WPEngine Growth Plan Review

Are you planning to purchase the WPEngine Growth plan for your website? Do you want to know about the plan features in detail? If yes, here you’ll find every little detail about this WP Engine hosting plan.

We’ll discuss the benefits, limitations, and pricing of the Growth plan to determine its suitability for your needs. You’ll also get to know the best alternative to WP Engine by the end of this article.

But first, let’s find out what this WP Engine plan is all about in our next section.

WPEngine Growth Plan

WPEngine Growth is a managed WordPress hosting plan from WP Engine. It is a shared hosting plan that protects you from the headaches of server maintenance or malware removal, making it stand out from its competition.

Let’s take a quick look at its primary features:

• It offers 20 GB of storage and 200 GB of bandwidth.
• The Growth plan supports up to 10 websites and 100,000 estimated monthly visitors overall.
• It has a daily and on-demand backup feature.
• You’ll get 24/7 chat and phone support from WordPress experts.
• WP Engine ensures your website security by providing free SSL, proactive threat detection, and automatic PHP updates with this plan.

You can easily scale your resources because of the availability of many other managed WordPress plans with the host. WP Engine also offers a 60-day money-back guarantee with this plan so that you can try it out without any worries.

Visit WP Engine

Pros & Cons of Growth Plan

Now that you have a basic idea of the plan features let’s look at its pros and cons:

Pros

• The Growth plan comes with expert WordPress support.
• Using this WP Engine plan results in a faster-loading website.
• You’ll get free CDN, SSL, and site backups.
• The plan includes advanced security tools for your website.
• The host also provides easy staging and development tools with this plan.

Cons

• The Growth plan doesn’t have email hosting.
• It offers limited storage space.
• The host provides limited bandwidth with the Growth plan and charges extra for over-usage.
• You won’t receive a free domain name with this plan.
• This plan is not budget-friendly because of its limited features and high price tag.

Benefits of using Growth Plan by WP Engine

Here is an overview of the benefits that the Growth plan offers:

Blazing Speed: You will get faster speed for your website with WP Engine’s modern cloud infrastructure and WordPress-optimized caching.

Advanced Security Features: To keep your site secure, the Growth plan offers advanced security with free SSL, multi-factor password authentication, and proactive threat detection.

Exceptional Customer Support Staff: This hosting plan offers 24/7, exceptional WP Engine customer support via live chat and phone.

Staging Environments: WP Engine Growth plan includes one-click staging that allows testing your website in the production stage before making the changes live.

Many data center options: You can choose a data center location from 11 Google Cloud Servers available for the shared plans.

Automatic daily backups: The host maintains automatic daily backups of your account under this plan to prevent any unexpected data loss.

Automatic updates: The Growth plan performs automatic PHP and WordPress updates to keep your account always up-to-date.

Ease of Use

WP Engine has a super-simple user dashboard with a clean design. It is not beginner-friendly and suitable for more advanced users only.

You will have to find different elements on the host’s dashboard and get comfortable with them.

Performance – Is WPengine Fast?

WPEngine Growth plan manages to offer better performance than the top shared hosting plans from the host’s competitors. You’ll get much better and more consistent website performance than the similarly-priced plans from many popular shared hosting providers.

Speed

To test the speed offered by this plan, we set up a test site on WP Engine servers. Then we ran the speed test on our empty sample website using the Pingdom tool.

Our test site took less than half a second to load. This result is quite good, considering we didn’t perform performance optimization on this sample site.

Uptime

WP Engine provides a 99.95% uptime guarantee with Service Level Agreement (SLA). We monitored two of our sample sites for eight days to verify this claim.

Though the uptime never fell below the guaranteed figure, the test detected a downtime of four minutes for both test sites.

Stress testing

We used the Grafana k6 (formerly LoadImpact) tool for stress testing of our WP Engine test site. We sent 50 bots at the same time for 5 minutes to check for any site slowdown.

Our test revealed that the website started experiencing some issues with 50 users.

In the above image, the green line represents the website user count, and the blue line depicts the response time. Our sample site performed quite well, with a few spikes in between.

You’ll notice that it maintained an incredible response rate during the whole test duration. As seen in the test result above, WP Engine delivered a steady server performance throughout the test, even with an increased number of users.

The server uptime remained consistent, with no downtime recorded during the stress test.

Also, remember that the host allows you to choose your server location during registration. You must pick the one closest to your site audience since that will certainly deliver the best website performance.

Customer Support

WP Engine Growth plan comes with 24/7 exceptional support from WordPress experts. You can connect with the customer care executives via phone and live chat.

Their excellent customer service, and the executives are friendly, knowledgeable, and always ready to help. You’ll get quick responses and appropriate solutions from WP Engine experts.

Pricing of the Growth plan

WP Engine Growth plan is available for $92 per month with a monthly billing term. However, you can save money with the annual term as the host gives 4 months of free hosting with it.

Here is the pricing structure of the Growth plan:

Limitations of the WP Engine Growth plan

Considering the high price you pay for the Growth plan, you get very limited server resources for hosting your website.

Storage space

WP Engine Startup plan offers 10 GB of storage and supports a single website. However, the Growth plan supports 10 websites but only 20 GB of storage. That’s a huge gap!

A total of 20 GB storage for 10 websites means you can use an average of only 2 GB space for each site.

An empty WordPress website on a WP Engine server consumes 500 MB to 1 GB of space. Therefore, you won’t have much flexibility when creating multiple high-quality websites on the Growth plan.

Bandwidth Limitation

WP Engine Growth plan includes 200 GB monthly bandwidth. The host charges extra money if you cross this traffic limit.

You must also keep in mind that Google Analytics tracks unique visits to your site only from people. But WP Engine includes bots and people when tracking monthly visits.

So you will cross their bandwidth limit quickly and end up paying for over-usage.

Disallowed plugins

WP Engine disallows the installation of some major plugins, including backup, caching, email, content, and optimization plugins. The host claims that all these plugins might conflict with the working of a few existing features of the Growth plan.

But you must note that WP Engine has placed these restrictions to prevent any feature conflict. They already include the features available with those plugins within their hosting plans.

What Users Say about WPEngine

We scoured the internet to find out what WP Engine users say about the host:

In the above screenshot, you’ll notice that the majority of WP Engine users have positive opinions about their services.

Verdict: WPEngine – Is it Worth it?

WP Engine Growth plan is not worth the money for its resources. But it can be a good choice for a startup or a rising business.

However, we recommend choosing the Scale plan when you have multiple websites. Though it is not cheap, the Scale plan is worth it since you’ll have ample resources across dozens of sites.

Who is it for?

• Multi-site owners like freelance developers, small agencies, or people having multiple businesses and eCommerce sites.
• When you’ve got a website with high revenue and huge traffic. (You can move up to the Scale plan when you need more bandwidth or support for additional WordPress websites.)

Since WP Engine is an expensive host and doesn’t have feature-rich plans, we recommend choosing an alternative discussed in our next section.

Best Alternative to WPengine?

Cloudways is the best alternative to WP Engine since it offers WordPress hosting at a much more affordable price.

Here’s a feature comparison table showing the differences between the specific plans of these two hosts:

Consider checking out the detailed features of Cloudways WordPress hosting plans here.

Visit Cloudways

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

Is WP Engine owned by WordPress?

No, WP Engine is not owned by WordPress but by Jason Cohen, an entrepreneur.

Is Kinsta better than WP Engine?

Kinsta and WP Engine stand at an equal level when we compare their features and plan pricing. You can choose any of these managed WordPress hosts without any worries.

Did WP Engine buy Flywheel?

Yes, WP Engine acquired Flywheel in 2019.