Tag Archives: SiteGround

[ad_1] Trying to choose between WP Engine vs SiteGround to host your WordPress site? WP Engine and SiteGround are two of the bigger names in the WordPress hosting space and both offer quality hosting products. However, they do so at different price points and with slightly different features, so you’ll want to make sure you’re picking the right host for your situation. That’s what we’ll help you understand in this post – both hosts can be a good pick; it’s just about matching the right host to your needs and budget. Keep reading to learn whether SiteGround or WP Engine is better for you… WP Engine vs SiteGround Comparison Summary If you’re in a rush, here are the basic conclusions of our comparison: Taking price out of the equation, WP Engine is the overall best host out of these two. However, SiteGround is still a good bit cheaper than WP Engine (though some recent changes have made the gap smaller). Because of its lower prices (and still quality service), SiteGround is probably still the better option for most “regular” WordPress sites including low-traffic blogs, portfolio sites, brochure websites, etc. SiteGround is also better if you’re just launching your first WordPress site because you’ll get everything you need for a cheaper price. For “serious” websites like high-traffic blogs, eCommerce stores, or membership sites, then WP Engine is probably the better choice because it can better stand up to resource-heavy sites and offers useful features that SiteGround doesn’t. Detailed WP Engine vs SiteGround Comparison Now, let’s go more in-depth by comparing SiteGround vs WP Engine in five key areas: Customer satisfaction Features Performance Support Pricing 😊 Customer Satisfaction Let’s kick things off with a basic question – which host has more satisfied customers? When in doubt, the wisdom of the crowds is usually a pretty good starting point. To get a good understanding of how people feel about a host, we aggregated reviews from several different platforms/surveys including Trustpilot, WhoIsHostingThis, CodeinWP’s hosting survey, and Review Signal. We then averaged out the overall rating from each site (this data is current as of April 2021). The idea is to get an overall picture of how people feel about each host. Here’s the overall satisfaction for each host, standardized to a score of 100: Overall ⭐ CodeinWP WhoIsHosting Trustpilot Review Signal WP Engine 84 ⭐ 89 82 88 77 SiteGround 86 ⭐ 86 96 94 68 Overall, that’s pretty dang close, and you can see that customers are about equally as satisfied with WP Engine as they are with SiteGround. The scores are also pretty good in general, which shows that customers at both hosts are pretty happy. Interestingly, though, the scores are moving in opposite directions from when we first collected this data in early 2020. That is, WP Engine has improved from its older 75% while SiteGround has dropped a bit from its older 89% (perhaps because of its pricing changes). ⚙️ Features Now, let’s compare some key features in a table: Feature WP Engine SiteGround Custom hosting dashboard ✅ ✅ WordPress autoinstaller ✅ ✅ Automatic WordPress core updates ✅ ✅ Server-level caching ✅ ✅ Free SSL certificates ✅ ✅ Staging ✅ ✅ Email hosting ❌ ✅ Automatic daily backups ✅ ✅ On-demand backups ✅ ✅ Built-in CDN ✅ ❌ (has a Cloudflare integration) Free migrations ✅ ✅ Safe automatic plugin updates ✅ (higher-tier plans) ❌ Elasticsearch ✅ (eCommerce plans) ❌ Multisite support ✅ (higher-tier plans) ✅ Local development tool ✅ ❌ Pre-installed WP-CLI ✅ ✅ As you can see, the main “feature” advantage that SiteGround has over WP Engine is that SiteGround offers free and unlimited email hosting (e.g. create a you@yoursite.com email address). WP Engine does not offer email hosting, so you’d need to use a third-party service like Google Workspace or MXroute to add email hosting, which is a small added fee. Other than that, WP Engine is the winner in terms of advanced features because it has some useful options such as: A built-in CDN (SiteGround advertises a CDN, but it’s really just a Cloudflare integration). AI-powered safe plugin updates with automatic rollbacks. Elasticsearch, which is great for WooCommerce stores or other search-heavy sites. Multiple staging environments (Staging & Development). Easy local development and push to live hosting with Local. * Not all of these features are available on the entry-level WP Engine plan – more on pricing later. Additionally, one thing that I didn’t add above is that all WP Engine customers get free access to the Genesis Framework and all StudioPress child themes, which is a nice little bonus. 🏎️ Performance To assess a host’s performance, we like to rely on Review Signal’s performance benchmarks as they implement rigorous testing in several different areas. SiteGround is a regular participant in the benchmarks, but WP Engine has unfortunately not participated in the past couple of years. In the 2020 benchmarks, Siteground earned Top Tier status (the highest designation) in both the <$25 and $25-$50 per month tiers. WP Engine last participated in 2018 and only with its enterprise plan, but it also earned Top Tier status in the 2018 benchmarks. Anecdotally, I’ve also tested these hosts several times myself and found that SiteGround offers excellent performance for the money, but WP Engine holds up better in load test situations. Based on their prices, this is kind of what you’d expect. So I would sum it up like this: SiteGround offers good performance for its price and will be plenty fast for most “regular” WordPress sites. For example, low-traffic blogs, portfolio websites, simple brochure websites, etc…all of those will load fast on SiteGround and you won’t benefit that much from WP Engine. WP Engine is better for high-traffic and/or high-resource sites. For example, high-traffic blogs, eCommerce stores, membership sites, etc. 💬 Support Both WP Engine and SiteGround offer 24/7 support on all plans. For WP Engine, you can get support via: Live chat and ticket on all plans. Phone support on the Professional plan and above. SiteGround

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