Why I’m Moving My Site To WP Engine

Currently, this site is hosted on Bluehost.com. I love Bluehost and I still recommend their service for when businesses or individuals are getting started. That being said however, I have had an opportunity to work with a client site using WP Engine and I have decided that I want to move my sites to their services. I’ll still keep Bluehost because I have non-WordPress sites hosted here and I’ll use it for probably even some WordPress sites. Today though, I want to list out the reasons and give the reasons why I love WP Engine and why I am moving.

It is FAST

Lately, my site has been loading slower and slower. I’ve been adding new plugins and other things that require time to load. I *could* install a caching plugin and deal with setting that up if I wanted to but I really don’t want the headache of having to manage and set that up. I’d rather they do it. That in itself will speed things up but in addition to caching, they provide a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which allows your images and files to be served up from more local data centers, which means things will load even faster. The speed excites me because Google takes speed of the site into consideration with it’s rankings, and it can’t hurt to be faster for your visitors too!

Staging/Testing Site

One of the features that excites me is the ability for every install of WordPress to have a staging site. This means you can duplicate your current site, test themes, plugins, or other changes, without a huge amount of mess. For me, I’m constantly looking for ways to make changes to my site. Even now this site is in a state of flux that I wouldn’t have done had I had an easy testing site. This is a cool feature.

Malware and Hack Protection

WP Engine scans the sites for malware. If somehow you are hacked the will fix it for you. This is more of an insurance policy but it’s nice to know they’ve got my back.

Daily backups and Snapshots

I have a backup plugin that I use right now. I love it and it works well. I back sites up to Dropbox and I restore them. WP Engine offers daily backups, as well as a snapshot feature. The snapshots are cool because when you go to install a plugin, or make a huge change to the site, you can take a snapshot and have a roll back point. I’ve done this lots, and had to use it, and it is super quick to roll back if something blows up.

Oh yeah! A coupon!

Overall, I’m super excited for my move to WP Engine. There is lots going on, and this site probably won’t be the first I move, but it is always exciting to be making changes. You’ll probably know when I’ve moved because I’ll probably finally fix/update the theme from here :). I almost forgot to mention that right now (through August 19th) WP Engine is running a coupon for 3 Free months if you buy a year up front. You can use the code “HEATWAVE” to get that discount.


Posted

in

by

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *