WP Engine Web Hosting Review

Getting started with WordPress is easy. Most web hosting services offer simple one-click installations, and some also provide more capable managed WordPress plans. But although every provider claims great WordPress expertise, these plans are usually just a tiny part of the overall product range, and there’s no way to tell how much experience of the platform a host might really have.

WP Engine is a provider of managed WordPress hosting — and nothing else. There are no e-commerce plans, VPS, dedicated servers or anything else to get in the way, just a single-minded focus on delivering and managing the best possible WordPress service. And the results look impressive, with the company trampling over the competition in just about every area.

All hosts claim their WordPress plans are optimized for speed, for instance, but typically that just means installing a few standard tools (NGINX, Varnish) and tweaking a handful of settings. WP Engine has its own custom EverCache system, HTTP/2 and PHP 7 support, a free CDN and a choice of data centers in North America, Europe and Asia.

Your site isn’t hosted on some cheap and underpowered VPS, either. WP Engine is now using Google Cloud Platform interfaces in many zones, and the company claims these are 40% faster than Google’s previous instances. (We’re not going to try to assess that, but it’s good to have transparency about the hosting infrastructure.)

An auto-migration plugin helps to import you existing site, or you might build something new with help from 36 bundled premium WordPress themes.

WP Engine does its best to keep the service running smoothly, automatically installing major WordPress updates and testing minor ones before recommending them. There’s built-in malware detection and blocking, and help removing anything that might get through. Even if all that fails, you can still fall back on the automated daily backup (typically a premium extra elsewhere).

To learn more about WP Engine, check out the full WP Engine Review.