WP Engine Mid-Year Review: A Look at Innovation

It’s been a busy first half of the year at WP Engine.

We’ve pledged to be the intersection of technology and service for our customers, so they can win online—here’s how we’ve delivered on that promise so far this year:

As voice technology continues to expand and see greater adoption, expectations that digital experiences include voice tech are growing. The Amazon Polly plugin for WordPress, co-authored by AWS and WP Engine, lets users bring voice technology to their websites by turning text into lifelike speech. Translate, an update to the existing Polly plugin, brings those voices to life in a growing list of different languages.

Here are some of the other updates we’ve made to our platform this year to keep you up to speed.

Platform Improvement To Do List

In the first half of 2018, we added improvements to our digital experience platform. We added SSH Gateway, which makes site management more efficient at scale, and we began offering the option to add development, staging, and production environments to your site, where you can spin up test plugins, themes, and custom code. We also added new capabilities to the WP Engine User Portal and we added new data centers in Montreal, Canada, and Tokyo, Japan. To make sure you get the most out of these platform enhancements, we back them all with our award-winning, 24/7/365 support.

24/7/365 Customer Support

At WP Engine, we support more than 80,000 customers across 500,000 digital experiences globally, and in the first half of 2018, we answered one support question every minute. That’s the same amount of time it takes a blood cell to travel your entire circulatory system.

14 Billion+ Attacks Stopped 

Our job is to make you successful. Since the beginning of 2018, we’ve blocked more than 14 billion malicious attacks against customers’ sites. That’s 3x the number of views as the most popular YouTube video—Despacito. We’re constantly working hard to keep bad actors at bay.

Strengthening the WP Engine WordPress Digital Experience Platform

In June, we announced the acquisition of StudioPress, WP Engine’s largest acquisition to date. Adding StudioPress and it’s popular Genesis framework to the WP Engine portfolio of solutions will allow us to strengthen our support for the WordPress community while building on all of the amazing work StudioPress has done. Beginning this fall/autumn, we plan to offer the Genesis Framework and StudioPress themes to all of our customers, for free.

 25 New Ways to Build With WP Engine

Since January, we’ve vetted and optimized 25 more plugins, tools, and solutions built by the WordPress community and made them available in WP Engine’s Solution Center to make your WordPress experience better!

WordPress is eating the web

WordPress now powers 31 percent of the web, showing relentless growth as businesses of all sizes turn to WordPress to power their digital experiences.

We love the community

At WP Engine, we love all things WordPress and the community that makes it thrive. In 2018, we will sponsor 18 WordCamps, as well as more than 100 WordPress meetups around the world. Our overall contributions to the WordPress community in time, money, writing, coding, and thought leadership are on pace to exceed $3.2 million in 2018.

Come Grow with Us!

Our Agency Partner Program can help your agency grow its business with WordPress. Already, more than 1,450 agencies partner globally with WP Engine so they can bring better digital experiences to their clients. That’s more than 2x the number of players who competed in this year’s World Cup! In the UK, the program has already grown by a factor of 20x since September. Come grow with us!

Everywhere you are

These days, every digital experience is global, and we want to be where you are. We’ve continued to focus on global expansion with growth in our London, Limerick, and Brisbane offices. June 2018 marked our one-year anniversary in Australia.

It’s been a busy first half of the year, but we’re not slowing down! Stay tuned as we continue to innovate and evolve on your behalf.