard opens with a cluttered mass of alerts, standing messages, information objects and extra. It isn’t a fantastic use of house, however there are settings elsewhere that simplify the scenario, and we quickly realized that the majority of it may very well be ignored.
Tapping a hyperlink to our new WP Engine plan displayed a panel with extra info on our setup: area, IP tackle, WordPress model, PHP model. There are additionally handy mini-graphs displaying you up-to-date histories in your guests, bandwidth and storage utilization.
The interface does not make any try to level customers in the suitable route, and novices may initially be confused by a number of the language used (domain-level redirects, CNAME information, Git push).
DNS setup is extra difficult than you may count on, as a result of your web site could also be relocated as vital. WP Engine says that it’s “consistently guaranteeing your web site is working to its fullest potential”, and “might migrate your web site at any time” to make sure it is on the suitable server. Should you observe the usual route of updating a static A document along with your area registrar to level it at a WP Engine account, this hyperlink will break each time your web site is moved, making it inaccessible.
The help web site’s really helpful resolution is to make use of CloudFlare’s CNAME service, and that is a good selection, however it would contain slightly extra preparation (learn extra in regards to the process on the WP Engine site).
Life will get simpler as soon as your DNS is correctly configured. A BlogVault-based Automated Migration plugin is a spotlight, migrating an present WordPress web site to your WP Engine account with nothing greater than your supply server SFTP credentials and vacation spot URL. This may not work with suppliers who do not help SFTP entry – WordPress.com, Wix, SquareSpace and different proprietary providers – however ought to deal with common WordPress internet hosting with out problem.
Technical customers get entry to phpMyAdmin, permitting them to manually import and mess around with present databases.
Alternatively, in the event you’re ranging from scratch, you’ll be able to launch the usual WordPress Admin web page with a click on and go to work. The set up does not come outfitted with any additional plugins or themes, however you’ll be able to browse and set up no matter you want utilizing the usual instruments, and anybody accustomed to WordPress will be capable of get began immediately.
Efficiency
Evaluating WP Engine is tough, as the very best elements of the service – administration, efficiency optimizations, reliability – aren’t simple to see or measure. Spend a while exploring the interface, although, and clues start to look.
The service has built-in automated backups, as an illustration, usually a rechargeable additional with different hosts. These run every day, or you’ll be able to create a backup on demand, and any of those may be restored as vital. The location solely shows backups from the final 30 days, however you’ll be able to obtain them in archived kind to keep up your individual native copies.
A helpful Staging function permits creating a replica of your web site for personal testing. You possibly can use this to check out a brand new theme, a plugin or the rest, with out affecting the manufacturing web site. It is a useful function and really simple to make use of.
Constructed-in efficiency assessments assess your web site efficiency, giving it a rating and making clever suggestions. The report web page additionally maintains a desk of your outcomes for the previous six months, that means that it’s simple to evaluate how particular person tweaks are affecting velocity.
WP Engine provides a customized web page to your WordPress Admin console, giving fast entry to some essential low-level settings and choices. Efficiency options permit configuring your CDN (if included along with your account) or purging WP Engine’s many caches; helpful for troubleshooting. Superior choices embrace a strong HTML Publish Processing choice to switch web site HTML after it has been rendered. That is an fascinating device which affords all types of prospects (the help web site has more on this), though you will want appreciable data and experience to make use of it correctly.
In one other fascinating contact, WP Engine does not permit some plugins the place expertise signifies they could damage web site efficiency or trigger different points (learn extra here). That is going to be an issue in the event you want one thing on the banned checklist, however general, we approve. Having an knowledgeable advise you which of them plugins may assist, and which actually will not, is a profit you hardly ever get with different suppliers.
To finish our evaluate we checked out WP Engine’s help, one thing the corporate highlights as considered one of its main benefits.
The official support site has some helpful hyperlinks to key paperwork masking the WP Engine portal, migrating your web site, troubleshooting issues, optimizing your web site for velocity, and extra.
These do not at all times ship the easy step-by-step ‘click on this, click on that’ options you will usually see with different suppliers, however WP Engine’s experience is clear. For instance, the complete set of ‘speed up your site’ movies and pages really feel extra like content material taken from an expert coaching course, quite than the same old fundamental help content material seen at different suppliers.
An built-in search engine ought to enable you to discover the paperwork you want, nevertheless it displayed little intelligence in our assessments. Looking for ‘antivirus’ returned no hits, as an illustration, whereas ‘anti-virus’ returned 145, and with apparently no effort made to checklist the most definitely articles first (the highest articles on our checklist have been ‘How you can Implement a Google Crawl Delay’, ‘Will transferring my web site to WP Engine have an effect on website positioning?’ and ‘What if I am unable to entry chat?’).
Fortuitously, WP Engine additionally affords 24/7 reside chat help. We tried this out and have been related to an agent in below a minute. They responded to our question shortly and intimately, have been capable of escalate our question once we requested one thing they did not know, and even then, we have been solely stored ready for a further couple of minutes. There is not any means for a single evaluate to evaluate how help will carry out in the long term, however WP Engine did all we may have requested in our assessments, and the expertise was a notable enchancment on a lot of the competitors.
Remaining verdict
WP Engine’s costs could appear excessive, however there is a good purpose – options just like the backups, replace service, staging, customized caching, built-in CDN and malware scanning are premium extras with many suppliers, if they’ve them in any respect. Should you want actual WordPress energy, give this outfit a strive.