Three years ago, we didn’t design and build websites, let alone host them. Now, this is an integral part of our business, and WPEngine is the only host provider we use. We learned that when we didn’t control the website architecture, backend management, and even the hosting — it really made the internet marketing aspects of what we do that much harder. Imagine signing up a client to provide search engine optimization or PPC management work, and then come to find out the infrastructure is not there to easily create new landing pages, add lead generation mechanisms, or simply add tracking code without having to go in and modify PHP files.
WordPress is the most ubiquitous platform out there. Check out these stats below from Builtwith.com. You can see that WordPress dominates with nearly 50% of the top 1 million websites. That means there are more developers and service providers who will be more familiar with WordPress than any other platform, making it easier to find support if you need it. Even if you aren’t using Pear Analytics for all of your web needs, on Upwork.com I found 109,138 WordPress dev resources, as opposed to only 20,104 for Drupal, and a paltry 629 for ExpressionEngine. Which platform would you rather be on?
The WPEngine migration tool is FANTASTIC. We use this tool every time, and haven’t had a major issue yet! It works beautifully in migrating all of your content and database over to a staging URL where you can check to make sure everything works, and then complete the migration and update the DNS. One thing we have found that you will want to be aware of, is any hard-coded CDN references from your old host. If you should encounter this rare issue, you can use this tool to search and replace all of the hard coding. It takes some programming knowledge, and I admit I was scared I would screw something up the first time I used it, but all went well and you’ll feel like a genius when it works. WPEngine support was great during the process, too.
The automatic backups and restore points definitely saved me more than once. This is another fave-feature from WPEngine where they automatically backup our sites every night, and then even allow me to create a new backup point whenever I want, in case I’m updating a plugin. In one particular case, I backed up a site before upgrading the Visual Composer plugin, only to find out something didn’t work right, and actually caused several errors on the front end. No worries though — all I had to do was restore to a prior backup point and within 60 seconds the site was back to normal.
The easiest domain-level redirects and redirect rules in the industry. Now I’ve worked with many host providers in the past, including Network Solutions, 1&1 Hosting, Rackspace and many others, and WPEngine has by far, the easiest interface to perform the necessary redirects on your URLs or root domains. This really makes my SEO job much easier.
24/7 live chat technical support is now available! I’ve always had great support from WPEngine, but support tickets are yesteryear, and their new live chat feature makes it so easy. Also, the support folks are not low-level like other hosting companies — they can actually go into your account and fix stuff.
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