WordPress Hosting and Migration FAQ
Here is a list of commonly asked questions regarding WP Engine’s service. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask us directly.
Common subjects
Before migrating to WP Engine
WP Engine will make the services available 99.95% of the time, excluding any excused downtime. The WP Engine SLA amends the agreement between WP Engine and customer and addresses the uptime guarantees in relation to the services we provide to you and your remedies for our failure to meet such guarantees.
We offer WordPress hosting solutions for websites and businesses of all sizes, from SMB to enterprise. We also offer eCommerce hosting and advanced solutions with customizable packages. See which WordPress hosting plan is right for your needs.
If you’re experiencing a technical issue on your website, please reach out to our 24-hour Support team and give us the opportunity to help you resolve it. Per our terms of service, account cancellations require a 30 day notice via our cancellation form.
WP Engine provides everything a WordPress website needs. Learn more about our award-winning hosting platform.
WP Engine is the most trusted enterprise WordPress hosting solution. Learn more about our enterprise hosting plans.
Migrating your site to WP Engine
It’s free to migrate a site to WP Engine. Our automated migration plugin makes it simple.
Yes! Here’s the information needed to do a manual site migration.
It’s easy to launch a site with WP Engine, here’s how.
It’s possible to test your site on WP Engine after migrating without changing your DNS, just by editing a file on your computer.
This guide will take you through the process of exporting your database from your previous host, so that you can then migrate it to WP Engine.
Once you’ve downloaded your wp-content folder from your previous host, you can easily upload this folder or zip file to our Support Team so we can help you with this step of the manual migration process.
Account management & billing
Learn more about transferable sites and environments.
Learn how to manage user roles on WP Engine.
The billing menu in your User Portal provides access to several plan-related functions, such as invoices, modifying billing info or changing your plan level.
Our pricing is partially based on the number of monthly visits to your site, we’ve provided as clear of guidelines as possible about which visits are considered billable.
When your number of visits exceeds your plan limit (here’s how we count visits), we charge you a small overage for each 1,000 visitors over your limit. If you are on a Personal, Professional, or Business plan, the overage cost is $1 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors. Customers on Startup, Growth, or Scale plans will incur an overage cost of $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors.
The WP Engine User Portal enables users to make many adjustments to their plans through upgrades, downgrades, and add-on features.
WordPress plugins
Follow this link to learn more about WP Engine’s Automated Migration plugin.
Yes, we recommend following this link to update plugins automatically with Smart Plugin Manager.
Follow this link to see our list of essential WordPress eCommerce plugins.
Follow this link to see the top 10 WordPress plugins on WP Engine.
Yes, follow this link to learn more about creating geographically customized content.
Transferring files to your site
When hosting your WordPress site on WP Engine, you may need to connect directly to your website’s filesystem. On other platforms you may already be used to using FTP. At WP Engine we use SFTP which works the same, except it uses a layer of encryption for security and is restricted to a secured port. Read more about using SFTP on WP Engine.
Once you’ve downloaded your wp-content folder from your previous host, you can easily upload this folder or zip file to our Support Team so we can help you with this step of the manual migration process.
Git is a powerful development tool which enables developers or a development team to securely push code changes from their local machine to their site on WP Engine with the benefit of version control. Read more about using Git Push on WP Engine.
Here’s how to setup and connect to SSH Gateway. SSH, also known as Secure Shell, is the method of connecting from your computer to the web server where your site is hosted.
Setting up SSL on WordPress
SSL/TLS certificates enable visitors to connect to your site with HTTPS, a secure protocol for exchanging information on the Internet. See more information on SSL (secure sockets layer) certificates.
Click here to learn more about adding SSL to your WP Engine site.
Yes, learn more about how to upload 3rd Party SSL Certificates.
Learn more about securing all URLs with SSL.
Email & WP Engine
While we manage many parts of your website hosting, default email functionality on WP Engine is limited. Normal emails, such as password resets, will not typically have any issues sending. However, for robust email functionality, monitoring and scalability, we highly suggest utilizing a 3rd party email host.
We typically recommend using a 3rd party transactional mail provider such as Mailgun, Gmail, or Sendinblue. These services allow you to send emails from a specialized mail IP and will include a higher level of customization, such as more robust logging. See our full list of recommended email providers.
Learn more about DMARC Policies for Email Deliverability.
Security & WP Engine
Yes! With a dedicated WordPress security team behind it, our platform’s enterprise-grade technology automates threat detection to block 72M attacks daily while keeping your website vulnerabilities up to date. See more about WP Engine security protocols.
Yes, learn more about WP Engine’s enterprise-grade security.
Learn more about how to handle the WordPress update process.
Offsite storage & WP Engine
Yes, learn more about how WP Engine works with LargeFS: Configuring Unlimited Storage with Amazon S3.
WordPress Multisite
WordPress Multisite is a feature that allows you to create a “network” of subsites within a single instance of WordPress. See more about WP Engine and WordPress multisite.
Follow this link to learn more about how to Add New Sites and Map a Custom Domain.
Follow this link to learn more about changing your Multisite Primary Domain.
Follow this link to learn more about Enabling Multisite on your WordPress website.
General WP Engine questions
Error logs are necessary for most WordPress troubleshooting. You can access the most recent 24 hours of PHP/Apache error logs in two different ways: how to access WordPress error logs.
We’ve outlined two methods for resetting your password, a traditional method and a method directly from the database: two ways to reset a WordPress password.
Here you will find a comprehensive list of WP Engine platform settings. Please reach out to our 24-hour Support team with any questions.
This article will cover how to import a database file into your WP Engine environment.
Follow this link for detailed instructions about how to update WordPress URLs.
Follow this link to learn more about how to solve problems when updating WordPress URLs.
Follow this link to learn more about understanding the WP Engine Error Logs.
Learn more about WordPress Backups and Restoring your website.
Learn more about copying to staging.
Learn more about common errors that WordPress users face and how to resolve them.
Learn how to purge your site cache in this detailed article.
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