Your WordPress Site Needs the Right Engine [A WP Engine Guide]

So you’re thinking about using WordPress for your next web build. 

You know it’s the most popular content management system on the web. You know you’ll have access to hundreds of themes with responsive designs. You know there are thousands of plugins at your disposal to make development and support easier.

Here’s what you might not know: In order to get the most out of WordPress, you also need to choose the right hosting platform. You need a hosting platform that’s optimized for WordPress. You need a hosting platform with a large, satisfied customer base, just like WordPress. 

You need WP Engine.

Why We Love WP Engine Hosting

Here at our St. Louis WordPress web design agency, we recommend WP Engine for all of our WordPress-based projects. Whether you’re building a brand new site or migrating to WordPress, we want our clients’ websites to reach their peak when it comes to speed, security and overall performance. WP Engine goes a long way in helping us get there.

Let’s talk about how:

DevOps

From environments to deployments, WP Engine has everything covered. Our web development team can spin up production, staging and development environments in a matter of minutes, complete with unique domains and a WordPress install for each. 

It also enables us to set up a site’s SFTP users, SSL certificates and even a CDN within the WP Engine admin, all at the touch of a button. 

Integrations with GitHub and a CI/CD service like Codeship make deployments simple and user-friendly. You won't need to hire an independent DevOps team. Any developer can handle deployments with these tools.

WordPress Management

We know — it’s hard keeping up with all of the updates to WordPress and its many plugins. It’s hard enough keeping up with everything WordPress has to offer. 

WP Engine is the best guide. For our clients’ sites, we can set up WP Engine to handle both WordPress and/or plugin updates automatically. Alternatively, WP Engine will notify us when a pertinent WordPress version update becomes available. 

We can also upgrade — or downgrade — your version of PHP (after we test it out on an emulated version of your site first, of course).

This is only scratching the surface. With WP Engine we’re able to switch back and forth between single site and multisite networks, clear your site cache without additional plugins and add password protection to any of your environments. WP Engine even provides a “Go Live” checklist to ensure we don’t miss anything when you launch.

Special Features

Here’s where WP Engine takes care of our clients the most. 

Because WP Engine is optimized for WordPress, site performance gets a built-in boost. Pages load up to 40% faster on WP Engine. Their servers are built to handle traffic spikes, so speed and reliability won’t be compromised.

What’s more, you can roll back your changes with ease. WP Engine creates daily backups of your site, any of which can be restored at any time. We’re able to create manual backup points as well. (Our developers do this any time we update a site and it only takes a few minutes.)

A Few Things to Consider 

While we could go on and on about our love for WP Engine for days, there are a few things that could be considered cons depending on your preferences and situation.

1. It can be expensive. Compared to other shared hosting platforms, WP Engine does come with a slightly higher price tag. But for our team, it’s 100% worth the cost.
2. It doesn’t support certain plugins and themes. Though the list is very small.
3. It doesn’t work for non-WordPress sites. This one is probably obvious, but if your site isn’t on WordPress — and you’re not planning on moving it — then WP Engine isn’t the hosting platform for you.

From our perspective, the list of benefits for utilizing WP Engine far outweighs any of these items. And we find the ratio of pros-to-cons is far greater for WP Engine than it is for most web hosting platforms. 

Integrity: Your WP Engine Experts

As you can see, WP Engine is the backbone of an efficiently-run website. By utilizing WP Engine for web hosting, our clients don’t have to worry about site security and performance. They know we’re using a service that will save them time and a lot of headaches. 

Don’t take our word for it, though. You’re probably using websites powered by WP Engine without even realizing it. Pandora, Yelp, Petco, Marriott and Instacart are among the many well-known companies using WordPress and WP Engine.

We think you should join the club. 

---

Ready to build or redesign your site with WordPress and have more questions about WP Engine? Integrity’s developers are here to help. Contact our St. Louis web development company to begin. 

And if you love WordPress and are looking for a web development career, check out our open positions!