Plank & WordPress VIP Partnership

While we have been developing WordPress projects since the mid-2000s, over the past five years, we have invested a lot of energy into elevating our focus on this pervasive technology. As a result, we’ve been working to improve our technical skills, grow our WordPress team and become more active community members. With us relying on WordPress as our Content Management System of choice for about 50% of our projects — and over 40% of all sites on the internet — it is a crucial part of our workflow and in turn, has affected our company and culture. 

We feel it’s important to reinvest in the ecosystem and have recently taken some specific steps to make it happen.

WordPress websites can take many shapes and sizes, from simple, template-driven personal sites to large custom design and development platforms like those in which we specialize.  Our goal is to create different partnerships that allow us to do our jobs better and serve our clients and partners well. So, when it comes to development, plugin choices and hosting, we need robust options that fit large, complex and highly trafficked WordPress projects.

Partnering with WordPress VIP

WordPress VIP is owned by Automattic, the creators of WordPress, and offers a hosting solution for enterprise-level web projects with WordPress as the core CMS platform. The VIP platform is a series of different solutions and approaches to managing WordPress projects in unique ways that focus on content strategy, analytics and support, stability and modern architecture. VIP is not the solution for hosting a personal or small business website but for high-trafficked websites that matter to a global user base.

Not too long ago, our WordPress Team Lead, Dave Kellam, mentioned that one of his professional goals was to work on a WordPress VIP-hosted project again. Earlier in his career, he was at an agency that had done quite a bit of work on big projects with WordPress VIP and was curious if we could do the same at Plank. So, loving a challenge, I decided to reach out to WordPress VIP directly and see what the process was to become an official partner of theirs.

Once we started our discussions with WordPress VIP, it became clear they had evolved a lot since Dave last developed a website on the VIP platform. In addition to their WordPress-specific hosting solution and high-end customer support, they have robust solutions to ensure code quality, testing and site stability. We also have come to appreciate that working with them has been like a genuine partnership where we feel like we are a part of something much bigger than our team and get a different perspective and support than any similar partnership.

Continuing to invest in WordPress

Intending to launch at least four websites on the WordPress VIP platform in 2023, we see it as one of the key parts of our WordPress strategy this year. So, while we will still see ourselves contributing to WordPress-related open-source projects, attending WordCamp Europe and the US, and hanging around PostStatus’ Slack, our partnership with WordPress VIP will define the strategy of 50% of what we create this year.