WP Engine: Powering award-winning WordPress digital experiences on Google Cloud
About WP Engine
WP Engine is the leading digital experience platform for WordPress. With a combination of tech innovation and an award-winning team of WordPress experts, WP Engine helps create world-class digital experiences for more than 120,000 companies across 150 countries. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices around the world.
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About Intel
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By powering customers’ digital experiences on Google Cloud, WP Engine provides enhanced security, performance, and stability for high-profile websites including The Webby Awards, W2O Group, and Thomson Reuters.
Google Cloud results
- Improves security, performance, and reliability for customers such as The Webby Awards
- Helps increase operating and provisioning efficiency to keep prices competitive
- Provides data locality with a variety of global data centers
- Offers opportunities for future enhancements with artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Supports the first WordPress Digital Experience Platform to adopt Google Cloud's newest infrastructure, the Compute-Optimized VM (C2)
- Achieves 60% faster platform performance when combined with other software optimizations
Powering 375K+ sites on Google Cloud
Powering more than a quarter of a million sites on Google Cloud
WP Engine is a market leader in one of the fastest growing segments of the internet: powering digital experiences built on the WordPress open-source content management system. WordPress now powers 35 percent of the web, up from 13 percent in 2010, illustrating its growing popularity with enterprises, agencies, and small businesses alike.
When it comes to the most popular websites on the internet, WP Engine powers more WordPress websites than all other managed WordPress hosts combined.* It serves more than 120,000 customers globally, powering hundreds of thousands of websites for marquee brands such as AMD, Motley Fool, NBA, News Corp, the City of New York, and Under Armour. The WP Engine WordPress Digital Experience Platform provides customers with all-in-one infrastructure, analytics, security, and support, helping to bring their digital visions to life.
"Google Cloud offers the network performance, security, and commitment to continuing innovation that we need to drive maximum value for our customers. We were looking for a bigger, better cloud partnership, and that's exactly what we got."
—Jason Cohen, founder and CTO, WP EngineAlways focused on doing the right thing for its customers, one of the company’s six core values, WP Engine wanted to partner with a cloud services provider that could help it scale smoothly while keeping performance and reliability high. Security and data locality were also critical, as WP Engine serves customers in more than 150 countries.
After a thorough evaluation of potential cloud partners, WP Engine selected Google Cloud as a strategic partner for migrating and powering customer websites due to its global data center footprint and agility to quickly adapt to evolving customer requirements. It also became a Google Cloud Marketplace Technology Partner for Premium WordPress.
"Google Cloud offers the network performance, security, and commitment to continuing innovation that we need to drive maximum value for our customers," says Jason Cohen, founder and CTO of WP Engine. "We were looking for a bigger, better cloud partnership, and that's exactly what we got."
A smooth and confident migration
WP Engine began by performing a lift-and-shift migration of virtual machines (VMs) to Compute Engine instances. Using BigQuery, Looker Studio, and Cloud Datalab to analyze and understand system performance during the migration, WP Engine confidently migrated thousands of live customer sites with no unplanned downtime.
In addition, even after the migration, there is no planned downtime for updates and maintenance. For instance, when the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities were discovered in early 2018, WP Engine experienced zero downtime when Google updated its host servers.
"We had planned downtime with our previous providers at least a couple of times per year, typically when they needed to update their hosts," says Jason. "Google uses live migration technology to keep virtual machines running, which means we never have that sort of planned downtime on Google Cloud."
Performing at lightning speed
Today, WP Engine hosts more than a quarter of a million sites in 14 Google data centers around the globe to keep latency low and help customers navigate compliance requirements.
"Data locality matters to our customers, and Google Cloud provides data centers where our customers are," says Jason. "Google Cloud delivers the low latency our customers require for their WordPress sites to load and perform at lightning speed."
Compute Engine provides the flexibility to choose compute and memory sizes that match customer workloads, helping WP Engine provision the right resources without wasting memory or CPU cycles. Live migration technology delivers a higher level of resiliency to WP Engine customers by keeping VMs running even when a host system event occurs.
"We need to make sure that we're earning our customers' trust every day and providing them with the stability, security, and performance that they need," says Jason. "Google has the same high standards that we do, which helps us provide a first-class product."
Optimizing hosting services with Intel
WP Engine powers some of its WordPress Digital Experience Platform services with 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable-based “C2” (compute optimized) instances on Google Cloud. When combined with other software optimizations, WP Engine achieved platform performance that was 60% faster than before. Compute Engine offers a range of Intel architectures that enable WP Engine to provide its customers with the best possible services per unique workloads.
C2 allows WP Engine to enhance and optimize its platform performance, thanks to fully transparent architecture, all while optimizing compute and memory within its VMs.
WP Engine also takes advantage of Intel-based Google Cloud “Live Migration” instances to run VMs with zero planned downtime, regardless of system maintenance, micro-code updates, and other events that might take place. All of this combines to make WP Engine a leader in performant infrastructure among WordPress platforms today.
Partnering for better customer service
To further improve reliability, scalability, and efficiency, WP Engine is moving to a microservices-based application architecture. It's using a variety of Google Cloud managed services, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for container management and Cloud Pub/Sub for message queueing.
"Our partnership with the Google Cloud team helps us keep service levels high for our customers," says Jason. "The relationship is truly a partnership and does not feel transactional. Google is very transparent with us, and the support is fantastic."
"We honor the best of the internet, so we need the best WordPress Digital Experience Platform. We trust WP Engine because they're always pushing the envelope to do better. Moving us to Google Cloud is a great example of that commitment."
—Steve Marchese, Executive Producer, The Webby AwardsPowering The Webby Awards
With a solid foundation for performance and growth, WP Engine is helping all its customers get the most from their WordPress sites. One of these customers is The Webby Awards, an annual award honoring excellence on the internet. Because The Webby Awards is a respected authority on website usability, performance, and innovation, it takes its own web presence very seriously. Every year, site traffic climbs as the entries roll in and nominees are announced, culminating with the awards show in May. Any downtime or performance issues could tarnish the reputation of the organization bestowing the internet's highest honor.
"We're proud that customers such as The Webby Awards can innovate and go to market faster, improve the performance of their brand's online presence, and generate more ROI from their sites and applications running on WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform and Google Cloud."
—Eric Jones, VP Corporate Communications, WP Engine"We honor the best of the internet, so we need the best WordPress digital experience platform," says Steve Marchese, Executive Producer at The Webby Awards. "We trust WP Engine because they're always pushing the envelope to do better. Moving us to Google Cloud is a great example of that commitment."
Adds Eric Jones, VP Global Communications at WP Engine: "We're proud that customers such as The Webby Awards can innovate and go to market faster, improve the performance of their brand's online presence, and generate more ROI from their sites and applications running on WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform and Google Cloud."
More ways to do more
Since migrating to Google Cloud, WP Engine has broadened its partnership with Google in a number of important ways, leveraging Google Analytics data augmented with WordPress intelligence to deliver WordPress Content Performance to customers. The company also uses Google Analytics 360 to drive business growth and optimize user experiences on its corporate website and user portal.
"Our strong partnership with Google has helped fuel our growth and success," says Jason. "Future enhancements with artificial intelligence and machine learning will help us do even more for our customers."
*Based on WP Engine research identifying the web content management systems' digital fingerprints for the most visited 1 million sites as identified by Alexa. The fingerprints can sometimes be found inside the HTML and in other cases, they are located in the HTTP headers.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About WP Engine
WP Engine is the leading digital experience platform for WordPress. With a combination of tech innovation and an award-winning team of WordPress experts, WP Engine helps create world-class digital experiences for more than 120,000 companies across 150 countries. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with offices around the world.
About Intel
Intel is a leading provider of cloud computing, data center, Internet of Things, and PC solutions that help companies perform better in a connected marketplace.