[ad_1] WP Engine is one of the very first companies to start offering tailor-made hosting for WordPress websites. They’re also one of the most popular such services online today. In this WP Engine review, we tell you if their product is actually any good! Here’s what we’re going to cover: What WP Engine is and how it’s different from classic hosting 🤔 WP Engine is what we like to call “managed WordPress hosting.” Although there’s no rock-solid definition of the term, the way most people understand it is web hosting that either houses/allows only WordPress websites or is at least specially optimized to run WordPress websites. What those optimizations are in practice changes from company to company, and there’s no official list of features that a hosting platform needs to have in order to be allowed to call itself WordPress hosting. So that’s “WordPress hosting,” but what is “managed WordPress hosting?” The managed part means that the user doesn’t have to deal with any server-level tasks on their own but instead gets that handled by the hosting company itself. In simple terms, when you’re on managed hosting, your main responsibility is to take care of your website’s content and not worry about any technical aspects under the hood. What’s WP Engine’s part in all this? WP Engine is the most well-known WordPress hosting provider on the market. As of this writing, the company serves 150,000+ customers worldwide, and it’s also one of the best-reviewed hosting companies in the WordPress space. In a recent survey, users rated it at 8.69 / 10 overall (data). So, is WP Engine really that good? Let’s examine it up close in the next sections of this WP Engine review: WP Engine review: features and pricing ⚙️💵 You probably already know that WP Engine is not the cheapest host out there. I’m guessing that’s why you’re here – to see if the high price tag is worth it. With that, we want to highlight a couple of elements of the WP Engine pricing model that are easy to overlook. But let’s start from the top. Here are the main plans that you can choose from: As you can see, getting onto the WP Engine bandwagon is from $25 a month when paid annually (billed at $300 for the whole year). This is not a small amount, considering that you can get a setup that’s similar – on paper – for a third of this. However, there’s a lot that’s going on under the hood: Even if you go for the entry-level plan that allows just one website, you can still take full advantage of WP Engine’s multi-environment setup with a Production, Staging, and Development version of your site. You get access to 35+ premium WordPress themes by StudioPress, including the popular Genesis Framework. You also get built-in integration with Local – a tool for local WordPress development originally built by Flywheel (another host that WP Engine acquired). There are automatic updates for WordPress core. There’s a functional site migration solution available for free. There are some useful pro-level tools that we’ll talk about later on in this WP Engine review. Apart from that, the list of extras available across different price points with WP Engine is quite impressive. Even the entry-level plan gives you access to all of the following: PHP 7.4 support. Transferable sites – an option for developers to create websites for clients without making those websites count against the developer’s site limits. Evercache – a proprietary front-end cache by WP Engine. LargeFS – Large Files System to let you store and transfer large amounts of data. Global CDN provided to WP Engine by MaxCDN. Page Performance – performance analysis and improvement tool. Automated and manual backup features, plus one-click restore. Automated SSL certificates. SSH gateway – access to command-line tools for the pros. Git version control. On higher tiers, you also get perks such as 24/7 phone support, WordPress multisite, or even the option to include geographically customized content via WP Engine’s GeoTarget feature. In the end, while WP Engine is not the cheapest WordPress host on the market, it might just be the one that gives you the most bang for your buck – especially once you start doing the math on all the additional stuff you’d need to run your site. For instance, if you’ve been planning on using the Genesis Framework anyway (a popular option), plus you want access to staging sites for development, then WP Engine might just be the budget-conscious choice after all. How easy to use is WP Engine? 👐 Upon signing up and logging in to your account for the first time, you’ll be able to get a WordPress website spun up right away. There’s an Add site button in the top right corner. When you click it, it triggers a pop-up form that lets you install a new instance of WordPress in a really simplified manner (no need to deal with any database settings or anything like that): Right up front, it’s also quite apparent that WP Engine is a professional-level tool when it comes to WordPress hosting. For instance, you are encouraged to set up three environments for your site – Production, Staging, and Development – instead of just a single one. This helps greatly if you have a team of people working on the site and gradually rolling out changes. The idea is that you can work on building new elements of your site on Development, then roll them out to Staging for testing, and then move everything to Production for the world to see. WP Engine lets you create a new environment very easily just by clicking a single button and then providing some parameters of the environment. No matter if you’re creating your initial instance of Production or a new Staging environment, the process looks the same. You get to choose from a couple of options: As you can see in the image above, you can: create a fresh instance
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