I put WP Engine up against SiteGround in a performance test and found which one is best value for money

SiteGround is one of the best web hosting providers and WP Engine is one of the best WordPress hosting providers but which one should you pick for the best small business web hosting or best ecommerce hosting?

To find out, I migrated an online store to each and ran some WordPress benchmark tests and some performance tests to see which one is better.

SiteGround vs WP Engine features and pricing

SiteGround

Starting at $2.99 a month for the first year( $17.99 a month after), SiteGround’s StartUp plan gives you a single website, 10GB of storage, unmetered traffic, and around 10,000 monthly visits. The plan is designed to accommodate spikes, rather than be a monthly limit. If your site regularly breaches the limit, you’ll be put on a more expensive plan, or your site will face performance restrictions.

This plan also includes free SSL, and a free domain and emails. Daily backups are provided, and the SiteGround Website Builder is also included This uses a combination of templates, themes, and AI content generation to help you get started.

SiteGround also includes speed and security optimization plugins, supports WooCommerce, and also has a WordPress “auto-migrator.” This is intended to simplify moving a WordPress site from another host.

WP Engine

Unsurprisingly given its name, WP Engine is a popular option for websites hosted on WordPress. We looked at the Essential package, which has four plans (Startup, Professional, Growth, and Scale). The Startup option, for $25 a month was selected – this is paid monthly, or annually ($300) without any discount.

(I discovered later that WP Engine also offers a cheaper plan, Lite (at around $12) but there is no information about this on the sign-up page.)

WP Engine’s Startup plan gives you a single site, 25,000 “visits” or monthly traffic, 10GB of storage, and 75GB of bandwidth. This might seem high, but for a small site it is effectively unmetered (unless vast amounts of data are being served). Again, both the traffic and bandwidth limits are in place to ensure optimum performance across WP Engine’s servers.

Some site building tools – themes and blocks – are provided, along with a staging environment. You also get SSL, DDoS protection, automated WordPress, PHP, and MySQL updates, CDN and caching, and DDoS protection. Site backups are daily and on-demand, and customer support is available 24/7 from WP Engine. Subdomains are permitted, but details on configuration and limits are sparse

Migration from another web host is possible using the WP Engine migration plugin.

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Back to back features and specifications
	Siteground	WPEngine
Price	$17.99	$25
Websites	1	1
Subdomains	Unlimited	Yes (see above)
Monthly traffic	10,000	25,000
Storage	10GB	10GB
Bandwidth	Unmetered	75GB
SSL	Yes	Yes
Control panel	Proprietary	Proprietary
WordPress installation	One-click	One-click
Free migration	Free plugin	Free plugin
Email accounts	Unlimited	No
Backups	Daily	Daily, on demand
CDN	Free	Free
Performance features	SSD storage	EverCache caching
Databases	Unlimited MySQL & PostgreSQL	Unlimited MySQL
FTP accounts	Unlimited	SFTP only
SSH access	Yes	Yes
Domain privacy	Add-on $12	No
Money-back guarantee	30 days	60 days
Security features	Malware, redundancy, DDoS	DDoS
Customer support	24/7	24/7

Migrated to each site is a WordPress site with a pre-configured WooCommerce store. The aim of this is to see how efficiently and reliably the hosts can handle requests. This isn’t just from a customer service angle, but also as a demonstration of how the hosting environment can handle data configured elsewhere.

Both hosts offer dedicated migration plugins that are designed to make this process easy. To make the comparison fair, I migrated the data from the same source.

SiteGround

Using the proprietary SG Migrate plugin wasn’t as simple as hoped. The idea is to install the plugin on both the source and destination web hosts, copy a key generated on the source to the destination, and wait for the data to transfer across. Unfortunately, the SG Migrate tool failed on every attempt. After trying All in One Migration and UpdraftPlus (and running into restrictions over backup size and storage location, and attempting to increase the upload limits in the wp-config file), I found another tool, Backup Migration, which executed a key-based data migration perfectly.

Initially it seemed as though the source of the migration (Hostinger’s Premium Web Hosting plan) might have been restricting the data. But given how effortless Backup Migration completed the process, it would seem that SG Migrate isn’t suited to this particular migration source.

SiteGround offers a paid migration service if you’re short of time.

WP Engine

The WP Engine Site Migration plugin is available shortly after signup, designed to copy database and site files and migrate them WP Engine hosting in one go. Again, it is simply a case of installing the same plugin on both the source and destination hosts.

Employing a similar key-based migration method, the process with WP Engine was absolutely flawless, completing in just a few minutes. No timeouts, no connection drops, just a simple, straightforward process. This is really encouraging, as unlike SiteGround, WP Engine doesn’t offer migration as a service. Instead, it’s all in your hands, and if it is always this easy, that shouldn’t matter.

Keep in mind that the source website was the same in each case – I’m drawn to suspect there is an issue with SG Migrate.

Support

You don’t want to find yourself out of options when your website goes wrong. How do these web hosts measure up when it comes to answering and resolving support requests?

SiteGround

While I had some difficulty with SiteGround for migration, our use of its customer service concerned a less urgent matter.

The manual migration process with SiteGround was simply too frustrating. Whether a fault of the plugin, the host, or the source host, I was getting nowhere. Yes, given the comparative simplicity of the task, I was too proud to ask for help from the support team. Finding a solution was a relief, but it should not have been so difficult.

A general view of SiteGround’s support team, based on our experiences, is that advanced support requests can take some time to be adequately dealt with. This should not be an issue with the majority of WordPress projects, however.

WP Engine

As you may have gauged from the table above, WP Engine skimps on a few features, such as Domain Privacy and email hosting. These are both things that other hosts offer. Learning about these comparative omissions was made easy by the AI-powered chat tool, accessible from within the WP Engine site portal (essentially a cPanel style interface).

Further exploration leads to the extensive knowledgebase, and where more specific information is required, the 24/7 support agents can be summoned. They’re very knowledgeable, and I found their responses to be quick and accurate. Access to support is available if not logged in, but a user PIN needs to be entered before you can get help from WP Engine.

Performance Testing

Websites are subjected to various threats to stability, from traffic spikes to targeted attacks. Shared hosting means other sites are hosted on the same server, so hosts should ensure all websites are able to deliver web pages efficiently. Prolonged or repeated traffic spikes can lead to sites being slowed down intentionally. Can WP Engine and SiteGround handle a growing amount of traffic? We used a pair of testing tools, Siege, and WordPress Benchmark, to find out.

WordPress Benchmark is a plugin that runs in WordPress admin and benchmarks the CPU, memory, filesystem, and database, along with the object cache and the network speed of the site. It provides individual ratings for each of these, along with a final benchmark score.

Siege is a command line tool that tests for response time, concurrent requests, and returned data, as well as how many hits and the amount of data (in bytes) it sends to the site.

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WordPress Benchmark
	SiteGround	WP Engine
CPU & memory
Operations with large text data	6.36	6.9
Random binary data operations	8.04	7.93
Recursive mathematical calculations	7.52	5.06
Iterative mathematical calculations	7.98	7.9
Filesystem	Row 6 – Cell 1
Filesystem write ability	9.21	7.79
Local file copy and access speed	9.31	8.25
Small file IO test	10	9.76
Database
Importing large amount of data to database	6.74	1.94
Simple queries on single table	9.26	6.66
Complex database queries on multiple tables	6.26	5.78
Object cache
Persistent object cache enabled	0	0
Network
Network download speed test	10	9.5
Server score	7.4	6.4

Various tests are grouped by type. We’re mostly interested in the CPU & memory, filesystem, and database tests, along with the final score.

As demonstrated here, SiteGround scores higher than WP Engine. While the filesystem write is marginally better, the main difference is the database benchmarking. Here, WP Engine performs poorly in comparison.

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Siege Table
	SiteGround		WP Engine
	5 concurrent	9 concurrent	5 concurrent	9 concurrent
Transactions	12941	22396	9583	17028
Availability	99.92	100.00	96.28	96.31
Elapsed time	299.21	299.45	299.70	299.33
Data transferred	125.87	217.56	106.63	189.25
Response time	0.11	0.12	0.15	0.15
Transaction rate	43.25	74.79	31.98 2	56.89
Throughput	0.42	0.73	0.36	0.63
Concurrency	4.96	8.98	4.84	8.51
Successful transactions	12941	22396	9578	17028
Failed transactions	10	0	370	652
Longest transaction	0.48	1.34	2.25	5.67
Shortest transaction	0.08	0.08	0.09	0.08

Testing with Siege to see how the server handles transactions and concurrency, I ran two tests on each site, both at peak times. One test simulated 5 visitors, and the other simulated 9 visitors.

Based on this testing WP Engine seems to be around 25% slower than SiteGround. Using these results as a guide, you would expect visitors to a site and store running on WordPress with SiteGround hosting to experience faster page loading and responses (such as adding items to a cart, completing orders, etc.)

However, while these results are favourable towards SiteGround, keep in mind that various factors can influence the score, not least the available resources of the shared servers at the time of testing.

Verdict

I’ve spent quite some time with each of these WordPress hosting providers, and both fulfill that role perfectly. But do I have a preference?

Prior to testing, I was leaning towards WP Engine, but in comparing the budget offerings of each host, SiteGround is clearly the better option.

WP Engine is more expensive, and its custom, tailored WordPress-focused hosting does seem to miss out a few features that are common with other web hosts, such as email. In its favour, the migration was straightforward, the control panel is fast, and it feels more suited to WordPress hosting.

But SiteGround did better with both WordPress Benchmark and Siege, and it is more affordable. Migration might be an issue, but hopefully you follow my lead and use a specific third party tool.

So, if you want something that feels more suited to WordPress, and you have the budget, WP Engine is a good choice. Otherwise, SiteGround’s discount signup and speed is the better option.

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I put WP Engine up against SiteGround in a performance test and found which one is best value for money

SiteGround vs WP Engine features and pricing

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