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Leaving WP Engine
WP Engine is good at what it does: keeping WordPress fast, secure, and supported. It's also expensive — typically $300–700/year for a small-business site that hasn't seen a meaningful content change in eighteen months.
10-year cost projection
What WP Engine actually is
Premium managed WordPress hosting, originally pitched at agencies and enterprises.
Pricing: Plans start at $25/mo for one site (Startup), climb to $115/mo (Scale), and run to enterprise pricing. Most small-business sites land between $25 and $58/mo.
If you're actively iterating on your WordPress site, paying engineering time to evolve it, and you need WordPress's content workflow, WP Engine is fine. Stay.
If your site is a brochure — services, about, contact, maybe a sleepy blog — WP Engine is paying for plugins, security, and support you don't need anymore. The site stopped being a working CMS and became static content. Migrating it to actual static hosting saves you ~$300–700 every year, forever.
Migration off WP Engine is one of the smoothest we do. WP Engine's standard configurations render predictably, the URLs are clean, and the SEO history transfers without redirects.
What they do well
- Genuine performance optimization for WordPress
- Strong support, especially on enterprise plans
- Daily backups and one-click staging
Why people leave
- Price has climbed steadily; small sites are paying enterprise prices
- Bandwidth overages on viral or scraped content
- The 'you should be on the next tier up' upgrade pressure
- The realization that you haven't logged into wp-admin in six months
What you keep when leaving
- Every URL, exactly
- Every page of content
- All SEO history and search-console authority
- Domain ownership (you transfer DNS only)
What you lose leaving
- wp-admin (intentionally — you weren't using it)
- Plugin compatibility (irrelevant once the site is static)
- WP Engine's CDN (replaced by Cloudflare's, free)
Our take
WP Engine is a great host for active WordPress projects and an expensive host for static content. Most of their small-business cohort is paying for the latter while no longer needing the former.
Questions
What about WP Engine's daily backups?
After migration there's nothing to back up — the site is in Git, deployed to Cloudflare. The 'backup' is the source repo, version-controlled forever.
How long does the migration take?
Typical WP Engine sites take 3–5 business days from kickoff to DNS cutover. We deliver a staging URL for you to review before we switch.
What happens to my WP Engine plan?
You cancel it after we cut over DNS. They'll prorate the unused time on most plans.
See if your WP Engine site is a clean migration
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Check my siteRelated
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