Late last year, we announced our industry-leading WordPress Digital Experience Platform, a solution to build, deliver and optimize digital experiences using WordPress. As a continuation toward enabling our customers to create those digital experiences, this March, we launched our new Digital Experience Plans: Startup, Growth, and Scale.
These new plans offer the flexibility for customers to grow on our platform at their own pace, allow for a more robust development experience, and make available powerful features which were previously reserved for specific plan tiers.
On this page, learn what this change means for you as a customer on a Personal, Professional, or Businessplan, and learn why WP Engine released new plans.
WHAT THE NEW PLANS MEAN FOR YOU
Learn what will happen to your current Personal, Professional, or Business plan after your grace period ends in or after September, 2018.
IF YOU ARE ON A PERSONAL PLAN TODAY
On your first billing renewal on or after September 1, 2018, WP Engine will automatically convert your Personal plan to the Startup plan at a new price of $35/month. If you choose to pay annually, your annual price will be $350/year which includes two months free.
- The one site included in the Startup plan will include 3 environments for production, staging and development to enhance your development workflow. Today’s Personal plan includes just production and staging.
- CDN will be free. We will no longer charge $19.95 USD/month for our customers to harness added performance gains with CDN.
- Flexibility to grow one site at a time. The Startup plan allows for additional sites to be added at anytime, according to your needs and your budget.
- Flexibility to add features without changing plans. Powerful product features like Content Performance and GeoTarget will be available as add-ons with the Startup plan, providing more flexibility and access to the features you value.
If you are paying for an additional site on your Personal plan today, your new price for this additional site is $20 and will automatically be applied when you change to the Startup plan. And, if you are paying $10 extra for hosting in UK, DE, or AU datacenters today, this cost will also apply on the Startup plan.
IF YOU ARE ON A PROFESSIONAL PLAN TODAY
On your first billing renewal on or after September 1, 2018, your Professional plan will automatically convert to the Growth plan with 10 sites, at a new price of $115/month. If you choose to pay annually, your annual price will be $1150/year, which includes two months free.
- You will keep the 10 sites included in your Professional plan today at no additional cost.
- Each of your 10 sites will include 3 environments: production, staging, and development, for a total of 30 environments.
- You will retain the ability to use WordPress Multisite at no additional cost, as well as the ability to create unlimited transferable sites.
- Flexibility to grow one site at a time. The Growth plan allows for additional sites to be added at anytime, according to your needs and your budget.
- Flexibility to add features without changing plans. We are no longer restricting powerful features like Content Performance and GeoTarget to Business plans. You can now add these features to any plan.
If you are paying for a 10-pack of additional sites on your Professional plan, your new price for this 10-pack will be $130 and will automatically be applied when you change to the Growth plan. And, if you are currently paying $30 extra for hosting in UK, DE, or AU datacenters today, this cost will also apply to the Growth plan.
IF YOU ARE ON A BUSINESS PLAN TODAY
On your first billing renewal on or after September 1, 2018, your Business plan will automatically convert to the Scale plan with 25 sites, at a new price of $290/month. If you choose to pay annually, your annual price will be $2900/year which includes two months free.
- You will keep the 25 sites included in your Business plan today at no additional cost.
- Each of your 25 sites will include 3 environments for production, staging, and development for a total of 75 environments.
- You will keep the features your Business plan supports today–WordPress Multisite, Content Performance, and GeoTarget–at no additional cost.
- Flexibility to grow one site at a time. The Scale plan allows for additional sites to be added at anytime, according to your needs and your budget.
If you are paying for a 10-pack of additional sites on your Business plan, your new price for this 10-pack will be $130, and will automatically be applied when you change to the Scale plan. And, if you are currently paying $70 for hosting in UK or DE, or $100 for hosting in AU datacenters today, these costs will also apply to the Scale plan.
WHAT IF I…
In this section we will explain how to keep your benefits when changing plans.
- What happens when I convert to the new plans? If you are on a Personal plan ($29) today, you will be moved to the Startup plan ($35), and will receive free CDN. For those on Professional plans ($99), you will be moved to the Growth plan ($115) and keep your 10 sites, (5 sites + 5 free). You will also keep the ability to use WordPress Multisite for free. And if you are on a Business plan ($249) today, you will move to the Scale plan ($290) and keep your 25 sites (15 sites + 10 free). You will also keep the ability to use WordPress Multisite, GeoTarget, and Content Performance for free.
- What if I upgrade? If you are on a Professional plan today, you get 5 sites for free when moving to the Growth plan (for a total of 10 sites). If you upgrade from Professional to Scale, you continue to receive 5 sites free for a total of 20 sites and retain the ability to use WordPress Multisite for free.
- What if I downgrade? If you are on a Professional or Business plan today, you are receiving some sites free and some free features when converting to the new plans. If you downgrade to a lower plan tier, you will lose your free sites (e.g. moving from Business down to Growth you would only receive 5 sites total, rather than 5 + 10 free sites) and the free features (Content Performance, GeoTarget, and WordPress Multisite).
- What if I cancel? If you cancel your Professional or Business account and sign up later, you will lose the free sites and free features that come with converting to the new plans from your current plan.
- What if I combine two accounts? If you are paying for two plans today (e.g. two Professional plans) and want to combine them, you could upgrade one Professional plan to the Scale plan ($290), continue to get 5 sites free for a total of 20 sites, and cancel the extra account. Or, you can convert both plans to Growth plans to receive 5 sites free on both (20 sites total) for a total of $230 ($115×2).
WHY NEW PLANS?
Since the beginning, our customers have asked us for the ability to add sites one at a time to their plans, and for added flexibility to add the features they want without jumping to a new plan. We have wanted to make this change happen for our customers for a long time, but this change meant fundamentally restructuring our plans. Our teams have worked hard for the last year to make these plans possible for our customers. The new plans fill the need for businesses to grow in their own time and within their own budget, without jumping to a higher plan tier and paying for unused sites.
HOW ARE THE NEW PLANS DIFFERENT?
For the past eight years WP Engine has been on a transformative journey, starting as a managed WordPress host to now becoming the first-ever Digital Experience Platform for WordPress. This evolution has come about specifically because of innovations and technology investments that take our platform far beyond simple hosting. Throughout the years our platform continued to grow, but our pricing never changed. The new pricing reflects the value of our platform today, and is the first-ever price increase for our customers.
Dynamic new changes include:
- New enhanced developer workflow with 3 environments (Dev, Stage, Prod) for every site
- New flexibility to add sites for $20/site/mo to any plan level
- CDN included for Startup Plans (previously $19.95 per month for Personal plans)
- Option to add Content Performance, GeoTarget, and Multisite to any plan level
- Customers selecting an annual plan receive 2 months free
WHAT CAN I DO ON THE NEW PLANS?
Our new plans are tied to our new “Sites” experience, which unlocks enhanced developer workflows. Each site on your plan can use three environments: production, staging, and development, to help your team create new versions of your websites quickly and easily. This experience also includes the ability to organize your sites into groups, copy up/down within your site environments, and move environments between sites with the click of a button. As the development world moves more toward Agile methodologies, these new developer workflows enable your team with more flexibility.
Each of these plans also allows the ability to add more sites without jumping to a new plan tier, as well as the ability to add powerful features like Content Performance, GeoTarget, and WordPress Multisite. Previously, these features were restricted to Professional or Business plan tiers, meaning users would have to upgrade and have unused sites just to gain these features.
WHAT IF I ALREADY USE 1-CLICK STAGING?
That’s fine! And you can keep using 1-Click Staging on your sites after moving to these new plans too. Technically, you could use 1-Click Staging with every environment in your sites. We are encouraging customers to take advantage of the new staging environments within the “Sites” experience if possible, since we do eventually plan to sunset the 1-Click Staging feature. However, before that happens, we plan to bring all the capabilities of 1-Click Staging to the staging environments first. Learn more about the differences between staging environments and 1-Click Staging.
