Category: WP Engine

WP Engine Go Live Checklist

Post author By Josiah Cole
Post date April 2, 2023
No Comments on WP Engine Go Live Checklist

One of the great features of WP Engine hosting is their Go Live Checklist, a customer guide to launching a website. Useful for beginners and intermediate webmasters alike, this tool walks a customer through the required and recommended steps for building and launching a website.

The guide covers such topics as adding your domain, updating DNS records, ordering SSL certificates, adding content, selecting a theme as well as bonus section on plugins, SEO and caching.

The checklist displays for new WordPress installs 45 days after creation or 10 days after the traffic milestone is met.

WP Engine also has a great guide on Getting Started with WP Engine, useful for those new to the platform.

WP Engine WPEngine

WP Engine Login

The WP Engine customer portal can be found here: https://my.wpengine.com

This URL will actually redirect you to another WP Engine login page here: https://identity.wpengine.com/

If you’re looking to instead log into your WordPress website hosted at WP Engine, you can use the Customer Portal to “seemlessly” login to WordPress with one-click, no seperate username and password required. More information on WP Engine Seamless Login.

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WP Engine Support

One of the main reasons I do business with WP Engine is because if their excellent support. Veterans of the web hosting business know how important competent support is, and WP Engine delivers this in spades.

WP Engine Support Chat

Every support instance starts with chat, launched within the Customer Portal. Once you get beyond the mostly useless and now commonplace “Virtual Assistant” (hint: type “support”) you get connected with a real live support agent within minutes.

The longest wait I’ve experienced in my over 6 years of doing business with WP Engine is maybe 10 minutes – it’s really that good.

Once you get connected with an agent, the real magic happens because unlike a low-cost hosting provider, WP Engine’s support agents are helpful, knowledgeable & prompt. 95% of my requests have been handled immediately, with only the most complicated issues being pushed to a support ticket (which is also promptly dealt with).

No waiting days wondering if your ticket is being addressed. No clueless outsourced agents working from a script. Just real people, good at their job, who are just as geeky as you (maybe that’s a stretch)

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WP Engine File Manager

Unlike traditional cPanel hosting, WP Engine offers no “file manager” within their customer portal web interface.

In order to access your files, you’ll need an SFTP client, or a plugin that offers file browsing and management features.

Thankfully, creating an SFTP account is easy thanks to my handy dandy WP Engine How To SFTP article!

If you prefer a WordPress plugin (please don’t) the top dog File Manager plugin with over 900K installs seems to be the aptly named File Manager by user mndpsingh287 (yes actually).

WordPress WP Engine WPEngine

WP Engine How To SFTP

SFTP may sound intimidating but don’t fret! It’s not. If you’ve used “regular” FTP, SFTP is no sweat. Here’s a quick quide on how to set up SFTP credentials with WP Engine.

Login to the WP Engine User Portal
Click “SFTP Users” in the left hand menu.

3. Click the purple “Create SFTP User” button.

4. Enter username, password, optional path (if you don’t know what path is, you don’t need it) and click “Add SFTP user”.

5. That’s it! Your new SFTP user will now be shown in the list of SFTP Users.

Note: Once the user is created, WP Engine will append the username you chose, to the end of your account username.

6. Connection information is listed at the top of the SFTP Users screen. Your SFTP server name is always in the following format: username.sftp.wpengine.com The port is always 2222 (unlike regular FTP which is typically 22)

7. Now you can use your favorite FTP program* to connect to your WP Engine install allowing you to manage files.

*For Windows, we like FileZilla.