TestLodge is an online test case management tool that allows software testers and QA teams to manage their testing efforts with ease. Our WordPress blog, blog.testlodge.com, is an essential part of our site, as it provides details of new releases, and acts as an outlet to share knowledge on industry related topics.
Hosting our blog on WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting platform has been crucial to its success. Here are seven key benefits we’ve experienced since switching our WordPress blog to managed hosting that you should know about.
You’ll save time.
Maintaining various codebases on various servers can be very time consuming for a small business. Since switching to WP Engine, we’ve been able to deploy our new WordPress blog in very little time and start publishing posts straight away. Time has also been saved by being hands-off in terms of setup and maintenance.
You’ll receive dedicated support.
The service that we’ve received has been far better than we originally expected and the support team has gone out of their way on several occasions to help us out. Last week we needed two images excluded from the CDN, so we jumped on your live chat and the first person we spoke to put a solution in place and tested it for us. In addition, the codebases are regularly maintained and updated by WP Engine. There’s no competitor out there who offers better service and support.
You’ll experience less site downtime.
If our site lacked responsiveness, we’d lose signups, which in turn leads to a financial loss. This would also damage our reputation as constant site downtime would lead to poor industry reputation, which would be very painful for us as a software service company. Downtime would also result in a loss of existing customers if they could not access our site. Since our WordPress blog went live on WP Engine, we haven’t had any significant outages and the system has proven to be very stable.
Better site responsiveness helps SEO.
Having a responsive site has also helped with our SEO rankings. Thanks to the speed and setup of WP Engine’s services, we’re starting to gain some high ranking blog posts on Google and our Google rankings have improved. TestLodge is currently on the first or second page of results for our key search terms.
Your WordPress blog will be more secure.
One reason for choosing WP Engine was that we needed a platform that’s robust and secure, as we’re not experts in WordPress. We therefore wanted someone who was going to help us out and support us with WordPress expertise. It’s important for us that everything is always patched with the latest security updates and is constantly monitored. If this isn’t done efficiently, then we’d have to hire a full time position to keep our site secure. With WP Engine, these security updates are tackled on TestLodge’s behalf, meaning that we are always on a recent version of WordPress and our core is not vulnerable.
You’ll acquire a free staging environment and daily backups.
We’ve made good use of WP Engine’s staging functionality to allow updates to themes to be revised before being pushed out to the live site. This allows us to test changes without affecting the live version. The automatic WordPress backups and disaster recovery feature offered by WP Engine is also an essential part of running any site should the worse happen.
You’ll get access to many other tools and features.
Added services like CDNs and dedicated IPs are extremely useful. CDNs allow for rapid content delivery worldwide so that our content can be accessed anywhere on the globe without a time delay.
Founder of TestLodge, Scott Sherwood graduated from The University of Hull with a degree in Internet Computing. Scott is a passionate, creative and innovative developer currently living and working in Cardiff, UK.
With a strong interest in everything web and mobile, he is always looking for new challenges and to develop his skills further.
Want to read more stories from WP Engine customers? Check out our WP Engine Customer Spotlight series for more examples of how WP Engine has positively affected other businesses’ websites.
That’s a very useful and well explained guide. I have read many positive review about WPEngine. Hopefully i will consider to move in future days if my blogging plans work as per my expectations. 🙂
Thank you for sharing the handy post. WP is more powerful and flexible, and has more of a community.
We have been using wp engine for about 200+ sites. for about 2 years.
We are now planning to move about 800+ medical customers to wpengine.