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Hi Guys Matthew Woodward here and today I'm going to show you how I earnt an extra $16,609 just
by moving my host to Wp Engine.
We are also going to take a look at pros and cons of the service
And I'll show you just how easy it is to move your own site over!
So let’s talk about site speed quickly. The load time of your site has a direct impact
on your profits.
A 1 second delay in load time decreases conversions by 7%
On top of that site speed now plays a role in your search engine rankings as Google want
to deliver great user experiences. And great user experiences are born on fast sites.
second the site took to load.
That’s a huge amount of money to be leaving on the table so with that in mind I decided
to do something about it.
I quickly realised that my cheap shared hosting was letting me down and couldn’t handle
the traffic. After much research I decided to move to the wordpress hosting specialists
WPEngine which costs $29 per month - but was it actually worth it?
To find out I tested the speed of my site 5 times from 3 locations to get an average
result.
I tested from America, the UK and India which are my most popular traffic sources and my
home page, a tutorial page and a forum page for each.
As you can see the load times are pretty shocking and in some cases higher than my original
5 second estimate!
After moving to WP Engine I ran the same tests again which deliver load time savings on every
single page!
That works out to deliver an average load time improvement of 1.299 seconds which is
worth $11675.41 per year.
Not bad when you consider WpEngine only costs $324 per year!
For added speed you can enable the content delivery network so things like images are
served to your users from local servers which costs $19.95 per month.
I ran my tests again and the results were pretty good with users from India seeing the
best time saving by having key content served to them locally.
Enabling the content delivery network saved an average 0.549 seconds on load time which
is worth $4,934 per year.
Another great investment given the CDN only costs $239 per year!
All in all I’m pretty impressed with what WPENgine has done for my blog.
It has reduced load time by nearly 2 seconds leading to an extra 12.9% conversion.
To be clear that’s worth nearly 17 thousand dollars to me at cost of $563, heh and I’ve
not even got round to telling you about the other features yet!
So WP Engine is fully managed specialist Wordpress host that is built for speed and security.
They offer built in caching technology with MEMCache support so you don't need a plugin
like W3 total cache.
They provide server level security protecting you from hackers. They also include daily
backups for free and a one click back up and restore option.
You can clone your live site to a test environment at any point to test changes which is really
handy if you break stuff all the time ahem.
And check this out - these guys were even providing instant support to me on Christmas
day!
Actually while I'm talking about the support, if you have a problem with wordpress most
hosts shrug their shoulders at you but WP ENgine has a whole team of wordpress experts
on hand that will help you solve any wordpress specific issues!
In this ticket they told me exactly what was wrong with my plugin and how to fix it!
In summary WP engine are true wordpress experts.
You get instant increases in speed, conversions & profits.
With the built in server level caching and content delivery network.
They offer server level security to protect against hackers as well as automatic backups
and a test environment for you to test changes and you can back that up with great tech support
that will even move your site for you.
There are a couple of cons though, firstly it is more expensive than your average shared
hosting and they don't host email but you can just use Google Apps for that if you’re
not already.
I've got to say the increase in speed and conversion alone is worth the extra money,
never mind all of
the other features!