A website is an investment—and like any investment, you want to keep it secure and maximize its value. If your site was built using WordPress, choosing the right hosting provider is crucial to your site’s security and performance. The options can feel overwhelming, which is why our team of expert WordPress website developers makes things easy on our clients by using WP Engine for managed hosting. 

About Vital

Vital has been building websites and crafting winning digital marketing strategies for over 20 years. We’ve worked with hundreds of brands in diverse industries including B2B manufacturing, higher education, fintech, and more to build online presences that help them meet their business goals. We love sharing our knowledge about how to leverage WordPress to build sites that do more than just look good—they act as the foundation for digital marketing with dramatic return on investment (ROI).

Why Vital Uses WordPress

At Vital, we custom-build virtually all our client sites using the WordPress Block Editor because it combines power and flexibility with an intuitive backend. Our clients love WordPress because it gives them the ability to easily add and edit new pages long after launch without the need for technical development expertise, which makes their sites scalable while lowering the lifetime cost of ownership.

About WP Engine

Vital has been using WP Engine for our managed hosting needs for seven years. WP Engine is the original WordPress-optimized managed hosting provider for everything from personal blogs to enterprise-level Fortune 500 companies. We recommend managed hosting to our clients because it helps keep their sites fast, secure, and technologically up-to-date. As a WordPress managed hosting provider, WP Engine handles everything from server infrastructure to the WordPress application itself.

Why Vital Uses WP Engine for Managed Hosting

At Vital, we build sites that are flexible, scalable, easy to use, and secure. We use WP Engine for managed hosting because it helps ensure that every site we build meets those standards both on the day they launch and long into the future. Here’s how:

WP Engine Maximizes Site Performance.

WP Engine’s sophisticated frontend system for handling web traffic means faster-loading pages, while their Advanced Network further improves speed and security. Site speed and performance directly impacts SEO and user experience, so this is a huge deal for our clients, who are focused on using their sites to attract traffic through search engine optimization (SEO) and on driving online conversions, generating leads, and increasing their revenue. 

Top-notch Technology for Top-notch Websites

With WP Engine, Vital gets dedicated servers that run HTTP/2, PHP 7, and have been optimized to run our highly dynamic sites as fast as possible. Both Premium and Enterprise solutions are dedicated virtual environments with provisioned processing power, memory, disk space, and system resources. This lets our clients get the most out of their sites and ensures that site performance is never compromised.

Keeping Up With WordPress Updates

One of the things we love about WordPress is that it’s always improving with core updates. In addition, a wealth of native and third-party plugins provide enhanced functionality—and those plugins are also frequently updated. It can be challenging to manage all these updates, and falling behind can lead to bugs and site breakages. WP Engine proactively manages all WordPress core updates and security patching to keep things running smoothly, and its Smart Plugin Manager makes sure plugin updates don’t break your site.

Ensuring Site Security

This one is simple. Security is a concern for any website in today’s world. No one wants their site to get hacked or otherwise attacked. We choose WP Engine because of its track record as the most secure, professionally-managed WordPress hosting out there.

Failsafe Backups

If you’ve ever had the experience of your computer crashing before you press “save,” you know how important backups are. With WP Engine, you get a fully automated, set-it-and-forget-it backup system should anything go wrong with your site.

The Best Customer Service and Support

Even with the most advanced technology, there will come a time when you need to get in touch with a real person, fast. In the course of our seven-year partnership with WP Engine, they have provided consistently excellent, responsive customer service. It’s one of the big reasons we stick with them for our clients’ managed hosting needs.

How WP Engine Improved Our Website Performance: A Success Story

Nine years ago, Vital used our own website as the guinea pig for evaluating WP Engine as a new WordPress hosting service. Our site was old and running very slowly on a competitor’s hosting servers. We moved the Vital site to WP Engine and saw a huge performance improvement right off the bat without making any code changes at all. WP Engine’s performance features solved a lot of the site’s problems without any further work.

How WP Engine Rescued Our Clients’ Sites: A Christmas Eve Miracle

A few days before Christmas 2015, we asked one of our hosts to cancel one of our VPS servers since it was no longer in use. On Christmas Eve, several clients’ sites went down suddenly. It turned out that the host had “accidentally” canceled ALL of our VPS servers on our account instead of just the one server we requested. 

The host had no backup system in place and therefore could not restore the servers. Everything was lost and the host couldn’t help us at all. The Vital Dev Team spent Christmas break scrounging for copies of the lost websites. We got them from local development systems and our own manual archival backups. Git version control saved a lot of the sites’ code as well.

We moved most of these clients to WP Engine where they are safe and sound thanks to infinitely more competent support, significantly more robust infrastructure, and daily offsite backups of all websites in case of disaster. The incident also spurred Vital to start offering our “Secondary Backup” service which creates daily backups of a site in addition to any backups offered by a client’s web host, just in case the worst happens again. 

Learn more about working with Vital, and speak with a representative to find out more about WP Engine’s plans and pricing.

About the Author

Melissa Lore is the Director of Brand Strategy at Vital. She works with new and established companies to help them improve brand awareness, tell compelling stories, and connect with their ideal audience. She has been writing search-optimized content for over 20 years, and she collaborates with Vital’s SEO strategists to drive qualified traffic to client sites.