It’s Official: The Future Is VIP Go!

We’re excited to announce that by the end of 2020, all WordPress VIP customer sites will be upgraded to VIP Go.

VIP Go is our proprietary cloud platform custom-built for enterprises who need to deliver amazing content at large scale.

Why VIP Go?

In the decade-plus that we’ve brought the benefits of WordPress to large organizations, we have learned their needs are concentrated in four key areas: agility, flexibility, simplicity, and ownership. VIP Go addresses each of those needs in a powerful, intuitive platform with the rock-solid performance and reliability our customers have come to expect from WordPress VIP.

What are the benefits of VIP Go?

Agility

With VIP Go, our customers’ development and marketing teams are more agile than ever. VIP Go introduces GitHub workflows and a new command-line interface (the VIP CLI) which puts more power in developers’ hands to ship new code quickly. Editorial teams enjoy the same intuitive interface as before, with faster turnaround time for shipping new sites and projects.

Flexibility

Direct access to the WordPress API makes it easier than ever for our customers to build exactly the experiences they’re looking to deliver with seamless third-party integrations. With the introduction of true pre-production environments, teams are able to experiment freely, test thoroughly, and tweak to their hearts’ content—all before making any changes to the customer-facing application.

Simplicity

Can we say three cheers for added simplicity anywhere we can get it these days? Our engineers built VIP Go based on over a decade of expertise powering the most sophisticated implementations of WordPress at scale. Over the years, we’ve learned what works, what doesn’t, and how to optimize the experience (from performance to usability to security) so customers never have to worry about things like uptime or traffic spikes. VIP Go bakes that expertise into the very infrastructure of the platform, so customers are free to focus their attention and resources on driving revenue and delivering their product roadmap.

Ownership

The new VIP Dashboard grants additional visibility and access to content syncs, domain mapping, command line history, and more, putting control of the application in the developers’ hands. The VIP-CLI makes it convenient to run commands and query applications. Furthermore, code review is no longer required, though it is still available for customers on a by-request basis. Our goal is to grant our customers increased ownership of their applications while continuing to provide the world-class support that has always defined our approach to customer partnerships.

What’s next?

As of today, more than 75% of our customers are already enjoying the added benefits of VIP Go. This group includes some of our larger organizations with complex, mission-critical applications—think brands like Intuit, Vanguard, Facebook, and more. Each of these companies migrated from our previous platform to VIP Go with great success, and we’re excited to move nearly all of our customers onto VIP Go by Sept. 30, 2020. At that point, we will begin phasing out support for sites on WordPress.com VIP and transition completely to VIP Go by Nov. 1, 2020. (Are you a current customer with a question about your migration? Please reach out to your Relationship Manager for more details.)

VIP Go is a significant milestone in bringing the best of open source to large organizations who need agility, flexibility, simplicity, and ownership in their software in order to bring out the best in their teams and their business. Content forms the heart of every customer experience, and we believe every customer experience should be delightful. We are proud to play a role in making the web a better place, one deploy at a time.

Report: Meeting today’s digital experience needs

Now more than ever, “customer experience” has become synonymous with “digital experience,” and the quality of these experiences is a key indicator of business health. Our colleagues at IDC (a global market research firm) seem to agree: a recent study found that 91% of tech vendors consider customer experience a “top business priority.”

However, executing a strong digital customer experience strategy can be more challenging than it looks. It requires a constellation of best-in-class tools and technologies working in sync to minimize risk and grow revenue.

At WordPress VIP, our main goal is to help our customers empower amazing results for their customers. So we were curious: what major trends are shaping customer experience strategies in 2020 and beyond? How can business leaders manage the many complex processes involved in delivering a unified customer experience? We teamed up with IDC to find out and created this free report to share the insights.

Read now

The report addresses topics like:

• Big-picture trends in customer experience research
• The biggest challenges for today’s digital experience teams
• Advice for organizations looking to improve their digital experience management capabilities

The report’s author is Marci Maddox, who has been researching content technologies and workflows for over a decade. Her core research coverage includes the evolution of enterprise content, customer communications, content sharing, and collaboration.

If you’d like to learn more, you can download the report here.

Oovvuu named a WordPress VIP Featured Technology Partner

We are proud to welcome Oovvuu as a new Featured Technology Partner.

Oovvuu is the newest addition to our group of partners demonstrating excellence in implementing best-in-class solutions for WordPress at scale. This Australian media tech “scale-up” provides the market-leading platform to seamlessly embed videos in news articles, supporting publishers’ goals to drive traffic, increase engagement, and improve monetization.

Oovvuu was founded by journalists-turned-entrepreneurs with the three-fold mission of:

1. Putting a contextually-relevant video in every article in the world;
2. Delivering trusted news to a billion people; and
3. Creating an advertising model to sustain journalism in the 21st century.

Launched in Sydney in late 2014, Oovvuu has partnered with hundreds of broadcasters and publishers (including Reuters, Bloomberg, The Associated Press, The Guardian, and Australia’s Seven West Media) to distribute reliable news to millions of people worldwide daily.

News video consumption is exploding worldwide, yet the news industry faces increasing headwinds. Oovvuu’s focus is on building a consortium of trusted publishers and broadcasters and lasting success for the industry. The outcome of that is a safer, more trusting world for billions.

Oovvuu uses world-leading proprietary machine learning technology to read news articles, watch videos, and recommend matches. Their technology is designed to fit into the workflow of busy newsrooms and to put the power in the hands of journalists to improve news reporting.

At Media24 of South Africa, Oovvuu grew traffic by 30x and engagement 26x in seven months, leading to significant revenue gains in their video strategy.

“Oovvuu is built by journalists for journalists. Like WordPress VIP, we recognise publishers and broadcasters have public trust and a burning passion to report the news. We built the tech that binds them together and now we are focused on working with the WordPress community to bring our common mission to the world.”

— Ricky Sutton, Oovvuu Founder

For more information about Oovvuu’s partnership with WordPress VIP, please visit https://wpvip.com/partner/oovvuu and https://oovvuu.com/news/

Streamlining operations for Grupo Abril

Grupo Abril, one of the largest media companies in Latin America, sought to streamline the IT sprawl that had arisen from the organic growth and development of its dozens of brands.

Taming the sprawl of organic growth

Abril’s portfolio was spread across several content management systems, including a custom Ruby On Rails system hosted in-house, another hosted via Amazon Web Services, and a Drupal-based system supported by Acquia. This system was costly and ineffective. Because of IT constraints, some brands hadn’t had a site update in ten years and as a result, had no mobile-optimized version of their site.

Unleashing greater efficiency

Abril has made major improvements in agility since standardizing with WordPress VIP. In addition to hosting and supporting Abril’s sites and providing training for developers and editorial staff, WordPress VIP manages ongoing security and performance, and serves as an end-to-end consultant for all of Abril’s content publishing development.

Shared benefits across its portfolio

New features and site launches can now be deployed with just a few days’ notice. Company resources are no longer tied up in staying up to date with third-party APIs, and Abril is now first to market with updates any time those services change. This has opened up their pipeline, and freed the organization up to focus its resources where they can have the most valuable impact – editorial and front-end work.

“We have enormously improved our efficiency since we don’t need additional teams or third parties to support our infrastructure. We can focus on what matters, which is producing content and generating value.”

Ricardo Schultz, CIO of Abril

To learn more about our work with Abril, including detailed results of their successful migration, download the executive summary.

Read now

How we planned the first virtual BigWP in just 3 weeks

Back in January, we laid out plans for BigWP in 2020. BigWP is an enterprise event series where our customers, partners, and friends gather to share the exciting things they’re building with WordPress at scale. We had a big vision for multiple events in New York, San Francisco, and London this year.

Then everything changed.

We knew pretty quickly we didn’t want to miss out on BigWP by waiting to see how the pandemic would progress, so we made a quick decision to pivot to a virtual event.

This post outlines our approach to the first-ever virtual BigWP. We hope it can be helpful for you as you navigate your way through the world of newly-remote events.

New Considerations

There are so many new considerations in taking an in-person event online. For us, those included:

• Could we engage high-quality speakers on short notice?
• Would people want to attend with all the distractions they were enduring?
• Might this open up the opportunity for more attendees without being geographically limited?
• Could we keep the balance of informative and fun that makes BigWP so special?

Turns out, the answer to each of these questions was a resounding “yes!” We realized we had a great opportunity to bring the San Francisco and New York events together, and dubbed it BigWP Americas —which also allowed us to extend invites to clients, prospects, and partners in Canada and South America. Our first win!

Next up… everything else.

Mission 1: Platform selection

In choosing a platform to host the event, we wanted to ensure it was interactive and something that attendees were familiar with using. Our immediate thought was to host this as a Zoom webinar, but that wouldn’t have allowed the audience to be seen, only the speakers. Since the enterprise WordPress community was at the core of this event, we shifted to what attendees would later call “the largest Zoom meeting [they’ve] ever been to.” Not only did this allow everyone to see and interact with each other, but it also allowed us to use breakout rooms for the Happy Hour to satisfy the social aspect of the evening.

Mission 2: Branded event website

While we previously used Meetup.com for BigWP events, we outgrew the constraints of the platform. We needed a site that could become a one-stop resource hub for everything BigWP—while also being reliable, easy to update, and granting us full ownership of the content. We built the new site on the VIP Cloud, which allowed us to serve multiple events and locations simultaneously. This move will also enable us to create a resource library of past talks, all in one place.

Mission 3: Compelling content

Choosing the right speakers for this enterprise community event was essential. We always work to strike the right balance of informative and interesting.

“What is the right path to start selling products on my WordPress site?”
Presented by: Matias Saggiorato, CTO of SAU/CAL

Matias is the Argentina-based CTO of the web development agency SAU/CAL. He actively contributes to open source projects and he and his team are certified WooCommerce Experts and are a WordPress VIP Silver Agency Partner. They build, enhance, and maintain high-scale online stores.

“The key to evidence-based decision making for product teams”
Presented by: Cathi Bosco, UX Architect for XWP

Cathi is a designer and UX Architect for web development agency (and Gold agency partner) XWP and UX consultancy UXATT. Her teams work with companies to create great experiences for humans through UX audits and informal research studies.

“Web Stories and the early version of Story Editor”
Presented by: Paul Bakaus, AMP & Web Creator Relations, Google

Paul joined as our keynote speaker. We were thrilled when he did a live demo to share a product feature that is yet to launch! This was a great way to give our community behind-the-scenes access to what’s happening next with AMP and WordPress.

Mission 4: Delightful swag

Swag is a big part of our physical events. The right swag is a great way to leave a long-lasting, positive impression on your attendees, and we challenge ourselves again and again to up our swag game each time.

For our first-ever virtual event, we wanted to create a physical aspect of the event despite the distance. Enter: gift boxes with all the fixings for mocktails/cocktails. We chose a recipe inspired by the Smoky Lemon Mule featured on SugarAndCharm.com, who call WordPress home. This element allowed for a fun surprise arriving to attendees’ homes the week of the event, and created a shared experience over Zoom as attendees raised their custom tumblers in a toast.

Mission 5: On to the next one!

We produced an event in less than three weeks from concept through design to go-live.

This agility was thanks largely to moving the BigWP site over to the VIP Cloud. The new site gave us full control over the user journey and empowered us to create a richly-branded event using minimal technical resources—just one (awesome) designer and one (fantastic) developer.

Happily, BigWP was received well by both the attendees and the speakers. We can’t wait to host our next event, BigWP EMEA, coming soon!

Unlocking power and efficiency for News Corp Australia

News Corp Australia is Australia’s largest digital news network. Together, its channels see 8 million unique visits a day and 600 million page views a month.

Multiple platforms hampered growth

With 90+ brands spread across a wide range of platforms, their team suffered from inefficient workflows which hindered their growth. To position themselves for continued success, they needed a flexible enterprise-level digital publishing solution with the power to scale.

After a successful test project, News Corp Australia went all in and migrated their 90+ brands to WordPress VIP.

Agility at scale

Armed with WordPress, an agile platform that integrates seamlessly with internal systems, stakeholders are now able to contribute value to their sites in ways that were not possible before. A core suite of vetted plugins and a base theme serve as the foundation for each new site on the platform. And a new in-editor “Site Build” experience offers web producers the ability to assemble and organize an infinite combination of complex layouts—without touching code.

Major improvement in time to value

Since launching with WordPress VIP, News Corp Australia has continued to grow their digital publishing offerings, now hosting 40+ sites with WordPress VIP, and launching new assets on a regular basis. They take advantage of over 50 custom plugins, which integrate WordPress with their broader systems architecture. In many ways, this project allowed News Corp Australia to reinvent themselves and established a partnership to drive the evolution of the platform for years to come.

“[We] … cut the time it takes to build out a section of the site from days to hours. We’re so proud to be part of that success story.”

Weston Ruter, CTO at XWP

To learn more about our work with News Corp Australia, including detailed results of their successful migration, download the executive summary.

Read now

Viafoura Named a WordPress VIP Featured Technology Partner

We are proud to welcome Viafoura as a new Featured Technology Partner!

Viafoura joins our growing group of partners with proven excellence implementing best-in-class solutions for WordPress at scale. This new partnership offers WordPress VIP clients the ability to integrate a suite of engagement tools onto their digital properties, which will allow them to build and retain a loyal audience.

Viafoura is a software company committed to providing media organizations with essential resources and tools that engage audiences and contribute to highly lucrative business strategies. Fueled by a team of dedicated product and data experts, Viafoura ensures that every client is following the best possible path to maximize their revenue.

This solution delivers a wide variety of tools and features that improve the visitor experience. These include conversation, live blog, community chat, content recommendation, and rating and review widgets — all backed by sophisticated moderation services.

Leveraged by major media companies like Reach PLC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Graham Media Group, and GateHouse Media, Viafoura’s solution is designed to transform passive audience members into active brand supporters. They also offer first-party audience data, actionable engagement insights, and guidance through a dedicated support team. To learn more about Viafoura’s solution, you can access a full overview of their products and services here.

“With consumers now craving more online engagement than ever before, businesses have a significant opportunity to nurture the traffic right on their websites or apps. We’re looking forward to connecting with WordPress VIP clients to discuss how Viafoura can help them fully monetize their digital audiences.

— Jesse Moeinifar, CEO and founder of Viafoura

Learn more about Viafoura’s partnership

How to Build an Ecommerce Store That Scales With WordPress

After a decade of building ecommerce solutions for large organizations, Matias Saggiorato has learned a thing or two about optimizing online stores for speed and performance. Matias is CTO of WordPress VIP partner agency SAU/CAL. The agency is a certified WooCommerce expert and they’ve worked with enterprise clients like Stripe, P&G, Amazon Pay, and Phlearn.

In this talk, Matias shares how companies looking to diversify their revenue streams can build a platform that scales up to thousands of transactions per day without breaking a sweat.

Panel: Lead a successful digital transformation

WATCH NOW

Did you know that of the 91% of companies pursuing digitization, only 40% successfully achieve it?

In this webinar, hear Jary Carter, WordPress VIP’s Chief Revenue Officer, interview a panel of experts on navigating change management at large organizations.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• Common digitization pitfalls and how to avoid them
• How to turn a customer-centered strategy into a competitive advantage
• Which emerging technologies are helpful, and which are just hype
• Tips for navigating change through every level of your organization

Featuring:

• Lora Dennis, Senior Vice President of Digital Media at NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations
• Jonathan Rivers, Chief Technology Officer at Fortune Magazine
• Nancy Cassutt, Managing Director, News, Marketplace (American Public Media)
• Scott Morris, Senior Vice President Of Technology and Innovation at Nexstar Media Group, Inc.

WATCH NOW

Empowering Creative Content Marketing Across Remote Teams

I recently had the opportunity to present at Discover MarTech, a virtual conference focused on marketing technology and management. My goal was to help fellow marketing managers see the silver lining in something many teams are struggling with right now: how to stay creative as we navigate the new culture of remote work.

Automattic, WordPress VIP’s parent company, has always been a fully remote workplace. Well, actually, we prefer the term “distributed,” because there are no central, physical, headquarters.

Each Automattician (which is what we call ourselves) works from a home office, or a local co-working space, a coffee shop, really, just about anywhere that has a good internet connection.

No such thing as “normal”

Right now, though, that list of possible locations has been whittled down to just one: the home office. And perhaps not the normal home office. It’s now the home office you can never leave. The home office with kids, with partners, and with a makeshift homeschool. Or the home office for one, on a bed in a tiny studio apartment.

So for us, the “new normal” of remote work that so many other companies have been thrust into is both incredibly familiar, and completely new. This is not normal remote work, even for us.

Shared values drive agility

The good news, though, is that being distributed actually enables us to be creative in a more agile way. That’s in large part thanks to the values and culture at the root of our workplace, and how our strategies and tools for remote work allow us to reach out to each other across teams, locations, and time zones.

I’m happy to share the recording of my 15-minute talk, which covers:

• How values like agility, stability, accountability, flexibility, and authenticity inform the way we work, and how defining your own values can have a similar impact on your team
• The role of open-source software in creating the stability and consistency we need to grow
• The tools we use to improve collaboration across cross-functional teams in multiple time zones

Watch the video here:

If you have any questions or ideas, I’d love to talk more about this topic. I have so much empathy for everyone who is juggling life in a new way. When it comes to navigating our current reality, we’re all in this together.