Obsessed with customer satisfaction, Templ is truly focused on solving your problems, and helping you every step of the way. With a modern and hyper performant WordPress platform built on Google Cloud, Templ will exceed your wildest expectations. Let’s take a closer look at why Templ is a better alternative to WP Engine!

TLDR;

Why is Templ better than WP Engine? Well the list is long, but just ask yourself: what is important to you? Then consider the following list of benefits that Templ has over WP Engine:

  • Better support – Templ support not only responds fast and with deep expertise, but is also personal and invested in solving your problem.
  • Better speed – the differences in page speed when migrating to Templ from WP Engine has been proven again and again.
  • Google Cloud CDN – the fastest CDN there is; WP Engine doesn’t offer this.
  • Managed DNS – backed by Google Cloud DNS; WP Engine doesn’t provide DNS at all, let alone manages it.
  • Hack fix guarantee – any site that is hacked while hosted at Templ is fixed for free.
  • No limits on Visits – Templ doesn’t punish you for a site that performs well by limiting visits.
  • No limit on PHP workers – if your site is lean and fast, you can add as many workers as can fit in memory.
  • No forced updates – choose yourself when to do major upgrades of WordPress.
  • Better Coverage – Templ is available in all 29 Google Cloud locations, WP Engine in 15.
  • Better Partner Program – including free sites for development and Slack support.
  • Fair pricing – pay for the sites you actually host, not for the “up to N sites” that you don’t host.
  • Value for money – the service and expert help you get from Templ is simply priceless.
  • Starting at $15/month – WP Engine starts at $30/month.

Now and Before – a brief history

After its conception in 2003, WordPress rapidly grew to become the most popular publishing platform on the internet. Thanks to its flexible and extensible nature, its popularity has only grown over the years.

WP Engine started in 2010 as one of the first hosts dedicated to WordPress hosting only. The mission was to create a Premium WordPress hosting experience. In 2022 it is one of, if not the, largest hosts solely on WordPress.

In 2017 Templ set out with a mission similar to WP Engine, but with a couple of important differences;

  • Customer satisfaction. Templ takes pride and joy in providing real value for their customers. When other hosts limit their scope to strictly hosting related issues and up-selling, Templ focus on customer value and understanding and helping customers with actual issues.
  • Speed. Nobody likes a slow site. Speed also affects things like conversion and page ranking, so the importance of page speed can not be overstated. Sure, many claim to be fastest, but few can back that up. The fact that every single site that has been migrated to Templ shows improved page speed, compared to before the move, is evidence of the claim that Templ really is the fastest.

While the story of WP Engine may still be unfolding, the story of Templ is only beginning. With a current year on year growth of over 100%, Templ is set to become one of a handful major Managed WordPress hosting providers very soon.

What do others say?

The veracity of online reviews are always rather difficult to gauge. In particular when most online reviewers are paid for their reviews, and also for the customers they refer.

One thing which stands out with Templ are the raving customer reviews and ratings it has received on Google. With a seemingly impossible rating average of 5.0 out of 5 possible, with more than 80 reviewers, it may be tempting to suspect foul play. The fact is, however, that every single one of these reviews are real. Each reviewer is a verified customer of the service.

WP Engine has no visible reviews on Google, but a look at their trust-pilot rating is probably not going to convince anyone…

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Best Kinsta/managed GoogleCloud WP site alternative with half the price for the basic plan and they have a proprietary caching plugin that works flawlessly just like WPSuperCache / LiteSpeedCache. Kudos to the team for such a great service. And they literally reply within minutes!

Chris Chong
Chris Chong
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A Closer Look

Foundations

Templ is built exclusively on the Google Cloud Platform, using their Cloud CDN, Cloud DNS and Premium Tier network as a backbone. The simple reason is that only the best is good enough for a premium hosting service. Google’s Cloud and network are unparalleled in speed and reliability. In fact, Templ use the most performant Compute Optimized instances for all sites. These achieve speed gains of up to 50% over lower tier cloud instances, and compared to low cost hosts, the gain is often more like 200-300%.

Interestingly, WP Engine also uses Google Cloud Platform for most of their hosting. However, they do not use Cloud CDN, nor do they have a managed DNS at all. Also, they do not use C2 instances nor the Premium Tier network other than for premium plans.

The Hosting Platform

Templ boasts a modern, beautiful, and easy to use hosting panel purpose-built for WordPress hosting. While the hosting panel is simple to use also for a novice, more advanced tooling ensures that experts and developers can achieve the highest level of productivity. Apart from the “standard” development tools, Templ also provides its own CLI to allow an unprecedented level of automation on their platform.

The WP Engine platform may be loaded with features, but the control panel is older, which shows, and harder to grasp. Their platform also lacks a purpose-built CLI, for higher degree of automation.

Support

Both Templ and WP Engine provide support via live chat, email and phone. The main difference is what problems you can expect to get help with, and how quickly you can them solved. Another significant difference is that Templ offers support via Slack for partners, which WP Engine doesn’t.

At Templ you will get support from experts via Live Chat at all times. Most of the time you will get the same person in all chats, who learns your particular site(s) and provides a personal experience. The Templ support is not tiered, but instead based on a team of experts that cooperatively provide answers and solutions as quickly as possible. The scope of the support is not restricted to hosting issues, but any question related to your website is fair.

Templ support will always give you options. Apart from the free support, included in each plan, Templ also offers extended paid support at fixed or hourly rates, that covers pretty much anything you might need fixed on your site. Even more long term or large development projects are in the scope, often in collaboration with partners.

At WP Engine, like many larger organizations, support is tiered. With tiered support, you will only get so far before your request is passed on to higher tier support with more expertise. This results in more time needed to get problems solved. Also, it often means interaction with multiple agents, sometimes not even human. Support is also limited in scope, so even if they may provide advice and other topics for you to explore on your own, they will not provide hands-on assistance with any issues outside the actual hosting.

Speed and Scaling

Page speed is an important metric for a website, for several reasons. Much of page speed has to do with optimizations of the site, but a significant part is down to how well the hosting can deliver.

Scaling is equally important; it’s one thing to have a site that is fast for a single user; it’s when traffic surges that the speed really counts. That’s why you need a site and hosting that is able to scale up easily.

Some features you’ll find at Templ, that doesn’t exist at WP Engine:

  • Free speed optimization for all sites migrated to Templ.
  • Managed scaling for traffic spikes.
  • Load testing applied by experts to ensure your site performs under pressure.
  • Google Cloud C2 instances used for all plans, for up to 40% faster delivery.
  • Google’s Premium Tier Network for all plans.
  • Templ CDN leveraging Google’s Cloud CDN.
  • Built in automatic conversion to webp, to improve speed and save bandwidth.
  • Redis cache support

Security

Since the start, Templ has always taken security very seriously. It’s one of the few hosts that guarantees that any hack your site is subject to will be fixed for free. Incidentally, this also guarantees that most site hacks are prevented in the first place.

Some feature you will find at Templ, which are not available at WP Engine, are

  • Automatic WordPress aware malware scanning of files and database.
  • Google Cloud Armor
  • Hack fix guarantee – any site hacked while hosted at Templ is fixed 100% for free.
  • Vulnerabilities checking, listing plugins that have known security issues, and recommended updates.
  • Managed site health. Your site’s health is monitored at least every 3 minutes, and whenever an incident is reported, the Templ team immediately responds.
  • Domain health checking to prevent inadvertent or malicious changes to DNS.

For Agencies

Templ Partner Program

Become a Templ partner for even more benefits.

  • Free development sites. While working on a customer site, host it on Templ for free, then convert to a paid plan after the customer accepts.
  • Support via Slack. For a simpler and more collaborative support, partners get a dedicated Slack channel setup for support discussions.
  • Customized panel. Add your logo and other customizations to the Templ Control Panel.
  • Quarterly meetings. Discuss your plans and influence the plans of Templ in partner meetings.
  • Advanced onboarding. Become experts on Templ hosting features fast.

For WooCommerce

Much of the success of WordPress is thanks to WooCommerce, one of the leading e-commerce platforms with around 25% total market share. In fact it’s estimated that 20% of all WordPress sites are WooCommerce sites.

Templ is a popular choice for WooCommerce sites; more than 30% of all sites at Templ use it. WooCommerce sites tend to be more complex and require more resources than the average WordPress site. Also, for an e-commerce site every minute of downtime can cost large amounts of money. So it just makes sense to invest in a reliable Premium host with expert support, such as Templ.

The following are features included in all Templ plans that are especially beneficial for e-commerce.

  • Managed scaling – handle bursts of traffic at planned launches or sudden unexpected traffic bursts. WP Engine doesn’t offer this.
  • Templ Cache – server based caching which increases speed and capacity, specifically tailored for WooCommerce performance. WP Engine offers their version of server caching.
  • Templ CDN – speed up global delivery of your site, based on Google’s Cloud CDN. Templ customers can also choose any other CDN provider they want. WP Engine uses MaxCDN or Cloudflare for their customers' sites.

Templ also provides services that cost extra, but essential for e-commerce sites, such as:

  • Load testing – test your site’s capacity to scale and reveal performance issues before they cause problems. WP Engine doesn’t offer this.

Migrating to Templ is simpler than boiling water

Whether you want to move one site or hundreds, Templ provides hassle-free migrations that are handled by skilled WordPress experts. Templ offers unlimited free migrations when moving from WP Engine.

If you want help migrating your site to Templ you can sit back and enjoy moving help from pros who treat your website with extra care. Your site is first copied to a temporary domain, so you can see the speed improvements before pointing your own domain to Templ. All you need to do is:

Once the migration request is received, your site will be migrated to Templ within 24 hours and you will receive an email when it’s done.

If you prefer to migrate by yourself, there are several resources to help guide you through the process.