WP Engine vs Nexcess (March 2025) – “WordPress Winner …”

WP Engine and Nexcess are perhaps the two best managed WordPress hosting providers in the industry. In this comparison of WP Engine vs Nexcess, we’ll take a look at the benefits each has to offer and which of these WordPress hosts is the better fit for you.

Nexcess is now a part of Liquid Web. In our previous comparison of WP Engine vs Liquid Web, it was an extremely close call between two of the best managed web hosting providers—with WP Engine coming out on top. Now that Liquid Web has transitioned their WordPress hosting over to the Nexcess platform, let’s see if there is a difference.

WP Engine vs Nexcess: Differences

Reasons for Choosing WP Engine over Nexcess:

• Faster Website Speeds with Google Cloud Platform
• More Responsive Customer Support
• Includes Free StudioPress Themes
• Includes Page Performance Tools
• 60 Day Money Back Guarantee

Reasons for Choosing Nexcess over WP Engine:

• Includes iThemes Sync
• No Restrictions on Themes and Plugins
• Automatic Plugin Testing and Updates
• No Pageview or Traffic Limits
• Less Expensive to Host Multiple Websites

WP Engine vs Nexcess Details

Category	WP Engine	Nexcess	Comments
Setup
Control Panel
Data Centers			WP Engine has data centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Sydney.
Website Speed			See Below
Security Features			WP Engine provides Free SSL, Real Time Threat Detection
Data Backup and Restore			Tie. Both provide Automated Daily Backups Stored 30 Days, plus Snapshot Capability.
Automatic Updates			With Nexcess you get Automatic Plugin Updates in addition to WordPress Core.
Servers
Network
WordPress Development			Nexcess includes iThemes Sync for managing multiple sites.
SSL			Tie. Both provide Free Let’s Encrypt SSL.
Resources
Staging			WP Engine offers streamlined website staging. See Below.
Customer Support			See Below
Money Back Guarantee			WP Engine offers a Full 60 Day Money Back Guarantee.
Price/Value

WP Engine vs Nexcess: Website Speed and Performance

For managed WordPress hosting, WP Engine and Nexcess are two of the very best choices. While they both provide outstanding website speed and performance, in our head to head comparison, Nexcess is slightly faster. Nexcess includes their excellent features like optimized servers, advanced caching, built in CDN, and premium image compression that allows them to post faster results.

So, while WP Engine provides an equally impressive number of performance features, in this comparison, Nexcess gets a slight edge. See some of our sample speed test results below.

Website Staging

While both WP Engine and Nexcess provide full website staging for WordPress sites, we prefer WP Engine. I like the way that both hosts easily allow you to make a copy of your live site and place it in the staging area. However, with WP Engine, you can just as easily copy the changes in your staging copy back into your production live website. In this category, WP Engine is the winner.

Data Backup and Restore

With Nexcess and WP Engine, you get top quality data backup and restore capabilities. Both of these managed WordPress hosts provide daily automatic backup, along with the ability to manually create a backup whenever you need to. Restoring your data is also easy to do. We’ll have to call it a draw here.

Customer Support

WP Engine and Nexcess both have quality customer support teams. With both hosts specializing in WordPress hosting, you get true expert support. So which one is the winner in this category? I’ll have to go with WP Engine here. While both provide excellent response times, WP Engine has more consistently provided helpful, friendly assistance. It’s kind of a close call here, but WP Engine gets the edge when it comes to customer support.

Recommendation

When it comes to managed WordPress hosting, WP Engine and Nexcess are definitely two of the best hosting providers I’ve used. Both are equally capable of providing excellent hosting features, website performance, and support.

For WordPress websites, including small business sites up to enterprise level applications, they are both outstanding. However, because of their superior managed WooCommerce hosting, in this ultra-close head-to-head comparison, Nexcess is the winner.

See our Nexcess Review Ratings below: