Why We Partner with WP Engine

After utilizing the services WP Engine has to offer for a few years, the Web Development team  attended their annual digital breakthrough conference in June to explore all WP Engine has to offer, and what they are currently developing to enhance user experience within their platform.

Among other companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare and Hubspot, we discovered that the team at WP Engine is unequivocally proving themselves as one of the foremost leaders in the digital world.

The Product Innovation Showcase

WP Engine DevKit

As a part of WP Engine’s product innovation showcase, they introduced their local development beta environment called WP Engine DevKit. The product is a toolkit that allows for local development of WordPress installations that works seamlessly with the WP Engine environment and encourages better, faster coding. DevKit combines the previously mentioned local development with SSH gateway access, the ability to easily push and pull deployments to WP Engine servers and other various tools to encourage a unanimous work environment to create WordPress projects that are highly secure without losing site performance.

Global Edge Security (Cloudflare)

Another keynote of the product innovation showcase was the Global Edge Security (powered by Cloudflare). This is an enterprise grade solution geared toward performance and security that scales as your project does. Its ability to protect a project starts immediately with the startup process and continues with growth, immense scaling and even custom projects.

The four components that make up the Global Edge Security are Managed Web Application Firewall (WAF), Advanced DDOS Mitigation, the Cloudflare CDN and automatic SSL Installation.

WAF

The Web Application Firewall feature blocks against the most common website attacks including cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection and cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF). The WAF is ever present within the WP Engine environment and is constantly protecting our projects against the previously mentioned attacks as well as more advanced attacks. WP Engine lets us rest easy knowing that our projects, from small to large, are always protected and accessible.

Advanced DDOS Mitigation 

In recent years, DDOS attacks have become much more prevalent and are meant to render the project environment inaccessible. Again, WP Engine has setup multiple network layers to double down on security and allow our projects to stay up and running at all times. The Global Edge Security measures allow for WP Engine to implement multiple network layers to protect against Application Layer attacks and Network and Transport Layer attacks, and provide protection for the origin IP address.

Cloudflare CDN

A feature that has numerous benefits, the Cloudflare CDN, provides yet another layer of security and performance features. An enormous benefit of using Cloudflare on our projects is that they offer an out-of-the-box solution to providing finely tuned caching rules in conjunction with WP Engine caching. This means that we can serve our project pages to users around the world at a much faster rate without sending as many requests to the WP Engine server.

Automatic SSL Installation

With the Global Edge Security feature, WP Engine automatically installs SSL certificates at both the WP Engine User Portal and on the Cloudflare Edge Servers. This allows for the connections between a user’s web browser and Cloudflare to be encrypted. With security being an ever-present concern on our projects, we are extremely proud to use WP Engine’s SSL installations to provide an end-to-end encryption on every project.