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WP Engine for WordPress – specific features

If you want to ensure that your website is optimized, secure, and fast-loading – without doing a lot of work yourself – managed hosting is an option worth considering. When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, WP Engine is one of the top names.

Its service offers quite a few WordPress-specific features, including:

• Quick and easy migrations from your old host.

• A free Secure Socket Layers (SSL) certificate, which is an important security measure.

• Support for setting up staging sites.

• Plenty of performance tracking and diagnostic options.

Support options

WP Engine plans come with plenty of support included. You’ll get 24/7 access to dedicated help, whether that’s via phone, email, or live chat. Support options are easy to access right from your user portal, once you’ve signed up.

We took a test drive of the live chat to get a feel for the support staff:

Agents were quick to respond, helpful, and seemed knowledgeable about the platform. They were able to answer our questions without any trouble. For even more assistance and information, there’s also a resource center and a comprehensive knowledge base with lots of well-written documentation and tutorials.

Performance

Features and support are important, but performance is what makes or breaks a web host. Fortunately, WP Engine offers plenty of performance-enhancing features, such as:

• A free Content Delivery Network (CDN) service, included on all plans.

• A Page Performance solution that tests your site and helps you make improvements.

• An add-on called GeoTarget that optimizes your site for specific regions.

What’s more, WP Engine offers a lot of server locations. We won’t list them all out (there are 19), but they include data centers in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

All of this should translate to excellent real-world performance. Let’s see if that’s the case!

Page speed tests with Pingdom

For the next phase of our WP Engine Review for WordPress, we set up a basic site and tested its loading speeds using Pingdom Tools from various locations around the world. Here are our results:

• New York: 1.61 seconds

• Melbourne: 1.67 seconds

• San Jose: 0.39 seconds

• Stockholm: 1.60 seconds

These are remarkably consistent times (with the exception of San Jose, which is the clear stand-out). 1.6 seconds isn’t particularly impressive, but it’s a decent speed that remains below the all-important two-second mark.

Page speed tests with Load Impact

It’s always smart to test performance using multiple tools. So we also used Load Impact to simulate the effects of multiple simultaneous users on our WP Engine site. Here’s what we got:

• Load Generator: Ashburn, USA

• Test Server: Ann Arbor, USA

• Minimum Response Time: 0.51 seconds

• Maximum Response Time: 0.59 seconds

Basically, this chart shows that as the number of visitors increases (blue line), our test site’s page load times remained consistent (green line). That’s a good thing because it means your site will load just quickly for the 1st visitor as it will for the 50th person visiting at the same time.

Pricing

While WP Engine only offers one type of service – its managed WordPress hosting – it also provides a number of tiered plans to choose from. These plans differ dramatically in how many resources they offer and the number of sites they cater for, which means you’re getting a very scalable service.

Let’s run through each of the WP Engine plans quickly:

• Startup ($20 per month): With this entry-level tier, you get support for up to 25,000 visits per month, one website, 10GB of storage, and 50GB of bandwidth. You’ll also get an SSL certificate, access to a global CDN, and a few other key features.

• Professional ($39.33 per month): This plan allows you to set up three sites, and welcome up to 75,000 visitors a month. You also get 15 GB of storage.

• Growth ($76.67 per month): This plan increases your traffic support to 100,000 and provides you with ten sites. In addition to more resources, you get access to 24/7 phone support and can import your own SSL certificates.

• Scale ($193.33 per month): This tier is largely identical to the last. It simply provides even more resources, bumps your site count up to 30, and supports up to 400,000 visits per month.

• Premium and Enterprise: These are custom plans, so pricing will vary. They provide lots of additional resources and support, and move your hosting up from a shared setup to dedicated servers.

These plans aren’t cheap, but they do provide plenty of features and lots of room for your site to grow. If you’re looking to build one or more serious business or e-commerce sites, this service is worth a look.