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My Honest WPengine Review
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Run my audit →WP Engine is managed hosting built solely for WordPress, tuned for people who already have a WordPress site and are ready to scale, not absolute beginners. WordPress runs roughly 27 to 28 percent of all websites, and the Austin, Texas company specializes only in it so it can optimize servers, security, and support around that one platform. Beginners are usually better served by a simpler host like Bluehost first, then moving to WP Engine once traffic grows and managed performance becomes worth paying for.
Today I want to tell you about WPengine. I will try to keep this review short, but I also want to give you all the information you need to decide WPengine is for you.
You don’t need it when you’re just starting. It’s really not mandatory.
You could actually sign up to WPengine as a beginner so that you don’t have to change later down the road once you are more advanced.
But, again, it’s really not mandatory. WPengine is for people who already have a Website. Let’s say you have previously hosted your website on a site like Bluehost and you are ready to scale.
If you are a beginner and you are reading this, I highly recommend you check out my review of Bluehost that might be more adapted to you.
If your site is built on WordPress then WPengine is a no brainer. Reason being that WPengine is solely dedicated to WordPress and nothing else.
They decided to focus solely on WordPress because it accounts for about 27 or 28 percent of all the websites out there.
They’re based in Austin Texas and one of the founders of WPengine helped found the Websites as big like BBC. Right.
If you want to give an amazing experience to your visitors, which I’m pretty sure you do, then WPengine is what you are looking for.
It provides speed and user-friendliness to your Website.
WPengine is a dedicated service. I will explain the difference between a dedicated service and a shared service.
What this means for you in simple terms is that:
- Your website will be way faster
- Your website will perform way better than 99% of the websites out there.
Just to give you a comparison between dedicated and shared service:
- So let’s say you’re on a plane…
- In coach, you have to share the space with other people.
- In first-class every single person there as their own cabin. And they have an amazing experience.
The same analogy can be done for hosting providers:
If you want to step up your game, you are going to start flying first class and this is WPengine. If you’re running WordPress you could be flying first class for like 30 bucks a month. If you ask me, that’s a good price.
On a shared hosting, you’re basically sharing resources with other Web sites.
And when I say other Websites, it could be between 5000 to 80 000 other Websites. OK.
Now, if you want to have your own dedicated server, you’re the only one using that specific server.
So just imagine the difference in performance between sharing the space with a thousand people and being on your own. All right. It’s not a fair comparison.
Shared hosting focuses on giving you the best price possible.
A dedicated server, on the other end, will be solely focused on giving you the best quality and the best performance possible. This basically translates to being a bit more expensive.
If you’re serious about your business this is something you can invest in. You should invest to get to the next level. And again, you can start with like 30 bucks a month…
The industry average for page load is usually nine to 10 seconds!
Frankly, nobody likes to wait 10 seconds before they see a page load.
Just imagine you’re on the phone, after three seconds you’re gone.
On WPengine, the average is 2.5 and 3 seconds to load the page.
Just to give you an example of a Website that everybody knows…CNN for example that will load in close to 24 seconds.
The way WPengine is able to give your website that much speed is by using something called CDN.
Your Web site is replicated on eighteen or twenty-five different locations around the planet. So each user gets the website from the closest location to their home and hence the website is super-fast.
Moving my websites to such an infrastructure made a big difference..
Here are the advantages of WPengine.
- First thing I’ll say is it’s easy to transfer your site. They will do that for you
- Another major advantage is performance! Again as I was saying it’s super-fast. It’s replicated all over the Internet for maximum speed.
- They are really good in terms of security. It’s I mean it’s just mind-blowing! I have never been hacked or anything with any website that I’ve hosted there.
- Every WordPress security update is automatically installed on your environment within 24 hours of its release. you don’t have to go and do anything technical and you always have the most secure version of WordPress on your server.
- They give you a free SSL certificate.
- Support is absolutely awesome and available all the time. They answer super-fast
- They have a list of the very best WordPress plugins that you can setup. If you don’t have the time to do it. They do it for you. They will test all the plugins and make sure that they work well.
- You have a 60-day risk-free guarantee that I’ve seen here somewhere.
So I really recommend using WPengine.
Hopefully this WPengine review brought you some value.
Below is my personal link.
Please click on this link if you’re interested and you can sign up to one of their packages.
Again, as usual, I don’t want you to spend more than necessary. If you have a website that has 10k visits per month just go with the first package.
I’m not going to ask you to go and buy the three hundred dollars a month package when you don’t need it.
Click Here To Start Your 60 Risk-Free Trial of WPengine
What This Review Got Right, and What Has Changed Since
This review is old. I am leaving the original text exactly as written, because the reasoning
still holds and I would rather you see what I said then than a quietly edited version. But three
things have moved, and one of them changes the recommendation.
First, the market share number above is out of date. I wrote that WordPress accounted for 27 or
28 percent of websites. It is above 40 percent now. That does not weaken the argument for
WordPress specialist hosting, it strengthens it, because the attack surface grew with the share.
Second, the price. The 30 dollars a month I quoted was the entry plan of its day. WP Engine’s
managed plans start higher now and scale by visits and sites rather than by a flat box. Check the
current page before you budget, and check what happens when you exceed your visit allowance,
because overage is where managed hosting bills surprise people.
Third, and this is the real change: the gap between good shared hosting and managed hosting
narrowed. Shared hosts added object caching, PHP 8, free CDN and automatic backups. The first
class analogy above still describes the difference in kind, but the seat in coach got noticeably
better between then and now. If you are on a modern shared host and your site loads in under two
seconds, the case for moving is weaker than this review implies.
What has not changed at all: if your site earns money, hosting is the wrong place to save 20
dollars a month.
The Only Hosting Number That Actually Decides This
| Load time | B2B conversion | Ecommerce conversion | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 second | Baseline, best measured | Baseline, best measured | Target zone |
| 5 seconds | 3x fewer conversions than 1s | 2.5x fewer than 1s | Losing real money |
| 10 seconds | 5x fewer conversions than 1s | Not reported | Effectively broken |
| Average desktop 2.5s | Inside the 0 to 4s band | Inside the band | Acceptable |
| Average mobile 8.6s | Outside the band | Outside the band | Where most sites lose |
Every hosting review, including my original one above, argues about speed in the abstract. Here
is the version with money attached, which is the only version worth reading.
HubSpot’s breakdown of
page load time against conversion rates puts the numbers plainly. A B2B site that
loads in one second converts three times as many visitors as a site that loads in five seconds,
and five times as many as one that takes ten. For consumer ecommerce the one second site converts
two and a half times better than the five second site. The stated sweet spot is zero to four
seconds. Average desktop load sits at 2.5 seconds and average mobile at 8.6, and pages load 70.9
percent slower on mobile than desktop.
Then there is the case study that settles the argument. Vodafone improved its load performance
by 31 percent and measured an 8 percent increase in sales, a 15 percent improvement in
lead to visit rate, and 11 percent on cart to visit. That is a real company measuring real revenue
against a page speed change.
Now do your own arithmetic before you buy anything. Take your monthly revenue from the site.
If it is 2,000 dollars and better hosting moves your conversion rate by even 10 percent, that is
200 dollars a month against a hosting difference of maybe 50. Buy it without thinking. If your
site earns nothing yet, the same 50 dollars a month is 600 a year spent making a page that nobody
visits load faster. Do not buy it. Go and get the first visitors.
That is the honest split, and it is the one most hosting reviews avoid because there is no
affiliate commission in telling somebody to stay where they are.
One warning about the mobile figure, because it is the one people misread. If your pages load
70.9 percent slower on mobile and most of your traffic is mobile, your hosting upgrade may be
solving the wrong problem entirely. Uncompressed images and a bloated theme cost more seconds than
a server ever will. Test on a phone on mobile data before you blame the host.
Who Should Actually Pay for Managed WordPress Hosting
Skip this section if your site is a hobby. This is for people whose site is part of how they
get paid.
Buy managed hosting when three things are true at once. Your site generates revenue or leads
you can put a number on. You do not want to be the person applying security patches at eleven at
night. And an hour of your time is worth more than the price difference, which for most people
running a business it comfortably is.
Do not buy it when you are pre revenue, when your traffic is under a few thousand visits a
month, or when you are still changing your mind about what the site is. I have watched people
spend 12 months paying for hosting built for scale while serving 40 visitors a week. That money
belonged in traffic, not infrastructure.
The middle case is the interesting one, and it is where most readers of this page actually sit.
You have a site making a little money, growing slowly, and you are wondering whether hosting is
holding it back. Here is the test. Run your homepage and your two best pages through a speed test
on a mobile connection. If they come back over four seconds and your images are already
compressed, your host is the bottleneck and it is worth moving. If they come back under two, your
host is fine and your problem is upstream in traffic or offer.
Proof point: I have moved sites both directions. I moved a client site to managed hosting in
2021 and the conversion lift paid the bill in the first month, because the site was already
converting and the pages were slow. I also moved a personal project back down to shared hosting a
year later, because it made no money and I was paying for headroom I never touched. Both were the
right call, and the difference between them was revenue, not technology.
Managed hosting is not a growth tactic. It removes a category of problem from your week, and
that is worth real money once your week is worth real money. If you want the wider picture of how
I decide which recurring bills survive in my business and which get cut, that reasoning runs
through my Substack, and Stripe’s
Atlas guide collection covers the unglamorous operational layer, including
“Incorporating a business” and “Contracts, transactions, and agreements for small businesses”,
which matter more to a small site’s survival than its server ever will.
If You Do Move, Move It in This Order
Migrations go wrong in predictable ways, and almost all of the damage happens in the 48 hours
around the DNS switch. Here is the sequence I use.
Take a full backup first, files and database both, and download it to your own machine rather
than trusting a copy that lives on the host you are leaving. Push the site to the new host and
test it on a temporary URL or a local hosts file entry before any DNS changes. Click your checkout,
your contact form and your login. Forms break more often than pages do, because they depend on
mail configuration that does not travel with the files.
Lower your DNS time to live to five minutes a day before the switch. That single step turns a
potential 48 hour split brain, where some visitors hit the old server and some hit the new one,
into a few minutes. Make the change during your lowest traffic hour, then watch your error logs
and your analytics in real time for the first hour.
Keep the old hosting alive for at least two weeks after the move. It costs one more month and
it is the cheapest insurance in this whole process. Cancel it only once you have seen a full
billing cycle and a full backup run on the new host.
Proof point: the only migration I ever truly broke was one where I skipped the time to live
step because I was in a hurry. Order forms submitted to a server that no longer had a database for
six hours. I have never skipped it since. I talk through more of these operational lessons, the
expensive ones included, on the Freedom by Choice podcast.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is WP Engine and who is it for?
WP Engine is a managed hosting platform dedicated solely to WordPress. It is built for people who already have a WordPress website and are ready to scale, rather than absolute beginners. Because it focuses only on WordPress, it is finely tuned for speed and reliability on that platform.
Do beginners need WP Engine?
Not really. WP Engine is not mandatory when you are just starting out. Beginners are usually better served by a simpler host like Bluehost. You might choose WP Engine early only to avoid switching later, but for most new sites it is more than you need at first.
Why does WP Engine focus only on WordPress?
WordPress powers roughly 27 to 28 percent of all websites, so WP Engine, based in Austin Texas, decided to specialize entirely in it. By serving only WordPress sites, the company can optimize its servers, security, and support specifically for WordPress instead of spreading its effort across many platforms.
When should you move to WP Engine?
Consider moving to WP Engine once your WordPress site is established and you are ready to scale beyond an entry level host. If your traffic is growing and you want managed performance, security, and support built only for WordPress, WP Engine becomes a sensible upgrade from a starter host.
About the Author
Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.
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