Speed, performance, and uptime are essential in today’s competitive media landscape. On high-traffic days, brands with fast and secure websites attract more viewers, build loyalty, and increase revenue.
On the downside, slow-loading or unavailable websites kill the user experience, drive high bounce rates, and decrease conversions.
Why our customers enjoy better performance
WordPress VIP is the technical backbone for the world’s largest media companies: TIME.com, News Corp, Al Jazeera, and Vox. We blend WordPress’s simplicity and widespread use with the performance, scalability, and reliability required to prepare them for the next major story or viral, high-traffic event.
Those media brands are saying no to performance roadblocks by leveraging WordPress VIP’s digital ecosystem, which includes an extensive partner network, support, plug-ins, and development courses.
Adweek: peak performance in the Red Zone
The Super Bowl is always Adweek’s biggest night of the year, with no second chances.
They have to be available, performant, and ready to scale to meet at least 3x more daily traffic as visitors flock to their Super Bowl ad tracker, live blog, and homepage that serve up hot takes on every commercial as they air.
Adweek upped its Super Bowl game for 2025 after migrating to WordPress VIP the prior spring with an assist from Agency Partner rtCamp.
Our infrastructure and pre-game testing paid off. Adweek’s site handled nearly double the traffic from 2024 with zero downtime and no performance issues. Score one for a platform purpose-built for the largest media brands on the planet.
TIME.com: a new era of performance at scale
“More stories on TIME.com means more traffic to TIME.com, which means more ads served on TIME.com, which means more revenue for TIME,” says TIME CTO Burhan Hamid.
A WordPress VIP client since 2015, having transitioned from a dated legacy publishing platform, TIME.com recently underwent a re-platforming. That meant moving from the classic WordPress Editor to the Gutenberg Editor, all in the name of gaining new efficiencies in publishing, editorial, and (perhaps more importantly) performance.
But would the upgraded site hold up after the publisher named Taylor Swift their 2023 “Person of the Year”?
Even at what TIME.com called “peak Swift,” TIME.com did. “The Swifties came, they showed up… like (100 thousand) requests per second we were doing,” says Hamid. “It really was flawless execution.”
New York Post: performance gains across the board
A decade ago, the iconic tabloid New York Post knew they had to modernize their operations for the digital era: moving print content online and meeting new digital demands like live sports and social media integration.
Unfortunately, their existing infrastructure was maxed out, requiring a complete overhaul to unify it, streamline workflows, and support new digital channels.
In 2013, the Post partnered with WordPress VIP and Agency Partner Alley to rebuild their core publishing services, move to a managed hosting platform, and develop digital-first workflows.
The performance gains across the board were newsworthy. The Post increased visitor traffic, sped up newsroom workflows, supported new sites, deployed new features faster, while virtually eliminating downtime.
In the digital transformation, the Post migrated 13 years of content into a unified system, significantly improving performance—“mindbogglingly fantastic,” says New York Post Chief Digital Officer Remy Stern.
“Whether you wanted to look at it from a performance standpoint or in terms of speed metrics, or you wanted to look at downtime or the traffic pre- and post-launch…all the data supported the decision that we made (to move to WordPress VIP).”
—Remy Stern, Chief Digital Officer, New York Post
Partnerships
As you’ve gleaned from our media case studies, our global network of agency and technology partners, global system integrators, and global service providers specialize in performance optimization for the world’s biggest digital properties.
These professionals lie at the heart of the enterprise CMS ecosystem, offering performance and implementation guidance, from optimizing infrastructure and speed to up-leveling a site’s Core Web Vitals.
Venture Beat
Before migrating to WordPress VIP, technology news platform Venture Beat faced significant performance challenges. Site response times ranged from 1,500 to 2,000 milliseconds, impacting user experience and search engine rankings.
Venture Beat partnered with WordPress VIP and Agency Partner 10up to address these performance gaps. The collaboration involved a comprehensive code audit and infrastructure review, which resolved performance bugs across the board—dramatically improving site performance, especially response time.
“It’s down to 200 to 300 milliseconds, and often quite less, a tenth of what it was originally,” says Venture Beat Director of Technology Steve Tidwell.
With WordPress VIP managing ongoing maintenance and performance, Venture Beat’s technical team is now freed up to focus on growth initiatives.
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Solving Performance and Stability for VentureBeat
iOne Digital
Another VIP + partner success story comes from iOne Digital, a leading online platform focused on American Black culture. During high-traffic events, the company suffered severe performance issues due to a legacy codebase, limiting scalability and complicating site maintenance.
Migrating to WordPress VIP with help from Agency Partner XWP gave iOne Digital a unified platform with a single theme for all its sites, streamlining development and feature implementation. Best of all, high-traffic days were no longer feared.
“Uptime was one of the biggest selling points of WordPress VIP,” says iOne Digital Chief Product Officer Grant Cerny. “We have huge traffic spikes as (much) of our content goes viral with our users on social networks. WordPress VIP’s infrastructure (can) sustain those with no changes on our end; it just works!”
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WordPress VIP Partners Accelerate Success for Media Brands
Support and Professional Services
Performance debugging and deep troubleshooting to high-traffic event planning
As part of its full platform commitment, WordPress VIP Support gets “down and dirty to solve a problem,” says News Corp. Senior Project Manager Monica Mina.
Often, that means platform and performance debugging, site bottleneck analysis, and application downtime monitoring—then delivering tailored recommendations. This comprehensive mix helps resolve common performance issues, ensuring media brands’ technical teams “remain unstuck” and can swiftly roll out high-performing applications.
“Bringing in a team that eats, breathes, and sleeps WordPress—that is where the power of WordPress VIP comes from,” says Al Jazeera Digital Chief Technology Officer David “Hos” Hostetter. (Full credit: Augmenting the media network’s move to a headless digital experience stack on WordPress VIP were Agency Partners rtCamp and 10up.)
Adds Venture Beat Director of Technology Steve Tidwell: “…basically it’s like we hired another engineer…an extra level of QA on our code now by people who actually know what they’re looking at, so that helps us a lot with availability and performance.”
Professional Services
WordPress VIP’s Professional Services can take performance optimization to the next level with a hands-on approach from foremost enterprise WordPress experts. Here’s a quick overview of what’s possible with an engagement.
Performance service
- Key benefit: Enhancing site performance for accelerated growth.
- How it’s done: We assess your plans, identify bottlenecks, and provide customized, actionable recommendations, collaborating with your engineering team or agency to implement improvements.
Resolving challenges
- Key benefit: Finding the root cause of existing performance roadblocks.
- How it’s done: WordPress VIP engineers perform rigorous testing and application code analysis to find the root cause of slowdowns and then provide actionable fixes.
Improving Core Web Vitals
- Key benefit: Improving SEO and user experience by identifying underperforming key benchmarks across different devices.
- How it’s done: We analyze your code to pinpoint what’s negatively affecting your frontend performance metrics and offer ways to improve them.
High-traffic event planning
- Key benefit: Preparing applications to stand up to the demands of sudden influxes of traffic and the unique behaviors that surface during critical moments.
- How it’s done: VIP undertakes a deep application-level analysis to develop actionable engineering recommendations for improved resilience and scalability.
Digital ecosystem
Plugins and courseware developed by developers for developers
The WordPress VIP digital ecosystem boasts over 55,000+ off-the-shelf plugins, integrations, themes, and templates to turbocharge WordPress-based CMSes.
Tried and tested performance favorites include:
- Legacy Redirector—for handling high volumes of redirects in a scalable manner.
- Comprehensive Sitemaps—to boost search engines when crawling your site.
- HTTP Concat (bundled as part of vip-go-mu-plugins)—for performing CSS and JavaScript concatenation of individual script files into one resource request.
- Performance Lab (from the WP Core Performance team)—a collection of features for enhancing site performance.
- Cache Nav Menus—to improve the performance of navigation menus within WordPress.
The ecosystem also includes free educational channels for developers to sharpen their tech performance skills. Here’s a look at two.
VIP Learn
Stocked with content meticulously curated by seasoned engineers, VIP Learn is an educational platform offering courses to enhance skills in WordPress development, performance optimization, and digital content management.
The Enterprise WordPress Performance module is of particular note for media brands. Its charter is to equip web developers with skills to build “high-performing, scalable WordPress applications,” with an emphasis on performance optimization strategies and high-traffic event preparation.
Learn WordPress
Learn WordPress, hosted on WordPress.org, is a vast portal with WordPress-focused courses, lessons, workshops, and more. It’s another learning resource goldmine for developers, suited for beginners to advanced users.
For example, the intermediate Website optimization course focuses on performance factors like network infrastructure and server hardware, ways to test site speed, and more. Key testing metrics and tools covered include Core Web Vitals, PageSpeed Insights, WebPage Test, and Time to First Byte (TTFB).
Learn more about WordPress VIP and performance
Discover why we’ve been a Top Tier performer four years straight, scoring speed and “perfect uptime” accolades, when put to the test by third-party testing site WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks, a Review Signal Company.
Greg Ogarrio, Content Marketer—WordPress VIP