Looking for the best hosting site for your WordPress website, you’re bound to come across these two popular and reputable WordPress hosting companies – WP Engine and SiteGround. Both hosting sites offer hosting services, especially for WordPress, but which of them is the best? Choosing between them can be very difficult.

However, in this comparison guide, we will explore the features, services, and performance of each web host as well as the pros and cons, and what value customers will get for their money.

By the end of this WP Engine vs. SiteGround comparison guide, you’ll be able to choose the most suitable host for your WordPress website.

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WP Engine vs. Siteground: An overview

SiteGround was launched in 2004 and had since been providing general-purpose hosting packages for all business before adding a managed WordPress hosting plan to its product lineup. WP Engine, on the other hand, was launched in 2010 and has grown to become one of the major providers of the premium managed WordPress hosting plan.

SiteGround is more affordable than WP Engine, offers more bandwidth and storage options, and hosts other sites that are not WordPress. WP Engine has more uptime and better, more refined WordPress features than SiteGround. However, several complaints have been made about WP Engine’s annoying sales reps. By comparing all features, SiteGround is the ultimate winner except if you will be hosting only a WordPress site.

WP Engine vs. Siteground: Hosting Plan

WP Engine is a premium, managed WordPress hosting company. It offers three main shared hosting plans for WordPress sites, including two other higher-performance hosting options.

SiteGround offers suitable and affordable hosting services for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs) and Bloggers. Like WP Engine, SiteGround has three main shared hosting plans, in addition to enterprise hosting and higher-end dedicated server options.

For this comparison guide, we will compare WP Engine’s shared hosting entry-level personal plan and SiteGround’s GoGeek plan. These two plans have similar pricing, although SiteGround offers price reduction when you pay annually.

Both plans are good choices for WordPress users because they offer servers that are optimized for WordPress software. More so, both plans are pre-installed with WordPress for an easy website launch.

WP Engine’s Personal Plan vs. SiteGround’s GoGeek Plan

*Staging site is like a dummy URL to create a copy of your website. It’s a place where you can carry out testing and development work before applying the changes to your live site. Both WP Engine and SiteGround offer a staging website. 

Creating a staging site for your website on both plans is very easy and incredibly straightforward. However, while WP Engine enables you to create the staging site inside your WordPress admin area, creating the staging site on SiteGround takes place via your external control panel (cPanel) dashboard.

More Features

Both plans offer managed WordPress hosting, which makes installing and using your site much easier. You also don’t need to be bothered by cyber-attacks, hacking, or downtime, as your site will be monitored on both plans 24/7.

Both plans offer easy installation (one-click installation) of an SSL Certificate at no extra cost. You will also enjoy a free CDN service and daily backups on both plans. Both of them offer an amazing caching service – WP Engine features SuperCacher while SiteGround offers EverCache. This feature reduces the time required to generate a webpage by more than half, doubling your website’s speed.

Amongst both hosting companies, SiteGround is known for its fast premium support. For instance, the only way to contact the customer support team on WP Engine Personal plan is through the 24hrs live chat channel, while other plans offer 24hrs phone support and ticket support.

For the SiteGround GoGeek plan, customers can contact the customer support team through the 24hrs phone support, live chat, and the ticketing system. SiteGround gives priority to support requests from GoGeek customers.

Both WP Engine and SiteGround allows easy and quick migration (importation) of your WordPress website. That means, if you already have your WordPress site hosted with another company, you can move it to either WP Engine or SiteGround without a problem. 

WP Engine has an automated migration plugin that facilitates the moving of your WordPress site from another host to the WP Engine’s hosting plan. SiteGround, on the other hand, offers one free website migration for new customers.

Note: Although the WP Engine’s personal plan has some limits, especially on the number of visitors and WordPress site, you can exceed this limit by paying overage charges of at $14.99/month per site. Although the SiteGround GoGeek plan doesn’t have limits, your site may suffer from performance issues due to an increase in the number of visitors or activities.

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WP Engine vs. Siteground: Pricing

Here’s the pricing information for both WP Engine and SiteGround:

WP Engine offers three pricing plans – Personal, Professional, and Business. The WP Engine Personal plan costs $29 per month but gives two months free if paid annually.

SiteGround also offers three pricing plans – StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek. The GoGeek plan costs $29.95 per month but is reduced to $11.95 per month if paid annually.

Both plans offer money-back-guarantees. WP Engine gives you a 60-days money-back-guarantee, while SiteGround gives you a 30-days money-back guarantee.

WP Engine vs. Siteground: Speed and Uptime

The site’s speed and uptime are very important factors that should be considered when choosing a web hosting company. Nobody likes a slow site. Chances are that your site visitors would abandon your site if it takes too long to respond. Hence, the site’s speed is essential.

Likewise, your site’s uptime is important because your site visitors expect your site to be available all the time. If your site goes down frequently, then you may lose most of your visitors. Both WP Engine and SiteGround claim to offer hosting plans with high availability and superfast browsing experiences. However, we decided to test their claims.

We built a WordPress site on both plans, installed the same theme, and added the same dummy text and visual content. We then conducted a speed and uptime test on these websites using Pingdom. The test result showed that the site on WP Engine took only 582ms to load while the site on SiteGround took 649ms to load.

The same test was conducted using Load Impact and Bitcatcha. Load Impact revealed that as the number of users on SiteGround site hits 50 users at a time, there were a few spikes before it quickly recovered, and the load times kept on steady. For WP Engine, the number of users at a time didn’t affect the page speed and performance.

When the response time was measure with Bitcatcha from 8 different geographical locations – Australia, Japan, Singapore, India, Brazil, London, LA, and New York – WP Engine was rated A while SiteGround was rated D.

WP Engine vs. Siteground: Pros and Cons

This comparison guide will not be complete without a list of the pros and cons of each plan. Here is a brief list of the pros and cons of each web host:

WP Engine Personal Plan Pros:

• A 60-day money-back guarantee 
• Award-winning customer support. 
• Premium-managed WordPress hosting services.
• Free post-hack cleanup service. Although WP Engine offers safety measures to protect your site from being hacked, your site may get hacked due to human errors. If this happens, WP Engine has well-experienced professionals that will get your website up and running for you.

WP Engine Personal Plan Cons:

• Pricing plans can be very costly for a newbie blogger or business owner.
• The personal plan only offers customer support through the Live Chat.
• WP Engine doesn’t offer a migration service on its own. Users have to install a migration plugin. However, the plugin is free and offered by WP Engine.

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Siteground GoGeek Plan Pros:

• Free site migration service.
• A 30-day money-back guarantee.
• Unlimited free email accounts for your domain.
• Unlimited data transfer.
• Premium customer support with less than 5mins response time.
• Offers 30GB of disk space.
• Allows 100,000 visitors per month  
• Hosting plans are much cheaper than that of WP Engine, with more server resources.

Siteground GoGeek Plan Cons:

• SiteGround is not a premium-managed WordPress hosting company.
• Offers just a 30-day money-back guarantee.

WP Engine vs. Siteground: Conclusion

From our personal experience and customer reviews, SiteGround offers the best hosting service for users who need an affordable hosting solution or are just getting started with a new website. SiteGround provides a wide range of necessary features at affordable rates to get your website up and running.

WP Engine, on the other hand, is best suited for SMBs, marketers, and developers who want to streamline their marketing and development processes without shouldering the responsibilities of hosting maintenance. Hopefully, this comparison guide has helped you to find a better hosting service for your website.

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