1. Speed
Moving to WP Engine is going to speed up your website. When we switched from our old host to WP Engine, our website went from fully loading in over 5 seconds to under .1 seconds. The speed improvement not only improves the user experience, but also our organic search rankings as Google includes page load speed in their search algorithm.
There are two main reasons for the speed improvement. WP Engine’s exclusive EverCache Technology features a caching technology on their servers. EverCache helps load your pages up lightning fast. This also ends the need for caching plugins, such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. In fact, WP Engine will not allow you to have these plugins installed. Many WordPress users face increased load time due to a large number of plugins combined with unoptimized settings. Not configuring your caching plugins can actually hurt your load time. This is where WP Engine solves these issues so that you don’t need any caching plugins at all, and you let them worry about caching configurations that they have on their own servers instead of installed on your site which will not affect your load time at all.
If you’re facing increased load times, switching to WP Engine will solve your problems. You want to aim for under 2 seconds, and ideally under .25 seconds.
2. Security
If you have your website hosted at WP Engine, you don’t need to worry about security. It’s easy to make backups and restore points. Daily backups are made for you. They’ll also scan your website for malware and repair your site if anything happens.
Having your website hacked can be a nightmare, especially if you don’t have everything properly backed up. If this has happened to you, then you know what I mean. Switch to WP Engine and you won’t have to worry about security anymore.
3. Staging
Building development sites or just trying out different looks or features on your website is common with WordPress websites. WP Engine makes it very easy for you to setup a “staging” area which is separate from your live site where you can make updates. I used to do this on subdomains that I would have to set up separately. One great benefit over the subdomain solution is that with WP Engine there is a one-click publish to the live site. That’s something you just can’t do with subdomains. This is a great way to try out new themes.
4. Price
For the price, you really can’t beat everything you’re getting. Pricing starts at $29 per month for one site, but for 10 sites it’s $99 per month. The latter option also comes with a Content Delivery Network option. It’s more expensive then most basic shared hosting plans, but it’s much less than most VPS plans, making putting it right in between both prices. The difference is in the quality and the results – you’re not going to get this sort of performance for a WordPress website anywhere else.
5. Support
Every time I’ve called WP Engine on the phone I’ve spoken with friendly, professional, knowledgeable people. I’m never on hold for too long (if at all) and my problems are always solved.
Online chat and e-mail support is also available. These come in handy when phone support is not available after-hours. Both of these options offer fast and effective support, although I still personally perfer speaking to human beings over the phone.
It’s for these reasons we use WP Engine to host all of our WordPress websites.
