By Alex Darling
At ChoiceLocal, we provide a lot of different digital marketing services. We touch on content marketing, on-page SEO, PPC advertising, web hosting, and more. Every task under those various umbrellas can require juggling multiple tools to get the job done, which means we have plenty of opportunities to get to know our tools – including their strengths and weaknesses. We’re starting a blog series called Why We Fancy to discuss our most valuable tools and why we use them. Today we will discuss why we fancy WPEngine Hosting.
WPEngine is a hosting provider. A hosting provider is in charge of making your website available on the web and every website has one. Whenever you visit any page, a computer somewhere is instructed to write out the content of that page and then send it to you. The computer in charge of that is your host and whoever owns that computer is your hosting provider.
There are a ton of hosting providers out in the world. You may have heard names like GoDaddy, Hostgator, or InMotion Hosting. We’ve worked with these hosting providers in the past, but WPEngine beats them all. So what makes WPEngine great? Read on!
Site Speed
WPEngine is heavily optimized for speed. If you use WPEngine, the computer that hosts your website will use a piece of software called Varnish to speed up delivery, and a proprietary caching program called EverCache that makes it easier to load big resources such as photos or styling.
We want your site to be lightning-fast. It’s better for users, and it’s a ranking factor for Google. WPEngine’s setup gives us speed boosts without forcing us to spend a ton of time knee-deep in technical digital marketing problems. That transitions us to the next big benefit.
Easy Technical SEO
One of my major focuses at ChoiceLocal is technical SEO, so it’s no surprise that I’m one of WPEngine’s biggest fans in our office. We tend to face some thorny problems with partner websites, including migrating websites, setting up HTTPS, and updating software. WPEngine gives us the tools to easily:
- Migrate any WordPress website
- Redirect old webpages using Regular Expressions
- Set up HTTPS on partner websites, which is a Google ranking factor
- Upgrade core WordPress software
- Test improvements to our sites privately before making big changes
- Perform emergency changes on the site using post-processing
The amount of time WPEngine has saved me across our partner’s sites is phenomenal.
Customer Support
We’ve all had to deal with bad customer support. Sometimes you find yourself talking to someone halfway across the world and other times your support technician seems like a great fit for the sales department. Far too often have I been unable to make basic changes to a partner’s website because they weren’t paying for Super Premiere Upgraded Hosting for $9.99/mo. extra. WPEngine doesn’t do that. Wait times are short and their customer service is great no matter how much you pay.
The best thing about WPEngine’s customer support is having someone who understands your problems and knows enough about WordPress to fix them. They don’t just understand their hosting platform, they understand WordPress, and that takes a huge burden off our specialists when unforeseen problems arise.
At this point I think I have gushed enough about WPEngine. I’ll leave it at this – Their hosting is the best around. It’s good if you’re technically-savvy, and it’s great if you’re not. If you have a WordPress site, you should be using WPEngine. Also,
About the Author
Alex Darling is a digital marketing specialist. His specialties include technical SEO and process automation. He likes singing, board games, and spending an unhealthy amount of time on reddit.
