WP Engine Review 2024: Premium Price, Budget Performance?
WP Engine is the industry leader in Managed WordPress hosting space. It comes with a premium price of $30/month and company claims to offer “Unrivaled speed” for its customers. But does their performance justify their premium pricing? After 24 months of continuous monitoring, our data reveals the following insights.
Key Finding from our Testing:
- 414 ms TTFB (Time to First Byte)
- 99.98% uptime with nearly two hours of downtime. Good uptime, but not exceptional for a premium host.
- Global TTFB of 650 ms across 40 locations.
WP Engine Review Summary
WP Engine excels in offering a great managed WordPress hosting experience packed with features and support but falls short on performance metrics. At $35/month, one can expect the best uptime. But WP Engine falls short with 99.98% uptime with nearly two hours of downtime in a year. Although, it falls within their Uptime SLA of (99.95%), the downtimes are not acceptable and not happening at the direct competitor like Kinsta. If you value developer features and customer support, WP Engine remains a solid choice. However, if you consider performance, Kinsta and Rocket should your choice.
WP Engine Pros
WP Engine Cons
Starts at $20/month
Our testing process: Just like any customer, we purchased WP Engine’s hosting plan with our own money. We installed a WordPress site and then we monitored its performance 24/7, 365 days a year. No sponsored or temporary accounts, just real world data from a real customer account.
- Hosting plan bought & tested: WP Engine Startup
- Test start date: September 1, 2020
- Test site setup: WordPress Twenty Twenty-Four theme + Essential plugins.
- View our hosting purchase invoice
WP Engine Performance
1. TTFB Speed Test
The WP Engine site recorded an average server response time of 414 ms in the last 12 months.
- October 2024 average TTFB: 504 ms
- September 2024 average TTFB: 479 ms
- August 2024 average TTFB: 481 ms
- July 2024 average TTFB: 491 ms
- June 2024 average TTFB: 467 ms
- May 2024 average TTFB: 457 ms
- April 2024 average TTFB: 471 ms
- March 2024 average TTFB: 454 ms
- February 2024 average TTFB: 499 ms
- January 2024 average TTFB: 474 ms
- December 2023 average TTFB: 465 ms
- November 2023 average TTFB: 450 ms
2. Uptime
The WP Engine site recorded an average uptime of 99.98%.
- October 2024 average uptime: 100%
- September 2024 average uptime: 99.97%
- August 2024 average uptime: 100%
- July 2024 average uptime: 99.96%
- June 2024 average uptime: 100%
- May 2024 average uptime: 100%
- April 2024 average uptime: 99.98%
- March 2024 average uptime: 100%
- February 2024 average uptime: 100%
- January 2024 average uptime: 100%
- December 2023 average uptime: 100%
- November 2023 average uptime: 99.99%
3. Load Testing
Our load testing on WP Engine consistently failed due to aggressive security measures. We spoke with their team and tried to disable the security for some time but it didn’t happen. The below graph shows how our test fails within first 10 seconds.
4. Core Web Vitals
The WP Engine recorded a ‘Largest Contentful Paint’ of 500 ms, a Total Blocking Time of 0 ms, and a ‘Cumulative Layout Shift’ of 0.07.’
5. Global TTFB
The WP Engine’s average Global TTFB measured from 40 locations is 650 ms. The test shows WP Engine offers good TTFB in America region. However, fails badly in Europe and Asia pacific region. If you have global audience, its good to avoid WP Engine.
WP Engine Plans and Pricing
WP Engine professional plan Best Values
- 75,000 monthly visits
- 15 GB storage
- 3 WordPress installs
WP Engine Features & Its Reviews
Support options: The startup plan ($30/month) includes chat support only, while all other plan offer both chat and phone support.
Availability: 24/7/365 days a year.
Average response time: Under 1 minute (Based on our recent customer interactions)
WP Engine CDN is powered by Cloudflare CDN. It comes with Edge Full Page cache, means it caches the HTML files across all their 330 CDN locations globally. By caching HTML files, the Time to First Byte (TTFB) will be improved to a great extent.
WP Engine is powered by Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Google Cloud is extensively used for pre-defined plans. AWS and Azure servers are available only to premium plans.
| Google Cloud | AWS | Azure |
|---|---|---|
| North America (Iowa, South Carolina, Oregon, Montreal) | North America (Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Montreal) | North America (Washington) |
| Europe (Belgium, London, Frankfurt, Netherlands, Finland) | Europe (Ireland, London, Frankfurt) | Europe (London, Netherlands) |
| Asia/Pacific (Taiwan, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore) | Asia/Pacific (Sydney, Singapore) | |
| Middle East (Tel Aviv) |
- WP Engine Uptime SLA: 99.95%
- SLA Credits: Get 5% credit of your monthly fee for each hour of downtime beyond the guaranteed uptime. Users should request credit within 30 days of the incident via customer support.
- WP Engine offers 60 days money back guarantee on all plans.
Most managed WordPress hosts limit refunds to 30 days, WP Engine stands out with 60 days trial period, the longest guarantee in the Managed WordPress hosting space.
- WP Engine offers Automatic and on-demand backups.
- Backup retention time: 40 days.
- Backup restore: Free.
WP Engine offers generous 40 days backup retention policy, highest in the industry. Most other Managed WordPress hosts limit backups just to 14 days. WP Engine’s 40-day backup windows gives you access to deeper backup history and more flexibility for site restoration.
- WP Engine offers unlimited site migration with their Site Migration plugin. The plugin is very simple to use even for beginners.
- One-click staging sites.
- Unlimited development sites for devleopers.
- Access to 30+ Premium StudioPress themes and Genesis Blocks.
- Proprietary EverCache Mechanism.
- Automated WordPress updates.
- DDoS Protection: Layer 3+4
- Free and Auto renewing SSL
- SOC-2 compliant
- ISO 27001-2013 certified
- Page Speed Boost
- Site Monitoring
- Smart Plugin Manager
- Global Edge Security
- Additional Sites
- Genesis Pro
Ask us about your hosting needs. We’ll match them to our performance data to find the best hosting for you.