Materiell Named a WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner

We are proud to welcome Materiell as a new Silver Agency partner! They are a GSA Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) holder and women-owned small business with extensive experience in accessible WordPress website design, development, maintenance, and support.

An award-winning Washington, D.C. WordPress web development agency, Materiell helps organizations leverage the power of the web to communicate purpose, stay true to their missions, and reach their goals and objectives. They focus on important areas such as mobile-first responsive design, engaging content layout, user interaction, and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility compliance.

Focusing on collaborative strategies, enterprise-level technologies, and custom features, Materiell creates and supports mission-critical websites for retail businesses, public sector entities, educational institutions, associations, and nonprofits. Materiell’s team of experts has completed hundreds of website redesign and development projects, but only after taking a good look into their clients’ internal workflows, audiences, and goals. Only then can their team of experts tailor each build to meet clients’ exacting requirements and expectations.

“Materiell is proud to be a Silver Agency Partner with WordPress VIP. Our experienced development and cloud infrastructure (devops and webops) teams are dedicated to utilizing the reliability and innovation that WordPress VIP provides for reliably hosting and securing enterprise WordPress sites across a variety of sectors.”

Materiell Founder and President, Susan C. Daniero

Learn more about Materiell’s partnership with WordPress VIP here.

Six Questions With Sailthru

Welcome to our latest round of Six Questions, an occasional series where we ask our Technology Partners how they can help the enterprise WordPress community beat growth goals, iterate quickly, and have fun doing it.

Cat Orlandi

Senior Director, Global Customer Success

Today we’re talking with Cat Orlandi, Senior Director, Global Customer Success at Sailthru, a WordPress VIP Featured Technology Partner specializing in automated personalized marketing technology. 

Six Questions With Cat Orlandi from Sailthru

What does success look like for your customers?

Our customers are constantly challenging and testing the status quo to find the optimal marketing mix for their end readers/subscribers. Our most successful customers take advantage of Sailthru’s ability to provide a combination of batch & blast campaigns and triggered marketing messages via email, mobile and onsite to find the ideal communication strategy. The most notable achievements in growth and loyalty come from marketers who continue to test strategies to find the best content, cadence and messaging to maximize engagement.

How do you help your customers accelerate their growth?

Our Customer Success team serves as an extension of our customers’ teams to drive the KPIs that are most important to each individual company. Our team of industry experts provides best practices, strategic recommendations tailored to each customer’s specific business goals, as well as examples of how our best-in-class customers are driving growth.

What does a great customer look like to your company?

A great Sailthru customer is agile. Our customers are constantly having to adapt to new trends and technologies as they enter the market. In the fast-paced world we live in today, it is crucial for our customers to be able to identify and execute opportunities for enhancement efficiently. At Sailthru, we pride ourselves on enabling our customers to be just that. 

Our Customer Success is dedicated to being thought leaders in the industry and to enable our customers to make real-time updates across their marketing program to maximize positive impact. We advise our customers on how to best achieve their specific goals and execute their marketing initiatives.

Companies and brands are continuously moving towards a more user journey focused approach to their users vs batch and blast. Email remains a top channel inthe market, but we are also continuing to see SMS, native mobile, social and more. Referral Programs as a lever to drive subscriber growth. And experimenting! Testing new technologies, tactics, channels etc. to drive growth and user engagement.

How has your team adapted to working remotely?

For 16 months we offered Global Events spanning the US, UK, NZ, and AU. Global events were offered 2-4 times a week in all time zones and ranged from activities in wellness, nutrition, personal and professional development, and hobbies & interests Some of our most popular events were Family Feud, A cocktail class with Talktales Entertainment, and various lunch and learns with medical presenters from all over the globe. During our time at home over 200 events were offered worldwide. This helped break up the monotony of working from home and kept us all connected from afar!

What is your team looking forward to doing together when it’s safe?

In person meetings and collaboration! Nothing like seeing friends and colleagues face to face to get the creative juices flowing.


Want to know more about WordPress VIP Technology Partners and the enterprise WordPress ecosystem? Check out the full roster of partners, and get in touch with us today. 

MOTTO Named a WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner

We are proud to welcome MOTTO as a new agency partner! They are the first agency in Quebec, CA, and the second in all of Canada to become a WordPress VIP Agency Partner.  

MOTTO knows their craft. They live and breathe it all day, every day. Motto launched more than 20 years ago as a Montreal-based full creative web agency. They care for and support medium to large businesses’ websites with great success. From custom themes, plugins, and WooCommerce to advanced API integrations, they pride themselves on staying up-to-date on the latest technologies and executing them properly. 

Introducing and implementing WordPress solutions is key to MOTTO’s focus on solving customer problems and helping them reach their business goals. MOTTO targets the B2B industry segment and pride themselves on working with clients such as Audicus, CCM Hockey, and Krispy Kreme Canada

“There is a huge discrepancy between those claiming to be experts in WordPress and those who actually are. Our goal is to become the best WordPress agency in North America by continuing to offer our customers the best possible service, consultation, and support from our team of WordPress experts. This partnership with WordPress VIP will let us stand out even more as leading WordPress experts.”

— Julian Fernandez, President, MOTTO

Purr Named a WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner

We are proud to announce Purr as our latest WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner! 

Purr is a digital technology consultancy that offers onshore (UK) web, app, and mobile development services. For entrepreneurs and business leaders, Purr is a digital partner that improves business effectiveness by implementing digital strategy across departmental lines. Purr achieves this by applying a digital mindset to business operations and planning.

“We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with WordPress VIP as a silver agency partner. This milestone is a testament to our incredible WordPress developers, who have refined our processes and improved our quality tenfold, at the same time as transitioning to a fully remote setup. Becoming a WordPress VIP partner is a significant step towards our goal of being recognised as one of the top WordPress developers in the UK. We’re looking forward to working alongside WordPress VIP  to continue this progression while offering our clients the highest level of development and support.”

— Nick Ellison, MD and Founder of Purr

Becoming a WordPress VIP partner allows us to work closer than ever before with the WordPress team — creating a more collaborative working environment while improving and advancing the WordPress ecosystem. 

FreshySites Named WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner

We are proud to welcome FreshySites as a new agency partner! Headquartered in Binghamton, NY, they are a professional WordPress web design company and team of WordPress experts. Their agency strives to provide best-in-industry customer service and have worked on more than 2,200 projects since their launch in 2011.

As FreshySites continues to grow, they’ve evolved into a distributed work model, with locations and team members across the country. From New York to Ohio, Texas, Colorado, and more, their team comes together remotely to create beautiful websites.

Embracing the distributed work culture, the team participates in monthly “Reviews & Brews,” and weekly team meditations, which help members re-energize and stay connected—as they did in the agency’s early days when everyone worked from the same office.

FreshySites’ focus is to provide excellent customer service paired with beautiful website design and fast turn-arounds.

WordPress website design services and WooCommerce is their expertise. All their WordPress websites are fully cross-browser and cross-device compatible with responsive design. With WooCommerce they can create basic shops to fully custom solutions that meet an organization’s growing needs.

Over the years, FreshySites have worked with hundreds of amazing clients in a wide range of industries, from government organizations, unique boutiques, schools, and artists to even playground designers.

“WordPress VIP is the leading platform provider of enterprise-grade WordPress hosting trusted by the world’s top brands. As WordPress experts ourselves, we’ve become an agency partner to work closely with Automattic and the WordPress VIP team to leverage their best-in-class infrastructure, partner network, and solutions to benefit our clients.”

—Ben Giordano, CEO

Equalize Digital Named a WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner

We are proud to welcome Equalize Digital as a new agency partner! Equalize Digital is the only WordPress VIP agency partner that is a Certified B Corporation and specially focused on building websites that are accessible for people of all abilities.  

As a Certified B Corporation, Equalize Digital has been independently verified as meeting the highest standards of social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. Their distributed team is striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet regardless of ability, and is proud to make user experience and usability central to every website they create.

Equalize Digital’s services include custom enterprise WordPress design and development, including complex ecommerce and membership implementations, web applications and portals, API integrations, and custom plugin development. In addition to building new sites, they also offer accessibility audits, user testing, accessibility training, and remediation for existing WordPress sites, and can partner with and provide accessibility guidance to companies with in-house development teams. 

In 2020, Equalize Digital launched the Accessibility Checker plugin, which enables users to bulk scan their WordPress site for accessibility problems and receive reports in the admin dashboard.

“We’re delighted to join WordPress VIP as an agency partner and provide another development option for VIP customers who want to ensure their websites can be used by people with disabilities.

Website accessibility is especially important when increasing numbers of people are engaging with businesses online first. Globally, people with disabilities have more than $8 trillion in discretionary income, and we’re excited to help more companies tap into that market while, at the same time, opening up the web for everyone.

Through our partnership with WordPress VIP, we’re looking forward to being able to provide our clients with a powerful enterprise content management system and hosting environment that can scale as their business needs grow, providing a foundation for an accessible experience.”

Amber Hinds, Equalize Digital CEO

About Equalize Digital 

Equalize Digital is headquartered near Austin, Texas and is a Certified B Corporation and woman-owned business. They’re currently participating as a finalist in MassChallenge, a highly competitive accelerator program and global network for entrepreneurs. 

MVP Marketing + Design Named a WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner

We are proud to welcome MVP Marketing + Design as a Silver Agency Partner! They are an award-winning Minneapolis Website Design Firm and Digital Agency serving clients globally — and the only one focusing extensively on the Private Equity, Investment Banking, Sub-debt, and RIA markets.

Fourteen headshots that show MVP personnel with the MVP logo in the middle of the headhsots

This recognition is indicative of the advanced website design and development capabilities that MVP has displayed on behalf of numerous Private Capital and Enterprise-class WordPress websites, including such clients and markets as North Star Resource Group (Financial Services), Origami Capital (Private Equity), Clearsight Advisors (Investment Banking), NAMSA (Healthcare/Medical Device), United States Law Firm Group (Professional Services), AdvantageData (Software), RoadTrek (Recreation/Transportation), Rotary Systems (Manufacturing) and more.

Joining the WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner program recognizes MVP’s ability to provide enterprise-level website design and development services to large-scale multisite engagements, including deployment of WooCommerce ecommerce software, on WordPress’s cloud tier hosting platform. 

“We appreciate that WordPress VIP has acknowledged more than 20 years of award-winning WordPress website design and development experience for leaders in such verticals as Private Capital, Financial, Healthcare, Technology-Enabled Products and Services, as well as B2B and B2C Manufacturing. Our ‘Best of the Midwest’ team looks forward to partnering with WordPress VIP to offer our brand-to-web design, development, and ecommerce services to companies seeking a Most Valuable Partner for integrated digital marketing, design, and cloud-based website hosting support.”

— MVP President and CEO Dick Weinrib

Filter Digital Named a WordPress VIP Agency Partner

We are proud to welcome Filter as a new agency partner! Filter is only one of seven WordPress VIP agency partners in the UK, joining an exclusive group of agencies with proven excellence implementing WordPress at scale. 

Filter is an award-winning digital agency, powering digital solutions for progressive businesses with clients including Crystal Palace F.C., Medivet, and J D Wetherspoon

Formed in 2016, this remote-first digital agency offers strategic and development services across web and mobile for mid-market and enterprise businesses, using their unique reset, launch, and innovate offering. 

By providing board-level expertise and experience, Filter helps businesses realize their digital vision with new and clear plans, while delivering scalable web and app development, and custom technology solutions to ensure clients thrive in the connected world.

With extensive experience in providing platforms to businesses with high consumer demand, Filter defines, designs, and delivers to the highest of standards. The team is particularly skilled at using WordPress and React Native, with an impressive back catalog of projects to showcase. 

From full digital transformation and start-up projects, to incorporating solutions such as Headless WordPress, native Gutenberg blocks, React Native apps, and Ionic PWAs,  Filter has done it for clients. Check out Filter’s client stories here.

“The team at Filter have always been advocates of the WordPress platform, and over the years have developed an incredible depth of knowledge, skill, and expertise. WordPress VIP is experiencing significant growth, and we are thrilled to be in partnership to offer solutions at scale.”

Filter CEO Oliver Morrison

Six Questions with OneTrust on Personalization While Protecting Privacy

Welcome to our latest round of Six Questions, an occasional series where we ask our Technology Partners how they can help the enterprise WordPress community beat growth goals, iterate quickly, and have fun doing it.

Sarah Hampton

VP of Marketing at OneTrust

Today we’re talking with Sarah Hampton, VP of Marketing at OneTrust, a WordPress VIP Technology Partner specializing in privacy, security, and trust. Along with compliance and governance capabilities to help enterprise businesses address GDPR and similar regulations around the world, OneTrust tools can help their customers create a more personalized and transparent user experience through consent and preference management.

In Conversation with OneTrust

What does success look like for your customers? 

We offer our customers the tools and solutions they need to be more transparent, ethical, and trusted organizations. So, success for our customers means empowering them with the technology platform, regulatory intelligence, and user community they need to create privacy, security, and governance programs that meet their needs. A great customer to OneTrust is someone who wants to differentiate on trust, and make trust a competitive advantage, not a regulatory hurdle.

How do you help your customers accelerate their growth?

We help our customers focus on building trust with their audiences and accelerating that trust through tools for data protection, transparent data collection, and simplified privacy compliance. Especially for marketers, it’s important to look at the customer experience and how you are communicating privacy to your audience.

With OneTrust, marketers can increase first-party data collection, understand the data they collect, and analyze where they are driving subscriptions, opt-ins, and consent.

What challenges do your customers face?

When looking at our marketing, publishing, and advertising customers, they face a unique spectrum of challenges. There are new expectations from customers regarding how they interact with your brand, websites, and apps. Today’s customers expect privacy, but also want a personalized experience. Additionally, changes to data sources such as the end of third-party cookies and new privacy features in iOS 14 means that there needs to be a change in strategy with where you collect data.  

One solution to these challenges is building a great UX across web, mobile, and even OTT/CTV streaming services. OneTrust helps our customers communicate the value exchange of opting-in which increases consent rates. As a result, marketers can leverage this first-party data to reach their goals.

Consumers, regulations, and now the industry itself are setting the standard for transparency in marketing and AdTech. Personalization while protecting privacy is at the center of many tech-related conversations, but this focus on choice and transparency is not a trend. It is here to stay. 

What’s the most exciting thing coming up for your company?

We have several exciting things on the horizon. First and foremost, is continuing to grow our platform of trust. We were named the #1 fastest growing company on the Inc. 500 last year and recently extended our Series C funding round. This extension brought the round to $510 million and our total funds raised to $920 million.  

We recently acquired Convercent, a leader in ethics software solutions, and recently announced our agreement to acquire Shared Assessments, a leader in developing best practices, education and tools for third-party risk assurance.  These new additions to the OneTrust family will allow us to better operationalize trust for our more than 9,000 customers across the globe.  Check out our growing customer champion stories to learn more about how our customers, like DHL and TheSoul Publishing are leveraging OneTrust to do this. 

We have more planned for 2021 so be sure to follow our social pages to see what else we have in store for the rest of the year! 

How has your team adapted to working remotely?

My team has done an amazing job adapting to working remotely. From working across time zones, finding ways to recreate the comradery we had in the office, and “bear hugging” one another while navigating these unprecedented times.  

Our team has capitalized on tools and applications that make virtual collaboration and updates easier, like WordPress. Given how important OneTrust’s website are as a marketing tool, we have leaned heavily on the ease of using WordPress to update our sites from anywhere around the world. 

Also, our events team pivoted all our in-person events overnight into virtual networking sessions. They’ve managed to not only recreate this community but expand it exponentially.    

What is your team’s favorite piece of marketing software made by someone else?

We love using WordPress to support our website and web development goals. WordPress is easy to use across our web properties and helps OneTrust our website to better market to prospects and customers.  

(Honorable mention to Monday.com for helping to keep us on track!)

Interested in finding out more about our Technology Partners and the enterprise WordPress ecosystem? Check out the full roster of partners, and get in touch with us today.

“Yet another” Top Tier Award for WordPress VIP in Hosting Performance Review

No one likes to be kept waiting.  

When it comes to fully managed WordPress hosting, speed and uptime count bigtime, especially at the enterprise level. 

Once more, WordPress VIP — the agile content platform leading a powerful enterprise ecosystem — has earned a coveted Top Tier award from WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks, a Review Signal Company.

Here’s the TL;DR 2021 performance summary by author Kevin Ohashi:

“WordPress VIP earned yet another Top Tier award. Perfect uptime. Errorless and flat K6 test and excellent Load Storm tests. Nothing seemed to impact the quick performance which is exactly what you would expect from a Top Tier performer.”

How our WordPress hosting performance was measured

Explore the full results here. Learn the tools Review Signal uses to put platforms through their paces, including Load Storm, K6, WebPageTest, WPPerformanceTester, Mozilla Observatory, and Internet.nl. 

For example, Load Storm simulates real users visiting the site, logging in and browsing, testing uncached performance.

Meanwhile, WebPageTest fully loads the homepage and records how long it takes from 12 different locations around the world.

Shopping for a new content management system?

Learn the 14 capabilities that belong in your cart. Read our Agile CMS Buyer’s Guide.