Worry-Free Onboarding Leads To Fearless Launches

Moving a site to a new platform can be scary. One false move could trigger a site-killing domino effect. And when your business is online and only online, that just won’t do.

I recently worked with the WP Engine Onboarding team and BrainPOP^®, a creator of educational resources, to bring its professional development arm – BrainPOP Educators (educators.brainpop.com) – onto WP Engine’s managed WordPress hosting platform. (I’m a developer for SlipFire, the agency BrainPOP used to build BrainPOP Educators™ several years ago). I had been using WP Engine for more than four years and never had a bad experience, so I expected the transition to be smooth.

My biggest concern was with a particularly finicky plugin that had the potential to run incredibly heavy, overload the database, and cause the site to timeout and crash. There was lots of legacy data associated with this plugin, so switching to another would not be easy.

The WP Engine Onboarding team ran a battery of tests before we went live, and sure enough, that plugin showed errors and eventually took the site down each and every time. Working together we were able to narrow down the issue and I was able to locate a filter to turn it off.

Though the code to remove it was simple, this was a huge discovery. It gave me, and my client, confidence that the site would perform as intended once it went into production.

With WP Engine, BrainPOP has a team of experts available 24/7 to help troubleshoot and fix any issues that arise. And the site is fast and on a managed WordPress hosting platform that offers a number of helpful tools, such as staging. We’ve found a lot of value in WP Engine’s staging environment, which makes it easy to develop and test a site before going live.

Overall, the move to WP Engine was amazing. It was a great experience, so much so that we were confident to go live in less than a week. And the launch was a success.

Want to read more stories from WP Engine customers? Each weekday in November we’ll unveil a new customer story as part of our WP Engine Customer Spotlight series.