Posted by Elizabeth 
When it comes to hosting platforms, most -people typically seek out the budget-friendly option, unaware of how vital their hosting decision is to the overall success of their website. Your website’s speed, experience, uptime, security, and search engine optimization (SEO) are all affected by your hosting choice. Think of a time you visited a website that loaded very slowly or went to purchase a newly released item and the site crashed from being unable to handle the number of visitors all trying to purchase simultaneously. These are just some of the moments that could have gone differently if the site you visited had chosen the proper hosting and plan for their website. The last thing you want is to invest a great deal of money on building your website to then have it on a budget-friendly hosting site with slow web speeds and unreliable uptime. For these reasons, it is great to consider a more premium hosting platform that excels in faster page speeds, uptime, security, and customer support and satisfaction.
WP Engine | Premium WordPress Hosting
WP Engine is a premium WordPress hosting option. It has fast and robust servers that can handle anything while also providing you with hacker-proof security and top-tier customer support on top of many other great features they provide. Other features include:
- Terrific uptime in testing
- Automatic Caching
- Daily backups
- Real-time threat detection
- 1-Click staging area
- Choice of either Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform cloud hosting
- Free SSL
- 1-Click WordPress
- Unlimited Monthly Data Transfers – WordPress
- Unlimited Storage – WordPress
- Linux Servers
- 24/7 Customer Support
Features not included:
- Email is not included with the hosting plan
- Doesn’t sell domains; it is only a hosting provider, not a domain registrar.
Site Speed
With WP Engine hosting you can improve your website speed up to 40% after migrating your site over. From my own experience as a lead developer, whenever I have switched over a client’s website to WP Engines hosting from other budget-friendly hosting providers like GoDaddy, HostGator, Bluehost, and others, I always see an immediate, drastic increase in site speed and overall site performance. Instead of pages loading within seconds, all pages load instantly, and scrolling through pages is done at lightning-fast speeds. On average, people take about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they’ll stay or leave your site. That is why it is important that your hosting can provide fast page speeds in order to stand a chance with keeping user engagement. Remember all the times you clicked on a website and it took way too long to load, you refresh the page to see if it loads quicker, but ultimately you ended up clicking out and going to another site. This happens all the time, just imagine all the users who never got to discover a company or product due to their site taking longer than their competitor.
Site Speed Affects SEO
Not only does your site speed affect your user experience, but it also has a role to play in your search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. Google has used speed as a ranking factor since 2010. Since Google is increasing its focus on site speed, it is now even more important to ensure that your site is fast in order to assist in your SEO efforts.
Site Security
A majority of hosting platforms will provide site security as an add-on benefit, but WP Engine has site security included in your hosting plan. They use an enterprise-grade technology platform that automates threat detection to block 72 million attacks daily while keeping your website vulnerabilities up to date. Alongside their technology, they also have a live team that monitors security feeds so you get proactive security alerts. With WP Engine, it is like having a dedicated team alongside you to ensure your site is up and running secure, safe, and fast. That is why they have over 185+ customers worldwide, like Pandora, AMD, Sleep Number, Yelp, and PetCo, to name a few. To put this in perspective, just the other day, we here at Pulse Marketing had a site breach on a GoDaddy-hosted site. Corrupted files were everywhere and it took multiple days and countless hours to restore the site to a safe and secure state. If you are having to deal with your current host’s support teams, most will charge you for any malware cleanup or extra support, which will end up costing you more than if you already had site security in place. All of our other clients’ sites that have already made the switch to WP Engine have been protected from any threats. With WP Engine’s security and live team on standby, you can rest easy knowing that your site is secure and taken care of.
Excellent Customer Support
Besides WP Engines’ live team monitoring your site to be secure, they also have their own support teams that are available to you 24/7 globally to help with any website issues you may have. From prelaunch to go live and beyond, they are there to assist you. Their team of experts receive continuous training on the latest technologies and industry best practices in order to best serve you. From my own experience with their support team, they have quick response times and often go above and beyond to fix issues on your behalf, so you don’t have to worry if you’re not web-savvy, they have you covered.
Pricing
Since WP Engine is a more premium hosting option, it comes with a premium cost as well. Most informational and basic sites are fine on their startup plan ranging from $20-23/monthly. When you consider the site security and quality of speed you are getting for the price this is actually a steal. In comparison, if you were to buy the deluxe hosting plan ($7.99) and advanced site security plan($14.99/month) that includes malware cleanup from GoDaddy you would be paying around $23 dollars a month for some of the same features but not get- nearly the same speed quality as WP Engine.
Switching Over To WP Engine Hosting
For all my WordPress site users, making the switch is pretty easy. They offer a FREE, one-step migration through their WP Engine plugin, which makes migration quick and easy to move your site with no downtime. For all my non-web-savvy readers, rest assured that their customer support will assist with guiding you through the migration process. When in doubt, you can always get site migration assistance from our web team at Pulse Marketing. We have helped countless clients migrate their sites over to WP Engine without a hitch. We even assist with WP Engine account creation, migration, and web maintenance. That way you don’t have to lift a finger and save your own time to focus on other important matters while we take care of switching your site over to a new host. If you are curious to learn more about switching over to this platform, please contact us at info@heartofcreative.com or call us at 951-337-4399.
Currently, WP Engine is offering 3 months free with an annual subscription. To see pricing and/or purchase a WP Engine hosting plan click here
Resources:
- https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/wp-engine-web-hosting#:~:text=WP%20Engine%20has%20high%2Dquality,email%20accounts%20and%20domain%20names.
- https://www.wpbeginner.com/hosting/wpengine/
- https://www.sweor.com/firstimpressions