An Embarrassing Fall from Industry Leader
December 04, 2019

An Embarrassing Fall from Industry Leader

Gordon Seirup | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with WP Engine

WP Engine *was* a leader in the Managed WordPress Hosting space. As such, we used WP Engine to host our website along with 117 client sites. From 2012 - 2017 WP Engine was outstanding. Since mid-2017 I have witnessed their heartbreaking fall from industry leader with the best critical thinking technical support team I had ever witnessed, to over-priced, technically unreliable, personally disinterested, commodity-level hosting, resting on their laurels spoiling their hard-earned reputation, with barely technically literate support staff copy-and-pasting canned responses with no regard for relevance or accuracy.

Pros

  • Hosting Panel tools are good

Cons

  • Performance - Allocated resources per site, and thus site performance, has decreased
  • Security - I experienced 4 individual site hacks and 2 recurrences between 12/2017 and 10/2018
  • Security - While still touting "enterprise grade active security monitoring" on their sales website, a technical support "lead" informed me - in response to a hack re-emerging after being "fixed" - security scans were only run upon request.
  • Reliability - Across the board, site's uptime reliability fell throughout 2017 and 2018
  • Caching - Once THE leader in caching, and thus site performance, technical support often suggests disabling caching to resolve undiagnosed problems while the caching suite itself has been reduced to commonly used tools available from other basic Managed WP hosting options.
  • Substantial lost time. After my "You have failed me for the last time" moment with WP Engine, I spent the week of October 22nd, 2018 migrating all our client sites to Kinsta - an emerging leader in Managed WordPress hosting.
  • Untold losses in unrealized revenue based on poor site performance.
  • Untold losses in brand damage to multiple clients whose sites were compromised.
I selected Kinsta to replace WP Engine because their performance statistics, security configuration, and technical support prowess reminded me of WP Engine circa 2012 - top-notch.
Technical support post-2017 has devolved into untrained bodies copy-and-pasting canned responses with no regard for accuracy or relevance, let alone critical thinking.

Do you think WP Engine delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with WP Engine's feature set?

No

Did WP Engine live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of WP Engine go as expected?

No

Would you buy WP Engine again?

No

I do not recommend using WP Engine. Period. If the security and performance of your website are not important, get commodity-level hosting for a fraction of the cost. If security and performance of your site are important, WP Engine will let you down.

Using WP Engine

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