WP Engine Review Summary

WP Engine is the most popular managed WordPress hosting service in the industry. We’ve been testing them over for more two years and found its performance is not adequate to compete with its competitors. Unlike their claim, WP Engine doesn’t offer a fastest TTFB and their uptime is not par, compared to their pricing. Apart from average performance, WP Engine has got a very good customer support team, powerful control panel with developer friendly features. Overall, if performance doesn’t matter to you, WP Engine is a good choice to get started.

Overall Rating:
4.8 / 5

WP Engine Pros

  • Power control panel.
  • Knowledgable customer support.
  • Average performance.
  • Industry leader in the segment, trusted by many MNCs.

WP Engine Cons

  • Doesn’t offer a real edge caching CDN.
  • Many essential features are offered as add-on.
  • Limited storage space.
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Starts at $20/month

WP Engine Plans and Pricing

Bottom Line
New item
 

Startup
Bottom Line
$24/month
New item
Single site hosting, 25k visits/month, 10GB Storage, 50GB Bandwidth
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Professional
Bottom Line
$48/month
New item
three sites hosting, 75k visits/month, 15GB Storage, 125GB Bandwidth
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Growth
Bottom Line
$92/month
New item
ten sites hosting, 100k visits/month, 20GB Storage, 200GB Bandwidth
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WP Engine Performance 

Server Response Time

The WP Engine site recorded an average server response time of 414 ms in the last 12 months.

Uptime

The WP Engine site recorded an uptime of 99.98%.

Load Testing

Due to the WP Engine security setup, our test got failed halfway.

WP Engine

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′

Global TTFB

The WP Engine Global TTFB measured from 40 locations is 650 ms.

WP Engine Features

1. Discounted Introductory Pricing

WP Engine provides discounted pricing on the first billing. One can save up to $580 in the first year through this discount.

Introductory Pricing

Most Managed WordPress hosting companies never offer deals on annual plans, so WP Engine has got an edge.

2. Knowledgable WordPress Customer Support

WP Engine offers 24/7 chat support on startup and Growth plans. The scale plan users include both chat and phone support.

WP Engine Support

Their WordPress experts at chat are well-trained and satisfactorily answered most of my questions. I asked all about their platform and features plans. There is no urgency among agents to close the chat and the average wait time is less than 3 minutes, although I usually get connected in less than a minute.

WP Engine claims more than 200 service experts are on schedule to handle support tasks, which is remarkable.

3. Easy Site Management

WP Engine dashboard gives you all site management features for your sites. The four major sections are Sites, Users, Tools, and Billing. 

WP Engine Portal

Under Sites, you can do site-specific functions like enabling CDN, accessing logs, adding redirect rules, FTP/SFTP, and site migration requests. You can create staging & development sites and access analytics data like traffic, storage, etc.

WP Engine Production Settings

The user is a hub to manage all users across your sites. You can invite new users to the WPEngine portal with full or partial control.

The Tools section is my favorite section, which is unique to WP Engine. Get access to StudioPress themes and Genesis Pro for free. The Page Performance runs Google PageSpeed insights on your behalf and provides you with speed optimization suggestions to improve your site.

4. Backups

WP Engine automated daily backups with options to create a manual backup when needed. You can also download either as full or partial backups. 

Backup Points

Restoring can be done in the same way available at a single click. You can either restore a directory or databases alone. 

5. Staging, Production, and Development sites

WP Engine offers three environments; Staging, production, and development.

Staging Sites

The production is where the live site is hosted. A staging option is a great way to test any new changes to sites or try new plugins or themes without conflicting with the production site. You can create a new staging site with a fresh WordPress install or take a copy of the production site and work on it.

The development environment helps to check those changes are working correctly before pushing them to staging for testing. 

6. Automated Migration

WP Engine WordPress plugin helps you to do automated migration. There is also a manual way, but the auto mode will be faster and super fun.

Site Migration

First, you need to download the plugin from the WordPress repository and fill it up with SFTP details. Now the site migration will start, and at the end, point your domain to WP Engine and SSL to go live in minutes.

WP Engine Review: Wrapping Up

WP Engine does a complete performance, features, and quality support package. WP Engine prices are not affordable for all websites. However, considering the performance combined with managed WordPress hosting experience, WP Engine offers an excellent monetary value.