WPEngine or WordPress Engine is a web hosting service for WordPress users. It’s been around for a long time. And to no surprise, when searching online for reviews, you will likely see a lot of people telling you the good and bad of the service.
It can be difficult to know what to believe when reading those reviews because every article seems so one sided. Some people are all for it, while others tell you to run the other way. That’s why I will provide you a detailed review of WPEngine; it will give you a balanced view of the advantages and disadvantages, so you can make an informed decision about using this business for your hosting service.
What’s So Great about WPEngine?
WPEngine is known for increasing the speed of websites. I can personally attest to this for one of my own sites. Recently, I read about a user who reported he was able to increase the speed of his site by 2.04 seconds. He was thrilled about this because he was never able to get the speed down to 1.45 with his previous hosting service.
Besides the server the site is on, WPEngine also has some internal assessment tools to catch issues that may be slowing down a site such as broken links. For example, users receive emails alerting them to broken links and warning them if they don’t correct them, the links would be automatically removed. When users delete the broken links, they receive an email thanking them for their work in making their site faster.
Site speed is important because Google knows Internet users want to be on sites that are fast. The faster a site can give them information the happier they will be. You can move up in ranking significantly when your site is as fast as possible.
No downtime is important to webmasters because it can affects traffic numbers. WPEngine does a good job in preventing downtime.
Many features are included in a WPEngine membership, but one that many people rave about is the staging area. This staging area allows you to test out changes to your site before making it live. This prevents visitors from seeing mistakes. It also keeps your site from crashing or going down because of an error in coding. Once the site has been changed to your satisfaction, pushing the changes to the site is as easy as clicking on a button. The system will take care of the rest.
Customer support is good with WPEngine. The fastest response comes from the chat on the site. You can also submit a ticket, but that takes about 24 hours for a response. Fortunately, when you do get a response the representatives seem knowledgable and willing to help solve your problems.
Automatic backups make many people happy. In case anything happens to your site, you can easily restore it with one of the backups. There’s also automatic backups when WordPress updates. This impresses a lot of people because they don’t need to do anything at all.
The Not So Great Things about WPEngine
The #1 complaint about WPEngine is the price. While pricing changes, the lowest priced plan at the time of this article is $29 per month. This is much more than what you’ll pay for most hosting plans. It’s also a limited plan. When you want something to handle more than one site and include more features (like a multisite), you’ll need to pay $99 per month. There’s also two other plans that are best for small to large businesses.
Besides price, many people say that you shouldn’t trust the company. These people found out that the company was inserting links in the footer of sites hosted with them. This would create a backlink to them. When the number of backlinks was a ranking factor, this helped them greatly. However, when Google decided to crack down on negative link building, many people found their sites were being penalized and they didn’t know why, until they learned of this unauthorized WPEngine link. Many people dropped their hosting service with WPEngine because of this and have been telling others not to give them business.
Migrating a site to WPEngine is not something everyone can do, so you may need to seek a third party for help with this process. This can tack on another few hundred dollars in addition to the upfront cost of WPEngine. This can make a lot of people upset, seeing as they already have to pay more for hosting with WPEngine.
WPEngine is a web hosting service specifically designed for WordPress sites. Due to this specialization, they do have many perks you can’t find with other services. When deciding if you should pay the extra money for this specialized WP hosting service, consider how much more money you’ll earn using a hosting service that will make your WordPress site faster. If you can make up the money you’re spending on the service by bringing in more online revenue, it’s worth it to use WPEngine.
How about you? Have you used WPEngine? Let us know what you think!
