Why We Recommend WP Engine

You have lots of options for WordPress hosting. Some are cheap, some are expensive. Some are geared specifically towards WordPress, and some are generalist hosts that can run anything.One option that works really well for us here at Web Design Boom – the choice that we’ve made for ourselves is WP Engine.In this article, we wanted to talk a little about why we use them, how they help us, and where WP Engine adds the most value and works the best for designers like us.WP Engine offers many features that are above and beyond a standard Vanilla WordPress install – in many ways, they’ve taken WordPress and made it even better, with additions like:

One-Click Staging Environment

One of our favorites – as designers working with clients regularly – is WP Engine’s one click staging environment. It offers the ability to copy your existing install – files, posts, plugins, and all – to another staging install in one simple click. And you can push that staging site live in one click as well.Now you have not only a place to show your clients new things and simple tweaks before you press them live – but you can also give your clients a place to test out that new cool plug-in their nephew recommended without getting yet another late night phone call.

The WP Engine WordPress Stack

WP Engine’s offering is somewhat different than a standard, one-click install from an general purpose host.Instead of using a standard LAMP stack with WordPress on the top, WP Engine’s team of systems engineers and DevOps experts have substituted the latest and greatest technologies at appropriate places in the WordPress stack for improved performance.They’ve added new technologies like serving front-end hits with NGinx, caching with Varnish, using OpCode acceleration and Memcache to serve a faster, stronger version of WordPress.(And if you don’t know what all of these technologies do, or want to design websites instead of becoming a systems administrator – don’t worry. A managed WordPress host like WP Engine takes care of this for you so you can focus on what you do best.)

EverCache

Along with new technologies to make your WordPress site dramatically faster (without making you become a sysadmin), WP Engine also provides their own caching system called EverCache.Caching plugins are an absolute necessity to run fast WordPress sites, regardless of what provider you choose. Without caching, your server has to work overtime to process even the simplest of requests.WP Engine has created their own proprietary caching system called Evercache. Evercache lets WP Engine scale WordPress to serving thousands of simultaneous visitors while maintaining fast experiences for visitors. The caching rules for the system are based on WP Engine’s experience hosting many of the highest traffic WordPress sites in the world, which gives them a large dataset to use as the basis for their custom caching rules.Now instead of managing a caching plugin (and spending both money and time managing these or buying a premium version), you can spend your time designing rather than worrying about what’s getting cached where.

Uptime

All of these features are great – but at the end of the day, if your WordPress site isn’t up, nothing else matters.WP Engine offers the highest uptime of any Managed WordPress Host, with a 99.95% SLA.We use BinaryCanary monitoring to understand the performance of our websites – and our sites on WP Engine have been up 99.98% of the time.

Security

Armies of vulnerability scanners wander the web night and day, looking for vulnerabilities in WordPress installs. They look for old plugins, outdated themes, unpatched instances, and more, hoping to take control, and bend you and your clients’ websites to their own malicious purposes.WP Engine employs full-time WordPress security specialists, who not only constantly guard your site against harm, but also participate in things like WordPress security vulnerablity discussions, and more. WP Engine also engages two well-known outside security firms to audit and assess their security infrastructure – so you can focus on your business, rather than the exciting field of WordPress security.And if you or one of your clients get hacked – it happens all the time – if you move that install over to WP Engine, they’ll fix it for free. And if somehow an update gets forgotten or you choose a theme or plugin that has a security problem, WP Engine will unhack your site for free.

Automatic Backups

In addition to hacking, other things happen to WordPress sites – and sometimes you just need a backup.And while many solutions provide backups – some of them cost money or take time to configure – which is more time away from designing websites and serving clients.WP Engine automatically takes backup points every day – so you can focus on your business instead of a backup plugin.

Support

Even the best features – like automatic backups, developer tools like Git, and advanced caching layers – don’t matter if no one picks up the phone when you encounter a problem.WP Engine has some of the best support we’ve ever experienced. They have the highest ratio of WordPress technicians – real WordPress specialists – to customers of any host in the industry.

Why We Use It

We love WP Engine! Even though WP Engine is a little bit more expensive than other hosting solutions, we believe this is money well spent.All of WP Engine’s features such as automated backups, 1-click staging, great uptime and high security are certainly worth the extra money when you operate a network of professional websites.We simply don’t have to worry about anything hosting related and it’s absolutely hassle-free and we save a lot of time not having to worry about any of this.Another major benefit of using WP Engine is the speed and performance which directly benefits SEO and rankings.When we migrated this site over to WP Engine we saw a noticeable increase in page speed which directly translates into improved rankings and increased traffic.Why don’t you try this out for yourself and you can cancel within 60 days and get a full refund if you are not completely happy.