WP Engine Review (2018)

WPEngine [Reviews] participated for the fifth time in our WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks (2018). This review is based off the results of that test. This year WPEngine entered in the Enterprise tier again. In the previous test, WPEngine struggled with the load tests. They returned this year and entered with the most expensive offering in the Enterprise tier and earned themselves a Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award.

The Product

Plan Name	Plan Monthly Price	Plan Visitors Allowed	Plan Memory/RAM	Plan Disk Space	Plan Bandwidth	Plan Sites Allowed
Premium Dedicated	$5,400	Capable of 10M+ (no hard limit, depends on site)	N/A	1TB	Unlimited	150

Performance Review

Load Storm

Plan Tier	Total Requests	Total Errors	Peak RPS	Average RPS	Peak Response Time(ms)	Average Response Time (ms)	Total Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Throughput (MB/s)	Average Throughput (MB/s)
Enterprise	1,914,457	786	1,564.62	1,063.59	11,541	509	115.54	95.23	64.19

The Load Storm test is designed to simulate real users coming to the site, logging in and browsing the site bursting some of the caching mechanisms typically found on managed WordPress hosts.

WPEngine's Load Storm test was good. Minimal errors and stable response time.

Load Impact

Plan Tier	Requests	Errors	Data Transferred (GB)	Peak Average Load Time (Seconds)	Peak Average Bandwidth (Mbps)	Peak Average Requests/Sec
Enterprise	1461819	0	78	0.665	1210	2780

The Load Impact test makes sure static caching is effective so that if a page gets a lot of traffic the site will keep responding without issue.

Zero errors, that's the magic number we love to see. WP Engine aced the Load Impact test.

Uptime

Plan Tier	UptimeRobot	StatusCake
Enterprise	99.95	99.96

WPEngine [Reviews] maintained above 99.9% uptime on both monitors.

WebPageTest / WPPerformanceTester

Plan Tier	Enterprise
Dulles	0.436
Denver	1.155
LA	0.948
London	1.155
Frankfurt	1
Rose Hill, Mauritius	2.109
Singapore	1.536
Mumbai	1.891
Japan	1.062
Sydney	1.428
Brazil	1.238

The response times on WPT were normal.

Plan Tier	PHP Bench	WP Bench
Enterprise	10.766	418.4100418

The WPPerformanceTester results normal.

Conclusion

After a disappointing 2016 showing, WPEngine [Reviews] stepped up their game and earned a Top Tier WordPress Hosting Performance award from Review Signal. It's always good to see companies working to improve their service offering. WPEngine is one of the oldest companies in the WordPress hosting space and they are showing they can support even the largest clients as many new competitors spring up. Great performance from WP Engine.