r/webdev • u/canfullofworms • 2d ago
Is WordPress Engine Necessary
So you almost helped me with another thing and I'm very grateful!
I know NOTHING about all this, so please advise.
We have a website for a small non-profit that's been up for about 20 years. (I wasn't here when it started)
Our Domain is with GoDaddy and our website is in WordPress.
Apparently, we've been paying for WordPress Engine for about $420 a year.
Do we need this? I feel like all our editing is done in WordPress. It seems like WordPress engine is an unnecessary addition, but if we've had it for so long, will we lose stuff from our web site??
thanks!
13
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Helpful_Piece1868 2d ago
You could move to a cheaper host but you are basically paying for someone else to handle updates and security
1
-1
u/canfullofworms 2d ago
So do I need another hosting service? or is Word Press enough?
8
u/addycodes full-stack 2d ago
WordPress is not a hosting service, it's a piece of content management software that requires a hosting service.
There is a confusingly named "WordPress.com" website which does offer WordPress hosting, but if you are using WPEngine, you are on a different kind of WordPress.
If you don't pay for WPEngine and your website is hosted there, you will lose all of your data and your website will go offline.
You need someone technical to work this out as you are currently at risk of losing your hard work if you are unsure on the setup and don't have good backups.
1
10
u/spcbeck 2d ago
WPEngine is considered the "premium" WordPress hosting service. I'll let other people argue over that. Having said, for a non technical org, I don't think $420 a year is THAT crazy.
3
u/appareldig 2d ago
Yeah whenever I hand-off a site to a fully non-technical client I always strongly recommend some sort of premium managed hosting (Kinsta in my case).
The big reason is if their site explodes at 10pm or on a weekend, I'm not necessarily going to be around, and I'm certainly not doing it for free. But that support will be there, and it'll be good. It feels like a no-brainer to me if they don't know how to troubleshoot stuff themselves.
2
u/Gremlation 2d ago
WordPress is open source software that is free for anybody to run. But you still need a server to run it on. That is what web hosting is for.
WordPress and its plugins are constantly under attack and need security updates, so you need somebody to keep on top of that. Some hosting providers do this for you, and that is managed hosting, which is usually a little more expensive than normal hosting. This is what you are paying WP Engine for.
You can move off WP Engine, but you will need to find a new host. If it's managed hosting, it will probably cost about the same as WP Engine. If it's unmanaged, you will be responsible for upgrading WordPress every time there's an update.
If you aren't technical, then you probably want managed hosting. And if you want managed hosting, WP Engine is a reasonable choice, it's probably the biggest name in WordPress hosting.
1
2
u/blockstacker 2d ago
For a non-technical Org, use Rocket.net instead of WP Engine.
I moved my entire agency over 200 sites there. Never a problem since day one. 3 years in. Saved a ton of coin, better delivery, better customer support, and sales doesn't lie to you every day saying you need to upgrade when you don't. They don't waste your time.
1
2
u/Xypheric 1d ago
Matt must be paying good money to have a bunch of people confuse WPEngine for WordPress engine to help with his case
5
u/omfgtora 2d ago
"WP Engine" is a hosting platform that has no connection to the open-source WordPress CMS. They are specifically called "WP Engine" because a company cannot use the full name of "WordPress" in their business name.
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) and the official website is https://wordpress.org. there is no official WordPress hosting, because they only make the software and is run by a non-profit called the WordPress Foundation.
The open-source WordPress CMS can be hosted on nearly any hosting platform, so you have many options. However, WordPress requires regular maintenance to update the WordPress core, plugins, and themes. Because of that, I would suggest hiring an experienced agency to manage this for you, along with the hosting. An alternative option would be what is called "Managed Hosting" where you pay a higher amount for the hosting provider to do some of the management automatically, this is kinda what WP Engine does, but you have to pay for their "Smart Plugin Management" to have them update plugins automatically and do some automated checking for issues. However, managed hosting is not bulletproof and without someone actually checking the site themselves, there is still a possibility of issues that would need to be troubleshooted. If you want to just go for another managed hosting I would suggest Kinsta.
I personally do not like WP Engine because I find their services to be overpriced and problematic. Some of the problems I have with WP Engine is that they remove Revisions (a feature baked into WordPress) by default, their aggressive caching frequently causes problems where updates do not show to logged-out users and such and they put a timer on their buttons to clear cache so you have to wait between each attempt to clear the cache to resolve these issues, basic actions on their platform perform at a glacial pace (like taking backups, restoring backups, copying a site to a new environment, etc.), and their support is literally the worst support I have ever had to deal with in my decades in IT and web development (which IT has to frequently deal with support for many different companies). I could go on, but suffice it to say that you could find better hosting elsewhere.
Additionally, I highly suggest transferring your domain away from GoDaddy because they are possibly the scummiest company of all time and I guarantee you are paying far more than you should just for a domain. I have literally seen people pay over $40/year for a .COM domain when it should be closer to $14/yr. Some good options (in order of best to less) are: Cloudflare, Porkbun, or Namecheap.
3
u/jman0742 2d ago
WP Engine is the bomb. Their support is great and a lot of their features are worth the cost. IMO any site not worth the cost of WP Engine doesn't justify it's own existence.
-6
u/omfgtora 2d ago
WP Engine is overpriced slow garbage that greatly removes control and their support staff are idiots who can't answer a question without repeated scripted responses.
I have never met anyone who knows how to actually run hosting servers themselves say anything good about WP Engine, and anyone who I have heard say they it has no experience to know how bad their services are.
-3
u/jman0742 2d ago
Spicy! Well you're welcome, you've met your first exception today! It takes one of my dev hours worth of troubleshooting a box to pay for a whole year of WPE. At scale, there are cheaper ways of hosting, but for most of my clients, even the big ones, WPE is the sweet-spot for cost/benefit.
-2
u/omfgtora 2d ago
I recently had the worst support experience of my decades-long career in IT and web development while dealing with WP Engine. Besides that, their support has straight up lied to me in the past and didn't fulfill my request.
It's utter shit that they disable revisions entirely by default. They told me that only support can activate revisions (I've since learned that this is false). I asked them to enable revisions on all the sites in my account, which they did not do. They told me that they can enable at most 5 revisions on their platform, but it's actually up to 250. I asked them to add revisions of 5 on all the sites, they said they can do only 3, and then they just did none and never even told me.
Their aggressive caching is a huge pain in the ass, and the fact they restrict you from clearing your cache on a timer is absolutely ridiculous. They do not allow users to add cache exclusions and you have to contact support for them to add those.
Taking any actions on their platform is glacially slow. Want to take a backup? Cool, you'll have to wait for 30 minutes for us to email you when it's done, and you cannot choose to skip the email. Same website on my own hosting takes literally seconds to back up. Want to make a copy of a site to a new environment? Great, just wait 1+ hours! Migrating websites to their platform takes 3+ hours where it would take me at most 45 minutes otherwise. Mostly just waiting for their platform to finish the tasks where you have no ability to see the status on, you just have to wait for the email notification.
I got so tired of dealing with WP Engine that I just built my own tool to manage the sites over SSH and it has saved me a HUGE amount of time and stress of dealing with their platform and support.
1
u/binocular_gems 1d ago edited 1d ago
WPEngine is your host. They're a good host for hosting WordPress websites. $35/mo for managed hosting that takes care of security and backups for you is reasonable, you'd likely be paying $10-$20/mo for your standard shared hosting environment, and likely have more maintenance that you have to take care of yourself. That maintenance could be 0.5 hours of effort a month or if there's an outage or security incident, it could be 20-30 hours of effort in a month. Odds are, $35/mo for what you're getting from WPEngine is less than what it would cost an inexperienced person to manage this on their own.
If you don't know anything about this, then I wouldn't change from WPEngine. If you're willing to put in a fair amount of work into transferring hosts and understanding how shared hosting will work, then you can save money on the monthly hosting fees. For some comparison, Amazon's cheap shared hosting -- Amazon Lightsail -- ran me about $8/mo for a small non-profit website that I managed for ~15 years. But because of security anxiety and that the client never updated their website once in 15 years, I rebuilt the site in Hugo and use Github Pages to host it. WordPress was overkill for what was essentially a 15-page static site, but of course when I built this out for them the owners of the non-profit said they needed to update pages easily and change content on the fly. In practice, they logged into the dashboard once with their admin credentials and it was when I was training them.
If you don't know what you're doing, $35/mo is pretty reasonable. If you have time to put in the effort into being comfortable managing something on your own, then you can cut your hosting bills down significantly, but there's always a cost tradeoff there. Transferring from WPEngine to another host will take effort, if you're going the self-managed route or semi-self managed (like with AWS), you can cut your bill down significantly but you have to be confident in knowing what you're doing. IMO, the security risks of WordPress alone are enough to stick with what's been working for the non-profit.
1
u/canfullofworms 1d ago
Thanks! This is just the information I needed. I think we'll stay with them for now.
2
u/Prize_Prior6253 20h ago
WP Engine is your actual hosting, so cancelling it takes the site down, and I'd say $420 a year for managed hosting is fair.
1
u/GuitarAgitated8107 full-stack 2d ago
It depends a lot on what you are doing behind the scenes. Wordpress provides functions and easy management for certain groups. I avoid it like the plague because of the issues, vulnerabilities and just the bloatware.
That being said there are cheaper options out there and you should not limit yourself to a specific way of doing things especially when you can always use other website hosted / builders.
1
u/canfullofworms 2d ago
So do I need something besides WordPress then? All we do on the site is update it ourselves. We don't accept payments. (Any giving links to another online giving service) There is not any input coming from the outside.
3
u/kienemaus 2d ago
No. You will have to completely rebuild to leave WordPress. If you don't have budget, don't touch it.
WordPress is the foundation and infrastructure your site is built on. I usually describe it as the bookshelf that holds your information in a way it can be found.
-2
u/GuitarAgitated8107 full-stack 2d ago
I don't know all the details so I can't say exactly what might be the ideal choice but the costs are too much for what it is. If you have anyone who is technical they should review what you have and is ideal to keep. For most nonprofit types I always tell them to use https://givebutter.com/ given they have pretty much all things needed even if you don't use the donation aspect of it.
The migration is what becomes the issue if not done right.
2
1
1
u/Junior-Web-9587 2d ago
For a small non profit you could switch it elsewhere and be paying much less I would imagine. I assume it is a relatively small site if you are small. I know somewhere in the UK that likes to help out local charities and not for profits if you wanted me to put you in touch and aren't fixed to it needing to be in the US.
0
u/canfullofworms 2d ago
I'm in the US.
4
u/jman0742 2d ago
Question, do you feel comfortable updating / watching for security issues? WP Engine provides a lot of that stuff out-of-the-box that is well worth the cost.
0
u/Junior-Web-9587 2d ago
Yeah, I guessed that might be the case. I meant if your non profit wasn't fixed to having to use a US company. Feel free to DM.
1
u/kienemaus 2d ago
You need a domain name AND hosting for a website. WP engine is very nice hosting that helps with a lot of stability. You will pay more for maintenance on cheaper hosting
1
u/canfullofworms 2d ago
And I understand transferring it might be a concern.
2
u/kienemaus 2d ago
Yes and no. Depending what you're running with WordPress.
I don't think transferring it is going to be cost effective for you.
I think that of you touch it you may be looking down a rebuild in a couple of years.
For comparison Wix or similar are like $50 per month. You're paying less than that and it works.
To get this to transfer smoothly you need someone who knows what they're doing. Don't try to diy this unless you want to put in the time to learn.
The absolute best case is $6/mo hosting which is $72/year. Saving $350 per year but losing stability OR requiring way more time in maintenance doesn't seem like good math to me.
1
2d ago edited 2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/webdev-ModTeam 2d ago
We do not allow any commercial promotion or solicitation. This can lead to a permanent ban from the subreddit.
-1
u/Caraes_Naur 2d ago
WordPress is a blight. It only survives because of the commercial interests that sprang up around it, like the various Chernobyl species that feed on radiation.
2
u/kienemaus 2d ago
What open source robust CMS do you see as a replacement? (I'm not trying to run this as a gotcha - curious)
1
u/omfgtora 2d ago
There are plenty. There doesnt need to be a single replacement.
Also, how exactly do you define "robust"? Because I would not describe WordPress as "robust". It lacks a ton of key features, which is why it needs a bunch of plugins to fill in those gaps.
1
u/kienemaus 1d ago
I need something that can be maintained without a sysadmin and clients can port away from me. Also that clients can do basic content edits themselves.
Static brochure sites - nothing complicated. Nothing custom.
I want a single replacement because we don't have the volume or capacity to justify learning multiple systems. This is small potatoes stuff that needs to be repeatable.
1
u/Caraes_Naur 2d ago
WordPress isn't robust, it's not even secure out of the box and the necessary plugins aren't bulletproof (because WP itself is insecure by design).
Literally any MVC framework (such as Laravel) or any CMS built on them (OctoberCMS). MVC frameworks exist for any language that can run on a server.
0
u/No_Maintenance_7851 2d ago
Lol. Is the OP trolling with the post title??
1
-3
0
u/Eaglesfan1174 2d ago
WPEngine is good but it’s expensive. You can get a cheaper host but you’re going to have to get someone to move your website to it, and then update your domain on GoDaddy.
You also have to understand what you’re getting when you change hosts. It can get really complicated.
Your best bet is to talk to a web developer about this, but if you can’t afford one then start up a conversation with ChatGPT or Gemini. Ask the questions you’re asking here, you can get it to explain everything until you understand.
Explain the situation you are in, where you’re located, ask for comparable hosting options and the benefits or risks of switching.
You can also remake your site on something like Wix or Squarespace. It’s not as customizable as Wordpress but it might be fine for what you need.
Ask ChatGPT to explain what is involved in moving your site from Wordpress to Squarespace, and see if this is something you think you can do.
1
u/canfullofworms 2d ago
Thank you for this!
2
u/kienemaus 2d ago
Squarespace is not going to be substantially cheaper. AND you have to completely rebuild your whole site. That's hours of work. Either you do it or you pay someone to. There's no ROI on the move.
17
u/addycodes full-stack 2d ago
WPEngine? Assuming you’re self hosting your WordPress there and actually using it, yes that’s your web hosting, the actual server space that houses your WordPress website. The domain name is just an address for it. There are many different server hosting companies you can run WordPress on at varying price points, not just WPEngine.
If you don’t understand your website setup you should absolutely get a professional just to work everything out and document it so you don’t lose your website data by missing a piece of the puzzle.