Select or Change a Website’s Data Center Location

We recommend choosing a data center that is located close to where the majority of your site’s visitors are. This server location can reduce round-trip time latency for domestic visitors, because the website data is physically closer closer, the site can load more quickly. This performance increase for visitors also helps improve SEO by creating a better user experience. The faster the site loads, the better your website SEO and the greater the opportunity to drive conversion.

However, sometimes data privacy laws require sites to be located on servers in specific regions. Wherever needed, be sure to adhere to these laws if they apply for your content.

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Google Cloud Services (GCS)

Below are all of the Google datacenter locations that a WP Engine website can be located in. All shared plans are created by default on Google Cloud Services in the region closest to your location at signup. Your website can be migrated to another region by Support request.

Many data center locations are available for both shared and Premium plans. Some of the locations listed below may only be available with upgraded pricing or exclusively for Premium packages. These are denoted with an asterisk (*).

Region	Location	Region ID
North America	Iowa	us-central1
North America	South Carolina	us-east1
North America	Oregon	us-west1
North America	Montreal	northamerica-northeast1
Europe	Belgium	europe-west1
Europe	London	europe-west2
Europe*	Frankfurt*	europe-west3*
Europe	Netherlands	europe-west4
Europe	Finland	europe-north1
Asia/Pacific	Taiwan	asia-east1
Asia/Pacific	Tokyo	asia-northeast1
Asia/Pacific	Sydney	australia-southeast1
Asia/Pacific	Singapore	asia-southeast1
Middle East	Tel Aviv	me-west1

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Amazon Web Servers (AWS)

AWS clustered servers are available only to Premium plans.

Region	Location	Region ID
North America	Virginia	us-east-1
North America	Ohio	us-east-2
North America	Oregon	us-west-2
North America	Montreal	ca-central-1
Europe	Ireland	eu-west-1
Europe	London	eu-west-2
Europe	Frankfurt	eu-central-1
Asia/Pacific	Singapore	ap-southeast-1
Asia/Pacific	Sydney	ap-southeast-2

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Microsoft Azure

Azure servers are available only to Premium plans.

Region	Location	Region ID
North America	Washington	westus2
Europe	London	uksouth
Europe	Netherlands	westeurope

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Atlas

Atlas headless WordPress hosting allows the frontend and backend of a website to be hosted in the same or in separate data centers. At this time, Atlas websites can only be hosted on Google Cloud Services.

Region	Location	Region ID
North America	Iowa	us-central1
Asia/Pacific	Sydney	australia-southeast1
Europe	London	europe-west2
Europe	Belgium	europe-west1

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Testing Locations

Before choosing a datacenter it may be a good idea to test out the various locations to determine general latency for your target users. The easiest way to test for latency is to utilize 3rd party tools designed specifically for these providers.

For Google data centers we recommend GCPping.
For AWS data centers you can use CloudPing.

Keep in mind that these tools will test latency for ALL available data centers from these providers. Make sure that you are focusing only on the locations listed above.

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Locate Data Center

1. Log in to the User Portal
2. From the Sites page select the name of the environment
3. Be sure that Overview is selected in the secondary lefthand menu
4. Locate Region toward the bottom of the page

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Select Data Center Location

The data center for your account will be selected when you create the first site on the account. Data Centers marked with an asterisk (*) may incur an additional fee due to limited availability.

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Change Data Center Location

If you are an existing customer and want to change the location of site, contact Support to put in a request.

Data Center changes require a physical migration of your website. This means the move will need to be scheduled to ensure it will not impact users active on the site.
Anytime we do a server change there is always a possibility of downtime, this is just the nature of a server move. However, we will do our best to have either no downtime or as little downtime as possible.

DNS will also need to be updated for any domains pointing to the website, as the server IP will change.
If you have setup CNAME flattening on your domain, no DNS changes will be needed.

If the primary environment on your account is moved, all subsequent environments will be created in the same new data center location.

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