WP Engine Review (2017)

Last Updated on November 7, 2017 by Vairo Kremanis

About WP Engine

WP Engine is a premium WordPress web hosting company that promises to help you ‘Build faster,’ though it is also said to help you ‘protect your brand and grow your business.’ On their official company website, they claim to provide best-in-class customer service, innovation-driven technology, and ‘the best in managed WordPress hosting.’

If you have been looking for a premium-grade WordPress site host, then you have likely come across WP Engine in your search. The main idea and selling point behind this company seems to be their size and claim-to-fame as a major player in premium WP site hosting. They claim that 5% of the online world visits at least one site hosted on WP Engine every day, that 500,000 digital experiences are powered by WP Engine, and that over 2 million attacks on WordPress site owners are blocked by the company every day.

Hosting Plans & Pricing

We all know that pricing plays a pretty major role in our choice of a hosting service – so naturally, we took a pretty close look at the hosting services offered by WP Engine.

Here’s what you need to know.

Plan Options…

Personal Plan

If you just want to run one site, then this may be the perfect plan for you. It is said to work best for creative people, marketers, and developers who want to make use of WP Engine’s core services that they offer with every package. This package offers…

• 1 Install
• 25 thousand visits/month
• 10GB of local storage
• Free SSL certificates

The pricing for this plan is $29/Month.

Professional Plan

This plan is said to provide greater flexibility, and will work best if you are managing one site with steady traffic, or numerous smaller sites. This one basically takes the basic plan and adds some better, extra features. It offers…

• Up to 10 installs
• 100,000 visits/month
• 20GB of local storage
• Free SSL certificates

Pricing for this plan is $99/Month.

Business Plan

If business is your passion and you need to be able to handle higher rates of traffic, then this package may be for you. It even offers cutting-edge technology, like GeoIP. But, it still offers hosting services at a price that even smaller businesses could afford. It offers…

• Up to 25 installs
• 400,000 visits/month
• 30GB of local storage
• Free SSL certificates

Pricing for this plan is $249/month.

Premium Plan

You will need to call them or get in touch for pricing on this plan, but it is basically designed for brands that are growing their sites and require absolute, optimal performance. This plan combines the power of a single, dedicated server with the WP Engine customer service and innovations that can really help you to take your site to the next level. It offers…

• High Performance
• A dedicated architecture
• Faster support response for questions and queries
• Managed onboarding
• And much more

Enterprise Grade Plan

This plan will also require you to contact the company for pricing information… but it comes with the best features that WP Engine has to offer. This plan is intended for high traffic sites with critical missions, and provides what they call the ‘ultimate in WP engine performance, scalability and uptime.’ It offers…

• The fastest support of any plan offered by WP Engine
• The highest uptime of any plan offered by WP Engine
• Dedicated account management
• Redundant data centers
• And much more

About The Company

Main Differences When Compared With The Competition

So, how exactly does WP Engine differ from their competition?

This is an excellent question, and we did quite a bit of digging to find the most relevant answers. Here is what we learned from our research.

First of all, you will be happy to learn that WP Engine does a good job of making their services user-friendly, even for first-time WordPress users. WP Engine also shines where site uptime is concerned. They are said to have multiple server locations throughout the US, Europe, and Asia, and are said to use top-of-the-line hardware. This helps them to guarantee 99.9% uptime, and the claims do not generally seem to be exaggerated!

But where WP Engine starts to pull away and ahead of the competition is where they offer a truly worry-free experience for the user. Their packages are managed, so you won’t need to bother with the mundane details of managing a server, optimizing performance, etc.

WP Engine also offers better security than most of their competitors, and also offers slightly better speed… which is awesome.

And, of course, let’s not forget that they offer a 60 day money back guarantee, which blows the industry standard (30 days) out of the water.

Our Thoughts About WP Engine

Our thoughts about WP Engine, after conducting our research, could be summarized like this.

First of all, we like it. What isn’t to like? They offer premium-level services at prices that even smaller companies could afford. Their ability to offer truly competitive, premium-level WordPress hosting is basically unparalleled, and they give you a lot for your money.

They also offer fast speeds and fantastic security features. There is little doubt that you are getting what you pay for with WP Engine, and this is a major upside.

So what are the downsides?

Well, mainly the price. WP Engine offers ‘affordable’ pricing, but it isn’t ‘cheap.’

Granted, you are getting quality for your money, but you do have to pay for it – and this might make the service more difficult to use for much smaller startups that don’t have a ton of disposable capital to spend on hosting every month if their site usage starts to pick up.

What Do Others Say About WP Engine?

We did some looking online, and found that most reviewers and users alike seem to basically agree with us. We did learn that some users seem to find that WP Engine’s hosting services are a bit more limited in a versatility-sense than they could be, but this also seems a bit understandable.

Every hosting company makes rules that govern how they manage the sites hosted on their servers, but WP Engine does, admittedly, go a bit above and beyond in this sense. They have more strict rules about plugins, and about what can and cannot be included in your install. They also ban some specific admin behaviors which could make usage less uniform.

Obviously there are pros and cons to this… but it is something that we noticed got some attention from users.

We also noticed that there is a growing collection of negative reviews about the service. We looked into them, and recorded some of our thoughts in the ‘scam sites’ section of this review below.

Has WP Engine Been Reported To Scam Sites?

Actually, there are a few reports of WP Engine being a scam… but not in the way that you might expect. I have read a few reviews that said that WP Engine started out really awesome back in the beginning, but that as the company has become larger, it has become less efficient. These reviews seem to suggest that customer service is not quite as good as it used to be, and they also complain about some other issues.

You can read the most detailed negative review that we found here. It did a pretty good job of outlining problems that have been experienced by some users.

The Main FAQs About WP Engine

WPWarfare.com Verdict & Stamp of Approval

Do we believe that WP Engine deserves our stamp of approval?

In a word, yes. They offer a quality, premium-grade service and are certainly a big-time player in the WordPress hosting game right now, and have been for the past several years.

They are not without their faults, but they do offer a 60 day money back guarantee – and 24/7 support is also a very attractive feature that makes us a fan.