For the longest time now I have recommended one of 3 WordPress hosting companies. If you are on a budget, try PeoplesHost.com; their service is great for the price. If you have some money, Siteground.com has a lot of great features not found elsewhere. And if you have a lot of money, WPEngine.com has a gold-plated first-rate service which makes their high price tag worth it.
In the past month or so I discovered that these recommendations were rather out of date in at least one regard. WP Engine used to have a gold-plated service; they don’t any more. I recently learned that WP Engine no longer offers the site optimization features they used to have years ago. While their service is still quite reliable, their high price tag can no longer be justified by what they can do for you.
This has apparently been true for a while now, but I only noticed after I got into a discussion about hosting companies on Reddit. One commenter challenged me on the point about WP Engine’s optimization features, so I went and tested an old client site (it had been retired but was still in good shape, making it an ideal test subject).
I tested that client site using Lighthouse, and then I tested it again after I installed the caching plugin WP Rocket. The site loaded considerably faster with the plugin than without.
This is especially interesting to me because WP Engine used to not allow you to install caching plugins. They used to control which plugins you could install (they didn’t want badly written or resource-hungry plugins slowing down their server).
But more importantly, without that optimization WP Engine charges a premium price for what is now mid-grade service. Seriously, there is little to recommend WP Engine over a budget host like PeoplesHost.com; just about the only feature which WP Engine and PeoplesHost doesn’t is staging, and that isn’t really that useful to the non-techy (and tech-inclined users can get by just fine without it).
If you have a site hosted on WP Engine, I would not necessarily urge you to move to another host. But if you are looking for a new host, I also would not tell you to move there. There are hosting companies which offer a better value, including Siteground.com.
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