Take it from someone who will never use WP Engine hosting, but who relies heavily on ACF, and I have done for 12 years, as long as you have ACF and not SCF (a fallacy), you’ll be grand. No one knows what will happen with so-called ‘Secure Custom Fields’ – they have a weekly review posted about how amazing SCF is when ACF built it. It’s unnerving. And Matt has now taken aim at WPMU on his blog… he’s been on a long roll to destruction, particularly with the forced push to Gutenberg – even while it was half baked – a few years back.

It is WordPress shame that they point their strategy towards amateurs and cripple the platform with Gutenberg and other nonsense. And it is obvious that they feel they need to cut down a tool they should have made them self since the beginning and never had the guts for.

Hey Eric, please send our support team a message and they can help you out https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/contact/

Apologies, this site did have SCF installed and I replaced it with the installation of ACF. After that it loaded fine, then when I refreshed the site wouldn’t load.

This website didn’t have ACF on it before, so it wasn’t upgrade to SCF, but I’m not sure what happened. Appreciate help.

I’ve wondered for years why WordPress went the Gutenberg route, despite the horrifically low ratings that it had, when a system like ACF existed. Why not buy it out and implement it in the core WordPress system? It makes miles more sense. And this whole thing is just… it’s a bad look, man.

ACF has a free, unpaid option. And yes, ACF offers dramatic improvements from free to pro. The flex content field in particular makes the license worthwhile… if you’re not familiar with it, you really have no business arguing as much as you are. And by the way, if $50 a year for one site is "too expensive" for a plugin that revolutionizes the CMS, I’m curious to hear what you think is reasonable.

As for being "bloated", again, I’m really curious to hear what plugins have this amount of functionality but are "lean" enough for you, and what you mean by "bloated". On the front end, it outputs no files. I’ve even printed all database calls made by all plugins on page load, and found that plugins like Gravity Forms have wild amounts of database calls, but ACF has relatively few, given how much it does. It’s completely revamped how it stores information in the database and has never slowed a site down in my 13 years of experience with it. In fact, it’s always a dramatic improvement on actual page builder plugins, like WP Bakery (which, by the way, has the WP right there in the name, but I guess they’re fine by you?).

I think you’re absolutely correct that WP Engine is abysmal hosting… I always specifically recommend against it to any of my clients. It’s slow, bloated, and has questionable solutions for dev problems. And it’s super expensive.

Buuuuuuuut this isn’t how WordPress fights a copyright infringement (in the name WP Engine) while still keeping the moral high ground. This is literally insane.