WP Engine WordPress Hosting Review

Disclaimer: Our reviews are not sponsored, as we used our own money to purchase hosting subscriptions. Our reviews are 100% based on our sole opinions. Reviews contain affiliate marketing links where we get a commission when you purchase or subscribe to that service. Read our Affiliate Marketing Policy here. Also, please verify all product and pricing information directly with the linked brands, as product offerings change often. FastestWP.Website is not responsible for errors or product discrepancies.

We proudly host our website on Rocket.net.

WP Engine is one of the major players in WordPress hosting, claiming that 8% of people visit a website hosted by WP Engine on a daily basis. WP Engine offers some of the most robust WordPress hosting features and is geared towards mid-level and higher websites.

In this review post, we will detail WP Engine’s services, how they performed on our performance benchmarks and speed tests, and our overall ranking of their web hosting services.

WP Engine General Features

WP Engine offers many great features but also lacks some standard features. One feature we really liked is the 60-day money-back guarantee, whereas most other providers offer only 30 days. By the time you set up your site and get it going, 30 days becomes only a couple of weeks. Sixty days allow a much fuller testing period to ensure WP Engine is right for you.

When things go wrong – which they will – it is important to consider the website host’s support policy. WP Engine offers 24/7 support via email, live chat, and, for all plans other than the lowest tier, by phone. This is the ultimate support and is much better than other WordPress hosts that offer 24/7 support but by email or live chat only. We also appreciate being able to call a human to get help!

On the other hand, we did not appreciate that WP Engine makes you pay a monthly fee for a Web Application Firewall (WAF). Firewalls are crucial to protecting your website from attacks and are relatively standard for WordPress hosts to provide. As of September 2023, it is $4/month to obtain the firewall.

Also, we find it interesting that WP Engine does not offer an explicit uptime guarantee except for its highest plan. It is extremely common for WordPress hosts to offer at least a 99.9% uptime guarantee. WP Engine states they have continuous monitoring and some of the highest levels of security to keep your site running. While we trust WP Engine’s uptime performance, it is odd that they don’t offer such an explicit guarantee.

Unfortunately, WP Engine does not offer email hosting. If you have a separate email plan through Google as part of Google Workspace, you don’t need to worry about email hosting – Google is your email host. But if you host your own email server, you must buy a separate email hosting plan from another provider. This adds cost and complexity to your WordPress setup, so keep that in mind.

WP Engine Optimization Features

WP Engine upgraded their network in 2023, promising up to 25% better performance than their previous network. We love that WP Engine uses HTTP/3 protocol instead of the common HTTP/2 protocol, as HTTP/3 is faster. Furthermore, WP Engine advertises their proprietary EverCache system that speeds up websites by caching static assets. However, WP Engine provides no technical documentation on how EverCache works, so it is hard for us to know exactly what it does.

WP Engine offers a few cache configuration options within the WordPress admin page. “Smarter Cache” is a cool feature that extends caching expiration dates to six months if the post or page hasn’t been updated in four weeks. Many of you aren’t updating your posts and pages that often, so this is a great feature to keep your website loading fast for return visitors. WP Engine also allows you to set separate cache lengths for posts and pages, ranging from 10 minutes to four weeks.

We love that WP Engine includes Cloudflare CDN on all WordPress hosting plans. CDNs are important, and Cloudflare is one of the largest in the world. In fact, Cloudflare claims they support “20% of all websites” and “30% of Fortune 1000 companies.” Additionally, WP Engine turns on Cloudflare Polish lossless image optimization by default, which is awesome.

WP Engine also adds in the Genesis Blocks plug-in, which they advertise as a free benefit of all WordPress plans. However, only the free version of Genesis Blocks is included – you’ll need to pay if you want the Pro version. Additionally, you may not even care much about the additional layout options and blocks from Genesis Blocks. Your theme may be better equipped, meaning this plugin should be deleted to reduce used resources.

Finally, WP Engine notes that it provides image optimization, including conversion to WebP format, which Google really likes. However, we tested WP Engine several times, and each time, we only found image compression, not image optimization. WP Engine support is researching the issue to find a solution. However, this doesn’t affect you if you have optimized WebP images on your site already.

WP Engine Managed Hosting Plans

WP Engine’s Managed WordPress plans vary almost exclusively by the amount of resources: higher plans come with more websites, storage, and bandwidth. Otherwise, from what we know, performance and features are the same across all plans. One exception is that the lowest plan – the “Startup” plan – does not include phone support, while the other plans do. However, the Startup plan still includes live chat support.

WP Engine Performance Tests

As with all of our web hosting reviews, we tested WP Engine using our test WordPress website to see how WP Engine performs in real life. We ran all of these tests using the Startup Managed Hosting plan, which is the cheapest WordPress hosting plan WP Engine offers. However, performance should be the same across all of WP Engine’s managed WordPress plans.

Our test has three components: Google Core Web Vitals, GTMetrix Performance, and worldwide speed testing. The results are below, and you can read our detailed testing specifications on this page.

Google Core Web Vitals – Lighthouse Scores

WP Engine lives up to its promise and performs well on the Google Core Web Vitals, although compared to other top-tier WordPress providers scoring in the 90s, WP Engine’s scores aren’t as great. The scores above are not the actual Lighthouse values but rather the scores Lighthouse assigns to each metric. We chose to display these scores instead of the actual values to make comparing scores across web host providers easier. Below is the chart showing the actual Lighthouse values for those of you who are more technically minded.

GTMetrix Performance

We are quite disappointed in WP Engine’s performance on GTMetrix. For a top-tier provider that uses Cloudflare, we expected much better results. Not a single location fully loaded in under two seconds, and only three locations – Frankfurt, San Francisco, and Vancouver – loaded in under three seconds. Compare this to Rocket.net – also a top-tier WordPress host that uses Cloudflare – which loads every location in under two seconds.

Even comparing WP Engine’s LCP times compared to other top-tier providers isn’t great. Top-tier providers have LCP scores under 1.5 seconds in many locations, whereas WP Engine only managed that in two locations: Frankfurt and Vancouver.

Overall, WP Engine’s performance in North America is acceptable. However, outside of North America, we believe there are faster options, such as Rocket.net or Hostinger, or if you are in Europe specifically, then HostXNow.

Worldwide Load Testing

With WP Engine’s inclusion of Cloudflare CDN on all plans, it is no surprise that WP Engine delivers relatively good results worldwide. Yet again, we are disappointed in WP Engine’s results compared to other top-tier providers. The results aren’t bad, they just aren’t excellent. But since we consider WP Engine a top-tier provider, we expected excellent results.

Our WP Engine Review Recommendation

We are disappointed in WP Engine’s performance. We expected a lot better based on WP Engine being a top-tier WordPress hosting company and that they use Cloudflare’s CDN. If WP Engine’s prices were cheaper, perhaps the performance would be fine compared to lower-tier hosting companies. But the prices aren’t cheap, and we found much better results with Rocket.net, Kinsta, and GoDaddy.

Overall, we can’t recommend WP Engine based on performance, price, or features. We encourage you to read our reviews of Rocket.net, Kinsta, and GoDaddy as we believe they provide better value and performance compared to WP Engine.