Speed And Conversions
If you managed to check out our review of WP Engine you will see just how fast they are. Site speed is important for a number of reasons, it's great for SEO, it's good for Google and your crawl rate but more importantly it's good for your users. No body wants to wait 6 seconds for a website to load and because of this it's been found that a faster website will convert better the faster it is. This study by
Tagman showed that a simple one second delay in site loading time resulted in a loss of 7% of conversions.
If you a run a e-commerce website with decent traffic and are thinking of switching WordPress hosting, this might be the main reason to do so - more conversions. Of course it's hard to determine just how much faster WP Engine will make your website since every website is different and has different HTTP requests as well as design but this little tool from WP Engine will help you get an estimate on the increase in site speed on your website.
Security
No website is free from hackers and while WP Engine can still be hacked they offer to fix the hack for free as a part of your subscription to them. While they take all the steps to make sure your website is safe from the moment you are a WP Engine customer it's still possible that your website can be hacked which is why having a support team that will fix the hack for your no matter how big or small is reassuring. If you've had a website hacked before you know what a hassle it can be and it's something that could take hours out of your day unexpectedly.
Disallowed Plugins
Some may argue that this benefit limits your choices being a WordPress user but by WP Engine disallowing a very small number of plugins means that you'll be getting the very best of their technology with everything running smoothly without any problems. Their banned plugins fall into various categories which hinder the performance of their servers: Caching:
Most caching plugins do not cooperate with our custom caching environment. As a result, we can’t have them running in parallel with our solution. In fact, whenever our maintenance scripts see these on the filesystem, they are automatically removed from your install
Backup plugins:
We already take multiple, nightly backups of your site — done in an efficient and automated manner — which are available for you to rollback to (or download) whenever you’d like.
Server & MySQL Thrashing Plugins:
There’s another class of plugins that we disallow simply because they cause a high load on our servers or create an unnatural number of MySQL queries.
Related Posts Plugins:
Almost all “Related Posts” plugins suffer from the same fundamental problems regarding MySQL, indexing and search. All of these problems make the plugins themselves extremely database intensive.
While they tell your which ones they do not allow due to server performance they do provide you with a list of better performing plugins which do the same job. So your choices are not limited with WP Engine you'll get a better experience by using better WordPress plugins.
Support
WP Engine has a reputation for excellent support. They differ from most hosting companies in they go that extra way to try and help you. They do not outsource their support and you'll be speaking to someone who knows WordPress, not just anyone. They offer various ways to get in touch, support tickets which can be unpredictable in terms of time answered and also live chat which gets answered almost immediately. They are very focused on support as apart of their service and are always looking to improve. For example here's an email we got from them showing their plans to make their support better.
At WP Engine, we believe in delivering a support experience that exceeds your expectations. Delighting our customers is what fuels us, as the success you experience with your website becomes the success of our own business.
I'm writing today because recently our customers have experienced longer than usual wait times for live chat, and longer than desired response times for tickets. This is not the level of service that we aspire to provide. I'm writing today to apologize on behalf of WP Engine, as we realize that we may have not met your expectations.
We have a number of things underway that we expect to make an impact:
Hiring. We have accelerated our hiring plans for our technical support organization and are currently on-boarding and training additional team members to serve you.
Support Garage. We are improving the design of our Support Garage to allow our customers to provide feedback on the quality of our Support articles. Expect to see Helpfulness Voting and Comments on articles by the end of this month, and please do share your feedback with us on the quality of our content so that we can improve.
Customer Tools in the User Portal. Based on feedback from our customers, we are building tools to empower you to have additional functionality without having to make a request for support.
We launched Git functionality in our User Portal in early February.If you missed this exciting announcement, please read more about it.
Copy Site: With a few clicks in the User Portal, you can now copy a production site to a current install, or a brand new one.
What’s next? Enabling the purchase and automatic installation of SSL certificates via the User Portal. More details will be coming in the following weeks on this exciting new feature!
We feel privileged to provide our customers with the fastest, most secure and scalable WordPress hosting platform and we don't take this responsibility lightly. We hope that in sharing our plans with you, we can continue to instill confidence in our services.
Thank you for being a WP Engine customer.
Respectfully,
Staging Area
Have you ever wanted to edit your website or test a new website design but didn't want to take your website offline or fear of breaking it due to untested features? With WP Engine you can do as much tweaking as you want by using their staging area. What this means is you can copy your website over to a staging area using WP Engine's service. By default your copied website is not visible to search engines so you don't have to worry about duplicate content etc. You're now free to edit and play around with your copied website while you still have a live website. Once you're happy with the changes you've made, simply overwrite your staging website to your live website. Your new website is live with no downtime. Excellent feature.
