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Curious if others here have had the same experience over the past several months?
We regularly work on sites owned by more than 100 clients on WP Engine accounts and anything that is not the completely cached front-end experience regularly slows to a crawl. Logging in, loading a page editor, etc.
It feels like they are over-crowding their server resources and throwing every caching trick in the book at the installations (and "Advanced Network") to keep the public-facing site usable.
I get it, in a way: You should avoid being wasteful. As a corporation, you should maximize profit. But when the experience is negatively impacted to the point that we actively dislike using the service, it's too much.
edit: typo
There is the Pitch Drop. A close runner up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_expe-up.
Personally I haven’t noticed this on any of my client sites with WP Engine, they all seem to run the same as they always have. Were they ever the fastest sites on the planet? Heck no. But I haven’t noticed any difference lately.
Moved to Cloudways from WP Engine for my main site. Instant performance improvement.
Edit: WPE definitely has people working the sub, no way 14 downvotes happen in a few minutes on this fairly low traffic sub
100% agree, lately it’s starting to lag – I’m out
I’ve noticed issues off and on but generally these have been when Cloudflare as had an issue going on as well. Nothing that has lasted more than a few hrs or a day and I’ve not bothered to keep a log of it since I personally have not been able to replicate it but I do know a few were at the sametime Cloudflare was having an issue.
> As a corporation, you should maximix profit. But when the experience is negatively impacted to the point that we actively dislike using the service, it’s too much.
When did big corporations care about anything else than the **quarter profits**? They are alien to terms like long term customers, customer retention, customer satisfaction. They would rather throw hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing and PR instead of investing maybe a dozen or so thousands of dollars in infrastructure.
They would rather hire 100 low-wage support agents from 3rd world countries that don’t know the difference between php version and php extension (personal true story) instead of paying maybe 10 of them decently and have pro-level support.
(Not throwing shade at WP-Engine, though OP is not the first person I hear this story from, I have at least a dozen clients complaining of unnecessary upsells, slowdowns and just price over all compared to the value they’re getting)
I notice it occasionally. But being in the industry for 25 years, I’ve never experienced a web host where they are performing quickly 100% of the time.
Overselling is a common problem for most shared hosting providers.
At the same time, caching is a good thing in itself because it decreases the initial response time. And there’s nothing wrong with having it enabled and working.
We moved a few large WooCommerce stores to separate AWS EC2 instances to reduce costs and achieve much higher performance.
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>and throwing every caching trick in the book
This is needed for most WordPress sites. That’s why WP engine is good for WordPress, they have good caching without the need of a plugin.
Developments sites run uncached, you are experiencing how slow WordPress actually is..
Less than 100 user here and this post already has 11 comments agreeing with it in 20 minutes. Hmmm……..
I’ve never liked WPE. They are expensive, in terms of cost of available resources. For a DIY’r, fine…but any dev or agency can get the same or better resources at a fraction of the cost. They don’t seem to offer anything any other modern hosting provider doesn’t. Better than plain ol’ generic hosting with cpanel, but hardly a real competitor for the plethora of managed VPS providers available.
Not saying this applies to you, op…
but I do wonder how many people actually have the expectation that paying 30-40$ a mo for basic hosting is the same quality of service as major sites like cnn Amazon Walmart etc. it’s kind of funny.
Wp engine is a profit machine. I inherited my businesses hosted site on there and had 97-99% monthly uptime. They didn’t monitor their MySQL server uptime and we experienced a ton more downtime. The support was lackluster and when I asked for more reliability they pushed a “dedicated option starting at $600 a month” and didn’t actually offer a dedicated server. I moved to a $20/month vps and it is now considered one of the fastest websites in our very competitive niche. As a lifelong WordPress power user I wouldn’t even put my ex’s website on there for them to manage for her when I couldn’t stand talking to her.
I can’t believe no one has asked what plugins and theme you’re using? That is the #1 driver of bad performance for WordPress sites.
This is normal for many hosting companies. Kinsta does this as well. There’s very little reason you need full resources available on staging, which should only be used for testing and development.
All hosting options have their problems. Saying there’s nothing slower is obvious rubbish.
There are plenty of much worse options. For the price point of a very simple platform with good support you’re not going to find a much better option.
Staging sites are not cached so of course they’re slower. You don’t want to be developing with everything caching?
Currently building a highly functional, image heavy site on WP Engine. It’s still in the staging environment, using the wpengine temp URL. Getting over 90% on GTMetrix. I think it very much depends on how the site was built.
A site made with elementor with 5 million plugins is gonna be slow.
I notice it. But the staging site does speed up as I navigate it. Presumably because the MySQL queries start getting cached.
I always recommend doing development work in Local or whatever app you prefer since WPE also owns that, but generally always going to be faster than a hosted Staging site.
I started booting up AWS EC2 instances or $20 DO droplets on a lamp stack for dev sites.
The few hour investment is so worth the speed
Rocket.net >>>
Nice try Matt.
If your sites are on a shared server then there might be a noisy neighbor. Maybe one of your sites is the noisy neighbor. You can reach out to support and ask them to see if that’s the case. Then they’ll move the offending site off the server or if your site is the culprit, then they can tell you what it’s doing that’s consuming so many resources.
Source: I did tech support there for three years.
I have noticed this on my WP Engine sites. It is just the admin pages. The “front end” loads quickly. I am using hummingbird for cache. But the editor can take up to 20 seconds to save a page.
For my largest site I have around 20 plug-ins that are active.
Full servers is the cause of slow performance
I am curious, have you done any ongoing performance monitoring to try attribute these slowdowns? Not familiar with WP Engine environment, don’t know what your monitoring options are over there. “Feels slow, hosting bad” might be right. Might be not. Knowing beats assuming for resolving it in either case.
Note that this is not specific to WPE or any other host.
So many people just install a plugin and activate it. That is it.
You go through the settings of every pluing, every setting for that plugin.
Context around plugins, themes, etc. being used would be helpful but seems like you have an agenda
It’s slow as hell. The new godaddy.
We noticed a substantial slowdown a few months ago, at the same time the server id in the logs they make available to us changed. Support I think changed some settings for the db and things got a lot better, but I don’t think we ever found out what changed to cause the slowdowns.
We’ve been working on sites hosted with WPEngine for several years.
1. wp-admin is slow because it is uncached and WPEngine runs their sites on minimal spec google cloud instances, sometimes overly shared with hundreds of sites in each instance. The front end is faster because it is heavily cached in addition to being served with cloudflare CDN (if on advanced network). Compared with my $5 linode/akamai VPS the backend is slow as molasses, wp-admin insanely fast on the VPS.
2. My theory is Stage/Dev sites are placed in “hibernation” mode (probably cheaper to hold them offline in google cloud), until you visit them so you’ll see the first load be extremely slow sometimes depending on if anyone has visited the site recently. They are then spun up when you visit them.
Hey Matt!
I did not know WPEngine used shared hosting, so though there resources where separate.
Honestly, I have learned that the only way to scale WordPress and doing it right is by using Horizontal scaling, because not even adding more CPUS and RAM you will eventually hit bottle necks, especially when you use Page Builders, you need to shard the read and writes or better yet, use MYSQL Heatwave on an Amazon stack. Heatwave is an MYSQL database on steroids *100.
I found it telling when sftp starting to take 10 seconds tk list directories… Only in the business for 25 years but sales rep telling me it is likely our oxygen pb is laughable… They overcrowd…
They use the buzz word dedicated… While it is a vps… We insisted that if we were to upgrade our “dedicated” plan thqt we have a right to learn what we are upgrading from and to…
We found that we are on 4gb ram for approx 1800 canadian a month.. going to more than double that amount of money to go to 8 gb
And ofcourse wpe tech guy trying to explain that they normally dont share this info as the specs are not of importance in combination with their optimization setups… Huhuh
Suffice to say… We are moving away ( we inherited this setup)
I have noticed this as well, when staging and production are not the same it makes it difficult to test which changes are increasing site performance/CWV.
A site slowing to a crawl is not a WP Engine problem. It’s a problem with the site. I have about 40 clients on WP Engine and have used it for years and never experienced this. The only slowdowns on dev and stg is when the environment needs to start up on the first load.