WP Engine vs Bluehost: Which Is the Best Host for WordPress?

Comparing WP Engine vs Bluehost is the proverbial apples to oranges. The former is one of the best-known managed WordPress web hosts around, whereas Bluehost built a name for itself through more affordable plans. It’s safe to say, both providers offer very different approaches when it comes to WordPress hosting.

If you’re trying to decide between managed and regular shared hosting, you’ll need to know what you’re getting with each provider. A higher cost doesn’t necessarily translate to quality, so it’s important to understand what each price point gets you.

Which provider offers the best features?

WP Engine specializes in managed WordPress hosting. In contrast, Bluehost offers a broader range of services, including shared and dedicated hosting, as well as virtual private servers (VPSs). They also offer regular and managed WordPress hosting plans.

Throughout this article, we’re going to focus on Bluehost’s regular WordPress hosting plans, so we can help you decide if managed hosting is worth the extra cost.

WP Engine

• Supports one website with the Startup plan
• 10 GB storage
• Nightly automated backups
• 24/7 support via chat (with phone option for Growth plan and beyond)
• Integrated content delivery network (CDN)
• Free, automatic SSL certificates to secure your site and get the green padlock
• Includes Genesis Blocks for free, as well as 10 premium themes
• Multiple add-ons available for all plans (including automatic plugin updates and Multisite support)

Bluehost

• Supports one website with its Basic plan and more with higher tiers
• Free domain for one year
• 10 GB SSD storage (higher tiers naturally get more)
• Automatic WordPress installation and updates
• Access to a free CDN (with all plans)
• Free SSL certificate for the first year (all higher plans get it indefinitely)
• 24/7 support via chat

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Bluehost’s shared hosting doesn’t offer as much by default as WP Engine, considering the price difference. However, Bluehost does offer a free CDN, which is a nice perk for a budget WordPress host. Plus, it throws in free domain registration as part of the deal, which could seal the deal for you compared to WP Engine.

Is Bluehost or WP Engine easier to use?

As far as hosting panels go, Bluehost offers one of the most user-friendly options available. Your Bluehost panel is incredibly easy to navigate, and you can easily access your WordPress websites with a single click:

It’s also worth noting that while Bluehost takes care of installing WordPress for you, they do not help you migrate your site. This means if you have a website you want to move to a Bluehost shared plan, you’re on your own unless you want to pay for the $149.99 Site Transfer service.

WP Engine doesn’t offer human migrations either, but it does offer a dedicated plugin that automates most of the process for you. Still, it’s a slight negative, considering many other managed WordPress hosts are usually happy to handle migrations for you.

Moving on, the WP Engine dashboard is not as streamlined as its Bluehost counterpart. That’s to be expected considering you get access to more advanced functionality. Though, you still couldn’t consider it hard to navigate:

Overall, WP Engine offers a lot more options out of the box for micromanaging your website through their hosting panel:

That’s a good thing, of course, but it does mean there’s a higher learning curve. Overall, once you sign up for a plan, WP Engine has an edge when it comes to functionality and it’s a better fit if you have experience managing websites.

Which web host wins when it comes to performance?

Usually, the biggest gaps between managed and shared WordPress hosts lie in features and performance. We’ve already compared WP Engine and Bluehost on the former, so let’s talk about the latter.

WP Engine offers an integrated CDN out of the box, and boasts about fast loading times as one of its main selling points. Given this, we went into the test with high expectations.

To begin, we set up two identical websites, one on each web host. We then installed the default WordPress theme, loaded it with the WordPress Theme Unit Test Data, and activated an identical selection of popular plugins (Yoast, Wordfence, Jetpack, and Contact Form 7).

Our goal was to simulate a real-world website in order to ascertain the performance of both hosts. For the tests, we used Pingdom Tools and averaged three tests at six different server locations. Here are the results:

We also run this test on a monthly basis and update the results above via a shortcode mechanism. In other words, what you’re seeing is the latest data. Generally speaking, WP Engine usually has a commanding lead when it comes to performance. Bluehost, on the other hand, doesn’t perform quite as well, even when you take into consideration the disparity in prices between both hosts.

As a rule of thumb, you don’t want websites to take over two seconds to load, regardless of their complexity. The test websites we set up were incredibly straightforward. They shouldn’t take up to five seconds to load under any circumstances.

Aside from loading times, you also want to make sure your web host’s uptime is as close to perfect as possible. In this area, both Bluehost and WP Engine generally do really well. You can see their uptime for the previous three months below (we update this on a monthly basis as well):

Performance is critical for any website, and since both web hosts usually have either flawless or close-to-flawless uptime, it all comes down to loading times. As such, you’ll find that on any given month, WP Engine will typically surpass Bluehost.

Who offers better customer support?

Both Bluehost and WP Engine have knowledge bases anyone can access for instant help with their site. However, WP Engine’s is much more in-depth, and it includes hundreds of support documents for WordPress users.

Every year, we poll hundreds of users for our WordPress hosting survey. We ask users to rate the quality of support for all of the major WordPress hosts.

Across the years, a common theme we’ve found is that users feel that WP Engine staff are better equipped to deal with WordPress-specific issues. This comes as no surprise though: WP Engine’s entire business is built around WordPress. In contrast, Bluehost offers several other types of hosting plans. Therefore, their support team isn’t staffed with “WordPress specialists” in the same way as WP Engine.

Which web host offers the most bang for your buck?

Now it’s finally time to talk about the real deal-breaker when it comes to comparing managed vs shared hosting. We know on paper, managed hosting will almost always be the superior choice across the board, but it comes at a high cost.

WP Engine is not what you’d call a budget hosting option. Its long-time base plan costs $20.00 a month, and it only supports a single website. Not too long ago, they also launched a Lite plan for $13 per month. Both of the aforementioned prices reflect annual billing. The Lite plan also only supports a single site and is somewhat limited in other ways. Therefore, for the purposes of this comparison, we’ll stick to the Startup plan.

As you might expect, Bluehost offers dramatically more bang for your buck. $1.99 a month enables you to host one website, which puts Bluehost squarely in the ‘budget hosting’ category.

That price is only available if you sign up for a one-year contract – just like with WP Engine. If you do go with the Basic plan, it ends up being a $23.88 upfront cost. That’s a pretty crazy deal, especially if you consider that the month-to-month price for that same Basic plan is $15.99. In other words, unless you have some highly unique use case where you only need hosting for a month, then you might as well sign up for the year. Otherwise, as soon as your second month would start, you’d already be paying more.

As a final thought on this, consider that Bluehost’s promotional price for a whole year on the Basic plan is only about $4 dollars more than WP Engine’s Startup tier for just a single month. That’s a significant difference.

Which one should you choose?

For most people, the decision between managed and shared WordPress hosting comes down to price. You know managed hosting is, in most cases, better across the board, but the question is whether you really need all the additional features and firepower WP Engine offers.

If you want to set up a personal website or a small project that you don’t anticipate will get much traffic, the decision is simple – paying $20.00 a month for hosting isn’t cost-effective and is likely overkill for your project.

On the other hand, if you want to build a monetized website and you have a suitable budget, it’s smart to invest in better hosting from the off.

Conclusion

If you focus on Bluehost’s WordPress shared hosting plans, you get exactly what you pay for – a budget hosting service. Bluehost does offer some nice bells and whistles, such as access to a free CDN, but it doesn’t come close to matching most managed hosting plans.

With WP Engine, you get blazing-fast performance and a lot of advanced functionality. This naturally comes at a higher cost. If you can afford it and you need the features offered, paying for one of their managed hosting plans is a smart investment.

If you want to see either host in more detail, we have dedicated reviews for both of these hosts:

• Bluehost review
• WP Engine review

If you decide that Bluehost is the right option for you, you can check out our tutorial on how to install WordPress on Bluehost.

Any additional questions about WP Engine vs Bluehost? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!