WP Engine specializes in managed WordPress hosting. They have a large customer list, including AMD, National Geographic, Dropbox, SoundCloud, HelloFresh, Texas A&M, and more. Overall, WP Engine is suited to people looking for hassle-free premium WordPress hosting. Read our expert WP Engine review to see if they are the right choice for you.
This will be a detailed WP Engine review, which will take an in-depth look at their services. If you don’t want to read all of it, here is a quick summary of our WP Engine review score.
| WP Engine Review Summary | |
|---|---|
| Performance grade | A+ |
| Average load time | 656 ms |
| Average response time | 123 ms |
| Free domain | No |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| 1-click WordPress | Yes |
| Support | Phone / Live Chat / Knowledge base |
| Start with WP Engine | |
Bottom line: In our WP Engine hosting review, we found them to be a reliable and balanced managed WordPress hosting provider. They offer an optimized platform with fast servers, security, and peace of mind that users need from a managed WordPress host.
That said, let’s get into the details and examine how we reached this conclusion.
About WP Engine
Founded in 2010, WP Engine is now one of the leading managed WordPress hosting companies. Serial entrepreneur Jason Cohen started WP Engine when he saw a need for specialized WordPress hosting due to its rising popularity.
WP Engine is Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices in San Antonio (Texas), London (England), Limerick (Ireland), Brisbane (Australia), and Kraków (Poland).
Plus, the company has won multiple Best Place to Work in Austin awards.
WP Engine Hosting Plans
WP Engine only offers managed WordPress hosting. Their managed WordPress plans have the following hosting options:
- Managed WordPress hosting – Fully managed hosting environment suitable for small businesses and blogs
- Managed WooCommerce Hosting – WooCommerce hosting with powerful store search, eCommerce templates, and more
- Secure Hosting – Additional security layers with website firewall and DDoS protection
- Custom Solutions (Enterprise Hosting) – Premium plan for enterprise customers with dedicated resources, white-glove onboarding, advanced security, and more.
Customers can choose a plan level based on the number of websites, bandwidth, disk space, and other resources they use.
WP Engine plans differ based on:
- The number of WordPress installs
- Traffic volume (Monthly visitors or number of visits per month)
- Disk storage amount
- Bandwidth requirement
Each WP Engine plan has set limits on the number of visits your hosting account can get. If your account exceeds those limits, you may be charged overage pricing for extra visits.
WP Engine includes some unique features for WordPress users that most hosts don’t offer or charge extra for. These special features include:
- Git version control
- Staging environment to instantly staging sites for testing
- Easy transferable WordPress installation from free to paid accounts
- Free SSL certificates and SSH access
- Cuttin-edge technologies, including the latest PHP version
Our review found that WP Engine offers the most advanced and comprehensive managed WordPress hosting features.
Advanced Security Features
WP Engine also offers several premium security features. The WordPress core is automatically updated to the latest version.
WP Engine thoroughly tests any major core updates before upgrading their customers. They have a proprietary intrusion detection and prevention system to block any DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, malware, JavaScript/SQL injection attacks, and more.
They also partner with third-party security firms to conduct regular code reviews and security audits.
Your security is guaranteed, so if you get hacked, WP Engine will fix it for free.
Customer Support and Service
WP Engine has a dedicated support team of WordPress experts. They boast over 97% customer satisfaction with thousands of customer interactions daily.
Support is available 24/7 via live chat for all customers and 24/7 via phone for all plans except the ‘Startup’ plan. If an issue can’t be immediately resolved via chat or phone, the support staff will create an internal support ticket for you.
Enterprise customers get access to 24/7 ticket support via email. Premium and Enterprise customers receive a consultative one-on-one onboarding experience as well.
WP Engine also has a dedicated Customer Experience Operations team that works to improve the customer experience continually.
In addition, they have an extensive library of knowledge-based articles, how-to guides, and tutorials for users who want to fix things themselves.
CDN for Even Faster Loading
WP Engine offers a CDN (content delivery network) using Cloudflare’s Edge Network. This innovative cloud network has a global network of servers.
With low latency, blazin-fast speed, and built-in security, this CDN network ensures your website performs well regardless of where your customers come from.
36+ Premium WordPress Themes
WP Engine acquired the popular premium WordPress theme company StudioPress.
Now, all premium StudioPress themes and the famous Genesis framework are available to all WP Engine customers for free.
All StudioPress themes have their code base optimized for faster page load times without compromising functionality.
Yes, you get all these great-looking and well-coded themes at no additional cost—that’s over $2000 in additional value for free!
Money-Back Guarantee
WP Engine offers a generous 60-day money-back guarantee. If you’re not happy with their service, you can cancel your account within the first 60 days and receive a full refund.
The guarantee only applies to annual billing plans.
Pros and Cons of WP Engine
WP Engine is a popular web hosting company, but it may not be right for everyone. Before choosing a plan, consider these pros and cons.
Pros of Choosing WP Engine
- Security – WP Engine protects your site with many advanced features that other hosts don’t offer.
- Fast Loading Times – WP Engine’s Evercache technology optimizes servers for WordPress, ensuring that your website loads quickly. Plus, you get access to a CDN, which further boosts performance.
- Reliability – WP Engine’s proprietary front-end layer system can handle traffic spikes easily without slowing down your site.
- WordPress Expert Support – WP Engine’s support staff is made up of trained WordPress experts.
- Rave Reviews – WP Engine is an incredibly popular host with great reviews from many customers for its reliability and excellent customer service.
Cons of choosing WP Engine
- Disallowed Plugins – WP Engine does not allow you to install certain WordPress plugins on your site, either because they conflict with or duplicate WP Engine’s features or cause a high server load. This includes many caching, backup, related post plugins, and others. You can see the full list of disallowed plugins here.
- No Domain Registrations – WP Engine offers only hosting services, not domain name registrations. This means you’ll have to register your domains with another company, which some users may find inconvenient.
- Higher Costs – When compared to shared hosting, WP Engine is more expensive, but the services it offers are well worth the investment.
WP Engine Performance Tests
WPBeginner users trust our reviews because we only recommend products and services that we have used ourselves. We go and sign up for each top WordPress hosting company to thoroughly test their claims with our own industry-standard tests.
For this review, we created a WordPress website on WP Engine. Using the default theme, we filled the website with dummy data, including media and images. This way, our test site looked and behaved like an actual average WordPress site.
WP Engine Speed Test Results
After setting up our test site, we first ran the speed test. Using the Pingdom tool, we tested our sample site on WP Engine servers.
Here are the results:
Our test site loaded in less than a second. This result is quite good, considering that we didn’t need to install any performance optimization.
WP Engine Stress Test
Next, we wanted to check how WP Engine servers respond under peak traffic. To measure this, we used a tool called K6 by Grafana Labs. We gradually built up to 50 unique visitors to see how the server would handle increased requests from multiple connections at once.
Here are the results:
The light green line represents response time, and the gray line represents the number of users on the site. As you can see, our test site performed well with minor spikes. It maintained an incredible response rate throughout the test.
The uptime remained steady, with no downtime recorded during the stress test.
WP Engine Server Response Time
Next, we tested the server response time from different geographic regions using a tool called Bitcatcha.
Here are WP Engine’s server response time results:
As you can see in the screenshot, the WP Engine server response time remained less than half a second for all geographic locations. It was particularly significant in the United States.
Is WP Engine Right for You?
Now that you have read our entire WP Engine review and examined the performance scores, you might be wondering whether WP Engine is the right web host for you.
After reviewing WP Engine’s services in detail, we found that they offer a balanced approach to performance, security, and features.
WP Engine is an ideal choice if you’re looking for a completely hassle-free web host for your WordPress site.
It is suitable for beginners, bloggers, and businesses that need faster servers and optimal performance.
Developers and freelancers will find that WP Engine’s advanced features save them time when developing WordPress websites for clients.
And growing businesses will find plenty of room to scale up their hosting as their traffic increases.
Ready to get started with WP Engine? Click here to select your WP Engine plan today.
WP Engine Coupon
WPBeginner users get an exclusive 20% discount on their first three months with our WP Engine coupon code: WPBEGINNER20
Additionally, you will also get two months free, which effectively gives you a 40% discount on the annual plan.
All you have to do is click on this link to purchase. The WP Engine discount will be auto-applied.
Frequently Asked Questions About WP Engine
We have been answering reader’s questions about WordPress hosting services for a long time. Here are some of the most often-asked questions about WP Engine that we hear from our users.
1. Is WP Engine a shared hosting company?
No, WP Engine is not a shared hosting company, and they do not offer services similar to shared hosting plans. WP Engine is a managed WordPress hosting company offering WordPress-specific hosting solutions.
2. What is managed WordPress hosting?
Managed WordPress hosting is like the concierge service for your WordPress website. WordPress is a powerful content management system and website builder. Managed hosting companies offer an optimized solution where they take care of updates, security, backups, caching, and more. This leaves you with time that you can then spend on growing your business.
Managed WordPress hosting is slightly more expensive than shared hosting plans.
3. Is WP Engine worth your money?
Yes, WP Engine is worth your money. Especially if your business has outgrown the limitations of shared hosting services and shared VPS plans, then WP Engine is the best scalable upgrade option.
It allows you to easily manage updates and security and scale your website as your business grows.
4. Why is WP Engine so expensive?
WP Engine is more expensive than shared hosting plans because it offers premium performance, advanced security, and expert support. These features cost money but improve customers’ experiences.
5. Where are WP Engine servers located?
WP Engine uses Google Cloud servers and Amazon Web Servers as their data centers. This allows you to select data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific.
6. How does WP Engine compare to other hosts?
We are often asked about how WP Engine compares to other best WordPress hosting companies.
When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, WP Engine has a slight edge over competitors like Kinsta, Flywheel, and other options, mainly due to better technology, user experience, and customer support.
WP Engine pricing is more expensive than shared hosting providers like Bluehost, Hostinger, HostGator, GoDaddy, InMotion Hosting, DreamHost, and SiteGround.
For more information, see our detailed comparison of SiteGround vs. Bluehost vs. WP Engine.
6. Does WP Engine support WordPress multisite?
WP Engine supports WordPress multisite as a paid add-on for Growth and Scale plans but does not support it for Startup plans. It is also included in ‘Custom’ plans for agencies and enterprise clients.
7. Can I cancel WP Engine hosting and get a refund?
You can cancel your WP Engine hosting service at any time from your account dashboard/user portal.
They offer a full refund during the first 60 days of hosting for users with pre-paid annual pricing.
8. Which WP Engine hosting plan is right for me?
If you are hosting a single website, you can sign up for their Startup plan. However, if you have a busier website or need to manage multiple installations, you can choose the Growth or Scale plans.
WP Engine is offering a 20% discount to WPBeginner users. Click here to start with WP Engine.
