SiteGround vs WP Engine for WooCommerce: What Changed in 2025, Prices, SLAs, and Limits

SiteGround vs WP Engine for WooCommerce is a shared-hosting plan against a managed platform that no longer sells WooCommerce plans: WP Engine withdrew its eCommerce plans on October 15, 2025 and now sells a per-site eCommerce Performance Pack on top of its standard tiers. SiteGround is cheaper; WP Engine has a contractual SLA and isolated compute on Core and above. Neither is shaped for a store past $1M a year.

What changed at WP Engine, and why it matters for a store

WP Engine’s support page states that as of October 15, 2025 “eCommerce plans can no longer be purchased,” and that existing eCommerce accounts are grandfathered (source). The replacement is the eCommerce Performance Pack, a site-level add-on that bundles EverCache for WooCommerce, Live Cart, Dynamic Plugin Loading, Slow Query Monitor, NitroPack, Stripe Connect and Checkout, Smart Search AI, Smart Plugin Manager, and Site Monitoring. Licenses cover a site’s Production, Staging, and Development environments together (source). The pack’s launch post says new customers should contact sales for pricing; existing customers can buy it from the User Portal (source). We could not find a public price, so treat it as quote-based.

The practical effect: a WooCommerce buyer at WP Engine now picks a standard plan by visits and storage, then adds the pack per site. The WooCommerce-specific caching that used to define the eCommerce tiers is still available, but it is a line item, and the plan underneath is the same Essential, Core, or Enterprise tier a content site would buy.

Entry prices and renewal

SiteGround’s WooCommerce plans are 12-month prepay: StartUp at $2.99/month renewing at $17.99, GrowBig at $4.99/month renewing at $29.99, and GoGeek at $7.99/month renewing at $44.99 (source). StartUp is one site and 10 GB; GrowBig and GoGeek are unlimited sites with 50 GB and 100 GB. Staging is on GrowBig and above, Git on GoGeek.

WP Engine’s Essential tier starts with a Startup capacity of 1 site, 25,000 visits a month, and 10 GB, and runs up to 30 sites, 400,000 visits, and 50 GB; Core covers 400,000 to 800,000 visits with isolated environments and a 99.99% SLA, and Enterprise goes above that (source). WP Engine does not print all prices on its plans page. A March 2026 breakdown lists Startup at $30/month monthly or about $25/month annual, Scale at $276/month monthly, visit overages at $2 per 1,000, and Core starting around $400/month (source); confirm current figures on WP Engine’s page before buying.

A GoGeek year at renewal is about $540; a WP Engine Scale year on monthly billing is about $3,300 before the pack, and Core starts near $4,800 a year. The Performance Pack is extra on top of any of these.

Compute: CPU-second budgets vs unpublished workers on isolated tiers

SiteGround meters CPU seconds rather than publishing PHP worker counts: 1,000 per hour and 10,000 per day on StartUp, 2,000 and 20,000 on GrowBig, 4,000 and 40,000 on GoGeek, with early warnings and possible access limits for repeated over-usage (source). Every uncached WooCommerce request, meaning cart, checkout, My Account, and admin, spends from that budget, which is why sale hours are when SiteGround stores tend to hit the wall. The next step up is SiteGround Cloud, from $100/month for 4 cores and 8 GB to $400/month for 16 cores and 20 GB on Google Cloud, with an optional auto-scale that adds resources to the single instance (source).

WP Engine does not publish PHP worker counts on its plans page. What it does publish is the environment model: Essential is a shared environment, Core and Enterprise are isolated (source). Isolation removes the noisy-neighbor variable but does not change the shape: one environment, sized by contract, scaled by moving tiers. Neither host offers horizontal auto-scaling across zones on the plans a store would buy off the page.

WooCommerce caching, staging, and monitoring

SiteGround runs a three-layer cache: NGINX direct delivery for static assets, dynamic full-page cache, and Memcached for database queries, with dynamic caching and Memcached on GrowBig and above. Cart and checkout are excluded by default and logged-in users bypass the cache (source). Backups are daily with a 30-day restore history, on-demand backups on GrowBig and above (source).

WP Engine’s WooCommerce cache is EverCache for WooCommerce plus Live Cart, which removes the AJAX cart-fragment calls that normally make cached WooCommerce pages slow; both now live in the Performance Pack, along with Slow Query Monitor and Site Monitoring for error-code alerts (source). Every WP Engine site gets Production, Staging, and Development environments and backup points. Application Performance, WP Engine’s resold New Relic APM, is not available on the shared Essential tiers and is sold to premium plans through an account manager (source). So on a Startup-through-Scale plan, trace-level visibility into a slow checkout is not part of the deal even with the pack.

Side-by-side comparison

On SLAs: WP Engine’s legal SLA guarantees 99.95% uptime with a credit of 5% of monthly fees per full hour over target, and an Enhanced SLA of 99.99% with 3% per half hour for services sold under that label (source); its plans page marks the 99.99% SLA as Core and Enterprise only (source). SiteGround states 99.9% on its WooCommerce page and does not publish a credit schedule (source). For a store, the difference between 99.9% and 99.99% is about 43 minutes versus about 4 minutes of allowed downtime a month.

Which one, at which stage

Under roughly $250K a year: SiteGround GrowBig or GoGeek. The caching handles a modest catalog, the price is low, and the CPU budget is unlikely to bind outside a promotion. Between $250K and $1M: either SiteGround Cloud or a WP Engine Essential Scale plan with the Performance Pack, depending on whether you value a written SLA and a three-environment workflow (WP Engine) or a lower bill and more raw CPU per dollar (SiteGround Cloud). Above $1M, both run into the same limits: one environment, vertical scaling, no trace-level APM in the plan, and a cache that does not understand cohorts, A/B tests, or sales channels.

Two specific things to check before signing at either. On SiteGround, ask what happens to checkout during a CPU-limit event, because the fair-use policy allows access limits. On WP Engine, get the Performance Pack price and the Application Performance eligibility in writing, since neither is on the public plans page.

The third option: when neither fits a high-traffic store

Urumi is the platform layer for WooCommerce stores doing $1M to $50M GMV, the range where an outage or a slow checkout has a dollar figure attached. It is not a cheaper alternative to SiteGround or WP Engine; pricing is custom. The difference is shape rather than price: horizontal auto-scaling across multi-zone Google Cloud, a 99.99% uptime SLA with active-active zones and auto-failover, fully managed APM with traces, logs, and alerts, isolated staging per branch with CI/CD and one-click rollback, a WooCommerce-aware cache that is cohort-aware, A/B-aware, and channel-aware, Cloudflare Enterprise delivery, and 30-day point-in-time recovery with off-site backups in a separate region. Migration is zero-downtime in 24 to 48 hours. Three AIs run on top, including Revenue AI that watches checkout, cart, pricing, and payments around the clock, prices every regression in dollars, and ships the fix as a PR.

Do Amore moved its engagement-ring pages from 5.9 s to 0.9 s and order edits from 8.1 s to 0.67 s, with every custom plugin intact through a zero-downtime migration. Urumi publishes its own load-test results on the WooCommerce performance benchmark page: a 236 ms median cart response and a 321 ms median checkout with the edge cache disabled. Already have a team or an agency? They ship faster with the grunt work covered. See Urumi’s WooCommerce hosting page for the free performance audit.

Frequently asked questions

Did WP Engine stop selling WooCommerce hosting?

WP Engine stopped selling its eCommerce plans on October 15, 2025 and grandfathered existing accounts. WooCommerce features such as EverCache for WooCommerce and Live Cart are now sold as a per-site eCommerce Performance Pack on top of standard Essential, Core, or Enterprise plans, with pricing through sales or the User Portal.

Is SiteGround or WP Engine better for WooCommerce?

SiteGround is cheaper and includes Memcached and dynamic caching on GrowBig and above, but meters CPU seconds and offers no written SLA credits. WP Engine costs more, adds a 99.95% SLA (99.99% on Core and Enterprise) and a three-environment workflow, but sells WooCommerce caching as a separate pack. Neither scales horizontally.

Does WP Engine include APM for WooCommerce?

Not on Essential plans. WP Engine’s Application Performance product is New Relic APM resold with WordPress support and is available to premium plans through an account manager. The eCommerce Performance Pack includes Site Monitoring for error alerts and a Slow Query Monitor, which are narrower than full tracing.

What uptime SLA does SiteGround offer for WooCommerce?

SiteGround states 99.9% uptime on its WooCommerce hosting page, which allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month, and does not publish a service-credit schedule. WP Engine’s legal SLA specifies 99.95% standard and 99.99% Enhanced with defined credits.

For the checklist behind these rows, read what managed WooCommerce hosting must include, and for the mechanics of why checkout slows first, see why WooCommerce slows down under load.

Last reviewed September 2026. Competitor details come from their public pages on the dates linked; check them before you buy.