A high-performance CMS breathes life into how media brands like TIME.com, News Corp, and Al Jazeera efficiently deliver breaking news, streaming video, podcasts, and other hot content to audiences.
After all, no one enjoys waiting—especially readers on the edge of their seats consuming minute-by-minute news about US presidential elections or following Taylor Swift’s latest moves.
WordPress VIP provides the technical foundation for many of the world’s largest media companies. We combine the ease and ubiquity of WordPress with the scalability and stability they need to ensure they’re ready for the next big story or event.
Case in point: During the recent 2024 US Presidential election period, Nov. 4-6, WordPress VIP efficiently managed more than 22 billion requests, maintained 100% uptime, and mitigated nasty DDoS attacks for clients (thanks to its purpose-built, enterprise-grade security).
How it’s done: testing to readiness
Committed to delivering reliable service and optimal performance during critical periods, WordPress VIP provides the most robust, secure, and scalable architecture for WordPress deployments—for highly regulated industries, key government agencies, and those top media sites.
For the latter, speed, performance, and uptime are mission-critical in today’s crowded media terrain. Especially on high-traffic days, brands with a performant, secure website get more eyeballs, loyalty, and revenue.
For that, they need a CMS that continually optimizes platform performance with comprehensive service and monitoring, including testing, analysis, and tailored recommendations to address site bottlenecks.
“Uptime was one of the biggest selling points of WordPress VIP. We have huge traffic spikes as a lot of our content goes viral with our users on social networks, and WordPress VIP’s infrastructure (can) sustain those with no changes on our end; it just works!”
—Grant Cerny, Chief Product Officer, iOne Digital
Further, WordPress VIP engineers perform rigorous testing to identify the root causes of slowdowns and to prepare sites for significant traffic events. This proactive approach ensures improved site efficiency and readiness for peak traffic occurrences.
Validated by third-party testing, VIP is a Top Tier choice year after year
No one wants to see their service unavailable or their site offline for customers. That’s why maintaining “perfect uptime” is such a critical goal for brands.
Four years running—2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 (the latest testing results available*)—WordPress VIP earned “Top Tier” awards from WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks, a Review Signal Company.
These accolades are from our 2023 overview:
“WordPress VIP is a familiar face in (our) benchmarks. They’ve been a model of consistency, earning Top Tier recognition every year they’ve participated. This year was no exception.”
Getting into the specifics, Review Signal notes:
“The Load Storm test saw WPVIP earn the third fastest p95, wp-login, and asset response times. The Static test had a 5.7ms average and 13ms p95 (tied for second fastest). WordPress VIP maintained perfect uptime on both monitors. They also earned the third-fastest average for WPT.”
And finally:
“Overall, an unsurprising Top Tier status earned yet again (by WordPress VIP) for a stellar performance.”
—Kevin Ohashi, Founder, Review Signal
Load Storm. K6. WebPageTest. WPPerformanceTester. Mozilla Observatory. Internet.nl. Want to learn more about the specific tools Review Signal uses to put platforms through their third-party validation paces? Dive in here.
*Note: Review Signal is currently on hiatus.
When performance counts, VIP delivers for clients
Here’s a customer roll call that showcases WordPress VIP’s ability to support high-traffic spikes based on our robust infrastructure and optimized performance capabilities.
- VentureBeat saw a 90% reduction in site response time, improved editor workflow efficiency, and an enhanced customer site experience using WordPress VIP’s application support and code review.
- TIME.com, even at “peak Swift,” effortlessly handled the incoming traffic tidal wave from Swiftees—more than 100k requests/second—after TIME named Taylor Swift its “2023 Person of the Year.”
- iOne Digital streamlined content syndication across its sites, managing traffic spikes on top of an average of 24 million pageviews per month without performance incidents after transitioning from a self-hosted WordPress platform to WordPress VIP.
- FiveThirtyEight, during US Election Week 2020, successfully managed 1.3 billion page views, including 132,000 requests per second at one point, with WordPress VIP’s response time staying flat at 144 milliseconds.
Explore more VIP resources for media brands.
Always be ready for your biggest day
And at all hours—because performant architecture helps you reap the harvest of traffic spikes instead of being washed away by downtime disaster.
“Being on the WordPress VIP platform for my company means that we have a sense of relief when we have high publishing days or news volume days,” says News Corp Senior Product Manager Monica Mina, “where we know we’re going to have a lot of traffic and audience activity.”
“The reassurances of uptime are there…No more worry of waking up at 2 a.m. to see that the site has had an outage.”
—Ramsey Mohsen, CEO, Everhance
Greg Ogarrio, Content Marketer—WordPress VIP