I’m not a developer by any stretch of the imagination. Like many marketers, I can manipulate HTML & CSS enough to be dangerous but rarely am I ever building anything from scratch. Even this site that I’ve built my portfolio off of is a free theme and Elementor basic. I didn’t need much so I don’t require much when it comes to this site specifically.
But I was curious.
Is WP Engine’s shared hosting worth the Higher Price Point?
$30/month seems pricey for shared hosting. But maybe that is because I’ve been on Bluehost for the last 3 years and paid basically $6/month when I bought a 3-yr plan. Also, to be fair, you can pay annually for WP Engine for a pretty decent discount. But is 3x the cost worth it? I wanted to find out.
So I put it to the test. My little site on Bluehost versus WP Engine. My WordPress site isn’t crazy like I said. Free theme, Elementor, and some smaller plugins to get images in next-gen formatting, security, and the free plan through RankMath to handle SEO.
My site on Bluehost
On mobile, it wasn’t that great. In this one instance on PageSpeed Insights, you can see the performance is lacking. The Desktop performance report was only marginally better. Load times were greater than 5 seconds in most instances which isn’t terrific.
How to Migrate to WP Engine
Migrating my site over to WP engine was very easy. After paying, it was as simple as installing a plugin in the WP Admin and getting the site copied over to a production environment on WP Engine. My site was a little over 200MB which only took about 2-3 minutes to copy over.
The next step was to validate some details and get DNS records updated. All this information was provided by WP Engine and step-by-step guides and how-to videos were easily accessible along the way.
On Google Domains, it only took about 10 minutes for updated records to show up in the WP Engine dashboard. Again, very painless to get on WP Engine’s advanced network.
Lastly, it was installing the security certificates which WP Engine provides for free. Again, about 10 minutes later and it was all up and running.
The whole process took less than an hour and the site was up and running with no hiccups or issues. I cleared the cache and went to bed to let it sit on the new server for about 18 hours before running additional performance tests. To be honest, I’m not sure why I waited but I figured some time might be beneficial for the dust to settle.
My site on WP Engine
With no other changes being made, I have to say I was moderately impressed. Mobile performance increased and desktop performance got all green. Where the average site load time was over 5 seconds, it was now coming in under 4 seconds on mobile and under 1 second on desktop. A little over a second may not seem like a lot but in the world of digital marketing, a second can make a big difference.
Conclusion
I wouldn’t say WP Engine is necessary for me specifically, but I prefer to use the best of the best. I still believe WP Engine is the best of the best when it comes to WordPress hosting. And their shared hosting solution did increase my site’s performance. I would consider a performance increase of 20% significant. So I will continue to pay WP Engine for their shared hosting (I may just switch to the annual plan to save a few bucks a year).