10 Ways We Improved The WP Engine Platform In 2015
At WP Engine, we’re committed to making your WordPress experience great. One way we do that is by continually improving our platform to better meet your business needs. In 2015, we made several improvements to our platform to provide you a seamless WordPress hosting experience. Here’s a sampling of some of the changes made in 2015.
1. We removed bot traffic from overage calculations
In October, we made updates to our overage policy so you are no longer charged for overages based on bot traffic.
To learn more about bot traffic, check out our guide to understanding the bot invasion.
2. We made it easier to secure your site with SSL
Not only is it imperative to have an SSL certificate to help your site in search rankings, but it also builds trust in those visiting your site. Setting up SSL with your WordPress site is now easier than ever and can be done through your user portal. In addition, SSL is now available to customers on our Personal plan.
To learn more, download our free SSL white paper.
3. GeoIP helps you go global
At the start of 2015, we launched WP Engine GeoIP. This powerful technology allows you to personalize and serve dynamic web content to visitors based on their location, enabling you to only show what’s relevant in a visitor’s specific geography.
For more on GeoIP, check out our free ebook.
4. We gave the user portal a facelift
Based on customer feedback, we made a few changes to the WP Engine user portal, including a refined look, simplified features, and improved install navigation.
5. WP Engine Search entered Alpha stage
This year we launched the Alpha project for WP Engine Search. Powered by Elasticsearch, this technology offers a speedy and accurate search experience, along with a full text search engine, among other benefits.
6. Site backups got better
We made significant improvements to how site backups work, including adding strong encryption, an uploads directory, and more.
7. Migrate your site to our platform in minutes
Migrating your WordPress site to WP Engine is now even easier thanks to the WP Engine Automated Migration plugin. This solution eliminates the time and complexity often required to migrate a WordPress site from one platform to another.
8. Updating WordPress is a breeze with One-Click WordPress Core Upgrades
With One-Click WordPress Core Upgrades, you can easily update your WordPress site to the latest version of WordPress with the click of a button rather than having to contact support about it, or waiting for WP Engine to upgrade your site for you. You can also see which version of WordPress your site is running, as well as defer the upgrade to the next version if you’d like.
9. PHP 7 testing is available in Mercury Vagrant
You can now test PHP 7 in Mercury Vagrant (HGV) 1.5 to compare its speed against HHVM. The latest version of HGV also includes a toggle feature that allows you to test and compare PHP 7, PHP 5, and HHVM. (See here for a speed comparison we did between the three.)
10. Upgrade Deferral is an option with WordPress Core Upgrades
You can now request to defer a WordPress Core Upgrade for up to 60 days, rather than having your site update automatically. This is beneficial should you need more time to prepare your site prior to upgrading the WordPress core.
What changes would you like to see take place in 2016? Leave a comment with your top feature requests in the section below.
Thanks for reading and have a wonderful 2016!
Have you considered incorporating Cloudflare into your service. I have lost a ton of money this December because your service is constantly subjected to DDOS attacks and my web site if offline or so slow it might as well be. I’m already evaluating replacement hosting services. You people are clowns.
Hi there. We have multiple levels of DDoS mitigation with our service including the use of Cloudflare; however, this was a global large-scale DDoS attack targeting infrastructure providers, data centers, and Internet Backbones that WP Engine happens to be down stream from. This size, scale and sophistication of this particular attack is a *very* unusual event that affected hundreds of thousands of websites beyond WP Engine. Our update here https://wpenginestatus.com/intermittent-connectivity-issues-in-two-us-datacenters/#more-‘ provides more details on the attack and how we plan on mitigating moving forward. Additionally, we can put you in touch with a sales rep who can chat about the availability of geographically redundant hosting, which is the only way to defend against data center / Internet Backbone provider wide issues like this DDoS attack.
Thanks for all your hard work in 2015. You have always been my favorite hosting provider.
However, my clients are extremely unhappy that there have been 3 times in the last 30 days that sites are down. What are you doing to ensure this does not happen again? They are asking for alternative hosting platforms.
Hi Terrance,
I’m sorry to hear your clients are unhappy. Here’s some more information about what happened and what’s being done:
https://wpenginestatus.com/intermittent-connectivity-issues-in-two-us-datacenters/#more-‘
Thank you,
-Andrew
It’s great to see WP Engine being developed on an ongoing basis. I have particularly welcomed the automated migration plugin and removing bots from your overage calculations in 2015. For 2016, I would like to see WP Engine offering a white label service – at the moment all our clients know we are using WP Engine because there’s a WP Engine link in the Dashboard and the temporary URL and staging site URL contain ‘wpengine’, so it’s impossible to use your services in a white label way. I would love to be able to reword the ‘WP Engine’ section of the admin and choose white label URL’s for the temporary and staging sites so that it becomes my decision whether to tell clients which host we are using. Thanks for listening!
My wishlist for 2016: PHP7 and HTTP2.