Why We Love WordPress VIP
If you could toss a stone into the internet, you’d be hard-pressed to find a website that isn’t built on WordPress’s systems. According to W3Techs’ Web Technology Surveys, around half of all websites live on WordPress’s framework and part of the reason for this is that WordPress offers a variety of integrations, customization, and security that makes them an easy choice for any business looking to establish an online presence.
However, what you may not know is that WordPress hasn’t been resting on its laurels but improving on its products and expanding its offering to meet the needs of a wider range of clients. WordPress VIP provides an example of this, since it comes with an array of tools that make it attractive for Enterprise level organizations to make the switch. Weidenhammer has been using WordPress VIP because it offers a secure, managed service that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Here are a few reasons why Weidenhammer has decided to move its website to WordPress VIP alongside companies like Al Jazeera and the NBA:
Flexibility
WordPress is a supremely flexible platform on which you can build a blog, a website, or a business of almost any size. In its most basic form, WordPress gives you access to thousands of integrations and can be extended practically indefinitely to meet whatever you need.
WordPress VIP takes these basic features and expands them for clients in need of even greater versatility. When the decision was made to diversify Weidenhammer’s brand portfolio, Jennifer Williams, Weidenhammer’s Marketing Director, explained how WordPress VIP could be utilized to easily manage the reorganization of the company’s multiple brands.
“WordPress VIP gave us the ability to manage updates and website content across all our brands from one centralized tenant. It also allows us to share plugins, design, and overall access to all of our 5 sites with ease” Williams noted. This innovation cuts down the time Weidenhammer staff spend updating the websites of the company’s five brand sites, but its utility can be leveraged for any organization with an extensive online presence or the need to manage multiple different corporate identities.
However, it’s easy to set up multiple sites with WordPress’s basic functionality, so why opt for WordPress VIP? It largely depends on how much time and what resources you want to devote to managing your sites.
WordPress VIP enables you to host your sites on WordPress’s servers, whereas other tiers of WordPress often require you to find an outside hosting service. In hosting a site on WordPress servers, WordPress VIP comes with a dedicated team that monitors your site’s uptime and performance, automatically scaling your website’s bandwidth to handle large spikes in traffic without disrupting your user’s experience.
Security
Despite the ability to extend indefinitely and manage multiple sites from a single, centralized hub, WordPress VIP is also one of the most secure website platforms available. With much of its software being open source and so many members active in WordPress communities, it’s easy to quickly identify and patch issues in the website’s architecture before they interrupt your business’s operations.
With WordPress, you get a ton of support in maintaining and protecting your website because of how prolific the software is and how actively the WordPress community identifies and rectifies problems with the system’s stability and security.
WordPress VIP takes this a step further. Having the entire environment hosted on WordPress’s servers does more than provide a means for monitoring traffic and optimizing performance; it also enables a dedicated team of professionals to evaluate all code that goes into your website to ensure no malicious software can compromise your business’s online presence.
“WordPress VIP gives companies a dedicated support team, freeing up internal resources to maintain and protect your website,” David Carpenter, Weidenhammer’s IT Director, said regarding the benefits of WordPress. “It’s easy to manage multiple sites through WordPress VIP’s centralized tenant where you can deploy necessary patches and updates from a single access point, and that coupled with WordPress’s support team makes it easy to manage digital real estate without worrying about security threats derailing your operation.”
In addition to the vetting process, WordPress VIP comes with automatic site back-ups, a built-in CDN that limits the ability of spammers to attack your site, and an SSL that’s trusted by organizations like the Democratic National Convention and Salesforce. WordPress VIP is the only version of WordPress whose information security ecosystem has earned the FedRAMP authorization status, enabling it to be used for use by the US government.
Functionality
So WordPress VIP is flexible and secure, but that doesn’t mean much if the system itself requires you to have an in-depth knowledge of coding and computer science to remove an extra space that made it through the review process. However, the WordPress team took this slim possibility into account and developed their system with an eye towards making it as accessible as possible.
WordPress provides an intuitive editor named Gutenberg to help its users publish and update content with ease. Managing content with the Gutenberg editor means that your writers will be able to edit their text, incorporate photos, and more without having an in-depth knowledge of HTML to get the job done. More streamlined content publishing means you can publish more quality content at a faster rate, increasing the likelihood of it reaching your customers before your competitor can. Plus, the content’s efficacy is tracked utilizing Pars.ly so clients can understand the impact their content has on the business.
In addition to providing an easy-to-use content management system, WordPress VIP enables your team to maximize their use of the platform by providing training to software experts and content creators alike, so everyone knows how to use your WordPress VIP website to the fullest.
Consider the Need
WordPress at a foundational level is designed to make it easier for you to create a website a maintain an online presence. While it’s certainly possible for companies to create a site using the open-source version of WordPress, it’s far more common to turn to hosting services to help manage the task.
There are tradeoffs when it comes to selecting an outside service to host your website. Smaller companies could get by with preset themes, but a more tailored, customized experience will improve your company’s online presence, especially when it comes to enterprise level clients. It’s because of the security, functionality, and flexibility of the WordPress VIP system that Weidenhammer has entrusted our online reputation to its team. Any company that wants to scale quickly without sacrificing your user’s experience should consider WordPress VIP.
If you want to learn more about how we use WordPress VIP, reach out to us today.