The WordPress vs. WP Engine Feud: Damage Assessments & Next Steps

Are you experiencing issues with your WordPress site? Download our WP Engine Ban Damage Assessment.

Recently, over 1.5 million websites found themselves cut off from essential WordPress features due to an escalating conflict between WordPress and WP Engine. This situation serves as a reminder of the importance of selecting the right providers and maintaining control over your website’s infrastructure.

For years, WP Engine has been one of the largest hosting providers in the sector, currently supporting 40% of all websites. WP Engine is attractive to IT teams and agencies that need an easy content experience, but its ubiquitous use requires you to sacrifice custom structure, functionality, and control.

You’ve been affected by the WordPress vs. WP Engine Feud. Now What?

Conduct a Full WP Engine Ban Damage Assessment

• Identify your current setup: Review your website’s themes, plugins, and custom configurations to understand how they’re impacted by the WP Engine vs. WordPress dispute.
• Assess performance and security: Determine if any plugins or components are outdated or causing security risks.

Research Alternative Hosting Providers

• Focus on flexibility and control: Look for providers that allow for better control over your website infrastructure, such as Pantheon or  Platform.sh.
• Consider your long-term needs: Choose a hosting provider that can grow with your business, offering scalability, robust security, and uptime guarantees.
• Evaluate support options: Ensure the new provider offers strong technical support and migration assistance.
• Score your options: Proven Website Hosting and Infrastructure Scoresheet

Plan Your Migration: Proven Website Migration Checklist

• Retrieve assets: Get the current code, files, and database from the hosting provider or developer.
• Install migration tools: Set up any necessary migration plugins where possible.
• Migrate to a new host: Transfer everything to the preferred hosting provider.
• Update system: Upgrade core files, plugins, and themes to the latest versions.
• Refactor code: Adjust or refactor the code for compatibility and optimization.
• Set up staging environment: Create a staging site for internal QA and client UAT.
• Handle DNS & launch: Assist with or manage the DNS switch and launch the live site.

The Proven Way

Proven chooses hosting providers such as Pantheon and Platform.sh over WP Engine as we want complete control over how our partners’ sites are structured. This mitigates the issues WP Engine-hosted sites are currently encountering, such as:

• Enabling or disabling features such as content revision history, user audit trail, and other customizations
• Managing which plugins and themes are used
• Deciding when and how core, plugins, and themes are updated
• Tracking and monitoring application metrics and performance
• Website security and redundancy (our clients see nearly 100% uptime)

Proven’s workflow does not rely on WordPress.org services. We utilize a GitHub repository and implement security patches and updates in our local development environments. After testing locally, we deploy the changes to a branch environment in Pantheon or Platform.sh to ensure thorough testing before deployments. We always create backups before deployments to easily roll back any changes that might cause issues. Our site maintenance and updates are frequent and hassle-free, enabling our clients to focus on content management and not worry about website security, uptime, or performance.

A Flexible, Adaptable, Collaborative Approach

For projects that require flexibility in the number of applications/services and routing, we host them on Platform.sh. For streamlined WordPress or Drupal projects and to take advantage of auto-updates/visual regression testing (VRT), we use the prebuilt upstreams available in Pantheon. We also keep a ready-to-deploy repository for each project in GitHub, which allows us to deploy disaster recovery (DR) environments and reduce downtime.

Managed hosting providers like Platform.sh and Pantheon.io offer additional benefits such as:

• Branch-based environments for dedicated development and staging, which are completely independent of the live environment.
• Effective scaling to meet application needs and handle traffic spikes.
• Ability to utilize advanced features, like Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM).
• Security measures, including monitoring, protection against malicious activity, and advanced identity management and access controls.
• Guaranteed uptime for all customers.
• Integrated CI/CD pipelines and the ability to incorporate test automation, resulting in worry-free deployments.
• Automated, configurable backup and recovery.
• Reduced carbon footprint in hosting to support our clients’ efforts towards sustainability.
• Flexibility in designing a solution that meets the complex needs of our clients, while also offering out-of-the-box CMS applications for standard CMS use cases.
• Partnership benefits that provide added perks to our customers, making hosting cost-effective and worry-free.
• Supporting open-source contributors and offering several open-source projects that help enhance the applications we build for our clients.