At WP Engine, we adhere to a set of core values that influences what we do as a company. Through those guiding principles we promise to be customer inspired and to do the right thing, which means we rely on feedback from our customers to improve our service and the value of our platform.
Recently, a number of our customers raised concerns about how we calculate billable visitors and overages. We are excited to share with you that we’ve made significant updates to our overage policy, which will result in cost savings across our customer base.
Starting October 13, we no longer charge you overages based on bot traffic—we only use human traffic to calculate billable visits. (Note: We stopped billing for bot traffic starting October 13. Because we bill for overages two months in arrears and each customer’s billing cycle is unique, you can expect to see a reduction in overages reflected in your statement that includes October 13.)
Previously, we calculated billable visits and overage charges based on the total number of visits to your site, which included both human and bot traffic. Why did we include bot traffic? From a hosting perspective, we process and serve pages to bots just as we do to humans, so we counted their visits as one and the same.
Bot traffic can be an important contributor to the success of your site, but all bots aren’t created equal and don’t always represent added value to you. With this change, we are sharing in the success of your site. We will handle the cost of bot traffic and give you those views for free, so you can measure your site’s success based on human visitors. Striking bot traffic from our billing calculation will reduce or eliminate overage charges for the majority of our customers.
We aspire to be transparent with our customers and to give you confidence to run your site on our platform. We want your monthly bill to be predictable and easy to understand. We never charge for bandwidth, and the first 1,000 GB of CDN service is always free for our Premium and Enterprise customers.
Our goal is to deliver a managed WordPress hosting platform that is fast, scalable, secure, and backed by 24/7 support from WordPress experts. We designed our platform to make your life easier and to be a valuable tool upon which you can build your business. Eliminating bot traffic from our billable visits and overage calculations is one way we deliver on that value and align with you for success.
For additional details, please see our FAQ page.
Want to know more about bot traffic and how bots affect your site? Download our new white paper, “The Webmaster’s Guide To Understanding The Bot Invasion.”
Wow that’s great to hear. When reading numerous blogs and reviews about WPEngine before I joined, that seemed to be the only real complaint anyone ever had. Great to hear it won’t be an issue anymore.
Hi,
I’ve only recently joined up with WP Engine and in my initial research phase I did read an article where someone was criticising the decision to charge for bot visits – I wasn’t expecting you to implement policy change so quickly – great stuff 🙂
Glad to hear it. Thanks for putting the customer first and your continued great service. Cheers!
Olivier
French Today
Fantastic news! The overage charges have always been the worst thing about WP Engine, and the problem has been made much more awkward by the fact that the visit numbers included bots. Whenever I have contacted a client about overage charges, they have always seemed really suspicious that the numbers I was reporting were so much higher than their Google Analytics data – it felt like I was conning them, even if I explained about the bots. This will be much easier to manage if the visit numbers are similar to Google Analytics.
I have very similar experiences here with clients in that it doesn’t matter how many times or which method you use to explain it, they simply do not like being charged for search bot traffic.
It is easily one of the most damaging aspects of client relationships related to using WPE as a provider; as such, this is a welcome change.
The last major problem WPE needs to address that causes damage with my client relationships is the complete lack of direct access to system generated email logs.
This amazing plugin is the answer to that! https://wordpress.org/plugins/postman-smtp/
I was thinking I needed to move one of my sites out at the end of this billing cicle but this has changed my mind.
you won a client right now.
Thank you for this move.
Thanks! Will this result in any refunds?
Hi Phil. Thanks for reaching out. This is a go-forward change, and bots have been removed from our billable visits calculations starting on October 13. Therefore, we will not be crediting accounts or providing refunds for historical bot visits (bot traffic incurred prior to October 13). Thank you for being a customer!
Wow, great news! I wasn’t planning on ever leaving WP-Engine but this news is the frosting on the cake!
Great news! tnx!
Thank you! This was my only complaint about WP Engine and I’m glad you are making this change. I’ll have consistent, predictable charges instead of what seemed like random billing amounts each month.
Wow, thank you so much!
thats a great change however we’ve seen no change in our tally, still showing ~6x the traffic in your system as compared to what GA tells us.
Great news, thank you WP Engine.
I’ve been a WPEngine user for about 6 months and am a huge fan. My account was getting overage charges, but I didn’t mind because I still felt I was getting an incredible value for the service you offer. You’re striking Bot traffic just makes me a bigger fan.
Really glad that you took this decision and I’m sure it will help you get more business because no one liked paying for the bots.
Great to hear that, thanks!
All well and good, but in the end it’s just plain weird you don’t charge for bandwidth and instead use this tweaky “visitor numbers” metric to figure out cost. Charges based on visitation rather than bandwidth discriminate against those of us who work hard to run efficient and fast websites. There is also no way you’ll ever be able to separate all bots from all real humans. Give it up. Very annoying..
I am late but this is AWESOME news! I left WP Engine because of that and the new change will make me come back!
Thanks for sharing this good news 🙂