4.8

Searching for the best WooCommerce hosting for your store?

In this WP Engine WooCommerce review, I’m going to take a hands-on look at WP Engine’s new dedicated WooCommerce hosting plans, in detail, and help you to decide if they’re the right choice for your WooCommerce store.

WP Engine have long been one of the top managed WordPress hosting providers. But, for most of their existence, they’ve only offered a generic managed WordPress plan. Sure, you could certainly host a WooCommerce store on that plan, but the experience hasn’t specifically been built for it.

That changed in early 2021 when WP Engine launched new dedicated eCommerce hosting plans that offered everything in the regular WP Engine plans, plus a number of features and optimizations specifically for WooCommerce stores.

In this review, I’m going to focus on WP Engine’s WooCommerce hosting plans and features.

I’ll touch on some general WP Engine features as part of that, but my main goal with this review is to help you to decide whether WP Engine is a good place to host a WooCommerce store. 

If you’re not launching an eCommerce store, or if you just want to learn more about WP Engine in general, you may want to check out our general WP Engine review instead.

To kick things off, I want to talk about the features that are unique to WP Engine’s eCommerce plans versus their regular hosting plans.

But first, let’s talk about the similarities. When you use the eCommerce plans, you’re still getting access to all of the general features WP Engine offer, including:

·         built-in caching

·         built-in content delivery network (CDN)

·         firewalls

·         malware scanning

·         automatic backups

·         staging sites

·         free SSL certificates

·         and so on.

Basically, the eCommerce plans give you access to every single feature you’d get with the normal WP Engine managed WordPress hosting plans. Again, you can learn about those in our general WP Engine review.

But then, the eCommerce plans also give you some ‘extra’ stuff that’s specific to WooCommerce. Let’s go through those additional goodies.

TAILORED DASHBOARD AND SITE SETUP EXPERIENCES

WP Engine have always offered a user-friendly custom hosting dashboard, along with an easy WordPress installer tool.

For the eCommerce plans, though, they make some adjustments to these to adapt them to eCommerce. You get a dedicated WooCommerce installer that sets up a fully functioning store right away, along with some unique features in the dashboard. I’ll show you exactly how these work in the next section.

OPTIMIZED CACHING AND PERFORMANCE

WP Engine offer built-in server-level caching on all of their plans to improve performance. However, caching can cause issues with WooCommerce stores, which means you can’t just apply it to your entire site like you can with a blog or brochure website.

To account for this, WP Engine have built their caching and performance optimization platform specifically to work well with WooCommerce. Beyond the WooCommerce-optimized caching, WP Engine also build in a global CDN for your store.

Later in the review, I’ll show you data from the performance tests I ran on my store hosted at WP Engine.

BETTER PRODUCT SEARCH POWERED BY ELASTICSEARCH

Excluding the cheapest tier, all of WP Engine’s eCommerce plans come with built-in Elasticsearch powered by the ElasticPress plugin at no extra cost. I think this is one of the most useful features in WP Engine’s eCommerce plans, especially for stores with lots of products.

If you’re not familiar with Elasticsearch, it essentially offloads your site’s search indexing to a separate Elasticsearch instance, which completely takes the load off your WordPress site’s database. Instead, Elasticsearch will build its own search index and use that to power your store’s search results. As a result, your site won’t need to query your WordPress database for every single product search, which will speed up your store on both the front end and back end, and help it to perform better under scale.

But it’s not just about performance — Elasticsearch also offers a better, more accurate search experience for your shoppers, which is essential for eCommerce stores. Your store’s results will be more accurate out-of-the-box and then you also get the following features:

·         Autosuggest — suggest products as soon as a shopper starts typing.

·         Faceted search — let people filter by price, category, attribute, and so on.

·         Related content — use Elasticsearch’s index to power your store’s related content.

·         Custom search results — manually override certain search terms to showcase specific products/content. This is great for promoting high-value products.

·         Algorithm weighting — manually adjust the search algorithm weighting according to your preferences.

·         Synonyms — set up your own custom search synonyms, e.g. linking ‘sneakers’ with ‘trainers’ to account for regional variations.

You can set up your own Elasticsearch instance if you host your store somewhere else but doing that is either going to be very complicated or very expensive, so having this service bundled in at no extra cost is a big benefit.

For example, if you paid ElasticPress directly to host an Elasticsearch instance for you, the cheapest option is $79 a month, which is already more than you’d pay for the entire WP Engine Professional eCommerce hosting plan.

DEDICATED ECOMMERCE STORE OPTIMIZER PLUGIN

If you use WP Engine’s WooCommerce installer to create your store, they’ll automatically install an eCommerce Store Optimizer plugin that they say will ‘boost sales on your eCommerce store with performance enhancements, beautiful page layouts and an effortless setup experience’.

I asked WP Engine support what ‘performance enhancements’ the plugin makes, but I didn’t get a specific answer beyond ‘optimizing your site for the WP Engine infrastructure’.

So, I can’t prove this plugin will make a difference in your store’s performance, but I do trust the WP Engine team that there are some improvements in that area.

DEDICATED WOOCOMMERCE BLOCKS AND LAYOUTS

To help with designing your store, WP Engine bundle in the Genesis Blocks Pro plugin at no extra cost, which adds new blocks and layouts to the WordPress Editor.

It’s not a huge deal, but getting access to some WooCommerce-specific block layouts is nice for designing your store.

BUNDLED SMART AUTOMATIC PLUGIN UPDATES

This feature isn’t specific to the eCommerce hosting plans (you can also get it with the ‘Plus’ plan), but I think it’s really useful and thus worth the mention.

In WordPress 5.5, WordPress added support for automatic plugin updates. But there’s a big problem with just using the core feature: The updates are ‘dumb’. That is, if an automatic update causes a problem on your site, there’s nothing in the system to address that, so you’d better hope you’re around to handle the issue.

WP Engine’s Smart Plugin Manager feature fixes that by adding visual verification to the update process. Essentially, it will compare how your site looks before and after applying the update by testing 20 different pages. If anything looks different (which would indicate a bug of some sort), WP Engine will automatically roll your site back to the backup they take right before starting the update process.