WP ENGINE ENTERPRISE PLATFORM
WP Engine Helps Oxford University Press Modernize and Cut Costs
An end-of-life CMS was costing Oxford University Press in staff hours and specialist contracts. Migration restored both time and budget for the 500-year-old publisher and provided a clear roadmap for its future.
Site:
Industry:
Publishing & Higher Education
“Migrating to WP Engine has been a significant saving in terms of the support and maintenance we required from our development partner. Thr flexibility and intuitive design features of WordPress® make it easy for marketing staff to get up to speed, and having access to WP Engine’s dedicated team and in-depth knowledge has been really good for us.”
— Gareth Brading, Functional Consultant & Platform Manager, Oxford University Press
20+
hours of staff time reclaimed monthly
127%
increase in site visitors
4x
faster onboarding for new marketers
Our Customer
For over 500 years, Oxford University Press (OUP) have been pushing the boundaries of education and research. OUP publishes the highest-quality academic and educational resources and research around the globe. From monographs to music, textbooks to children’s books, they have titles that span cultures, classrooms, and languages. Beyond traditional publishing, Oxford University Press finds innovative ways to support the needs of learners, making knowledge accessible to all.
Partnership with WP Engine
OUP’s relationship with WP Engine has evolved over many years, beginning with separate accounts for different divisions. Recognizing the inefficiency, OUP consolidated its properties under one global account to streamline management and billing. The partnership is defined by a close, collaborative relationship with WP Engine’s Premium Plus support team, which provides proactive security suggestions, deep institutional knowledge, and reliable service that OUP has come to trust.
The Challenge
OUP’s core digital properties had been running on Alterian, but the price of running an outdated content management system (CMS) was only a small part of what Alterian was actually costing OUP.
An internal security audit flagged Alterian as a risk, as it was no longer supported by its original developers. Maintaining the end-of-life platform meant paying for specialist support and maintenance through an external development partner, running a separate estate of servers, environments, and load balancing, and accepting that any capability the CMS lacked had to be bolted on or built elsewhere.
The true cost to OUP came in the form of lost staff time. Alterian’s templates were locked down and inflexible, so routine updates frequently required hand-coding HTML. Between onboarding training and content changes, setting team members up for productivity was difficult. Technical troubleshooting to support marketing teams had become a nearly full-time job for Platform Manager Gareth Brading.
Fragmentation also added to the total cost of operating OUP’s digital presence. Different divisions had started on separate accounts, and team members could lose an hour per week just jumping between them.
OUP needed to move dozens of sites onto a modern platform that its teams could operate without specialist help. They wanted an environment that could eventually absorb its eCommerce estate as well, so the Alterian infrastructure could be switched off for good.
The Solution
After evaluating several options, OUP chose to standardize on WordPress, hosted on WP Engine’s enterprise-grade platform. This solution offered the best balance of budget, support, and functionality.
More importantly, the foundation prepares OUP to grow and evolve over time. The migration was planned as a multi-phased project, starting with self-contained, informational sites to build momentum and demonstrate success.
A key early win was the migration of the main corporate homepage, corp.oup.com, from Alterian. This was followed by more complex projects, including the large-scale migration of india.oup.com. Throughout this process, OUP worked closely with its dedicated WP Engine support team, which provided proactive technical guidance on security and optimization.
The Results
Moving to WP Engine yielded significant improvements across the board. The newly migrated sites are faster, more reliable, and feature a modern design. The relaunch of corp.oup.com provided real ROI not only from reduced costs but also from the reduced stress required for successful operation.
Key results include:
- Upwards of 20 hours a month returned to the marketing teams. Content changes that used to require hand-coded HTML are now simple to self-serve. WordPress gives OUP’s marketers the flexibility and intuitive editing experience they need to update content quickly.
- Training reduced from hours to minutes. Alterian required a minimum of two hours of formal training plus shadowing, and ongoing troubleshooting was a regular job for technical team members. The new environment takes at most half an hour of training, reducing both the onboarding cost for each new marketer and the internal support burden that used to accompany it.
- Lower spend on specialist support and maintenance. Because WP Engine handles the underlying infrastructure, the support and maintenance work contracted out to OUP’s external development partner has decreased drastically.
- About an hour per week saved by consolidating accounts. Moving divisional accounts into a single global account gave team members with global access a single place to manage the portfolio without jumping across platforms or adding unnecessary access for divisional teams.
- Fewer security incidents and faster resolution when one occurs. Security incidents have dropped to almost zero. The only incident OUP has encountered since migration traced back to a compromised third-party developer account. WP Engine joined a call immediately, and the issue was resolved within a day.
- Improved performance and accessibility, without extra tooling. OUP reports a significant increase in page speed with no performance complaints since migrating, as well as steady increases in WCAG 2.1 AA compliance scores across its sites.
“Alterian training used to take at minimum two hours of dedicated training, often in a training room, and then some shadowing, as well as lots of troubleshooting, said OUP Platform Manager Gareth Brading. “For several years at OUP, that was my main job: helping marketing with issues. Now, training takes at most half an hour.”
Lower cost and operational stress are the true value
For OUP, more savings are still to come. Some parts of the organization’s digital presence are still using Alterian, which means it’s currently carrying the weight of both platforms. The full cost difference won’t be realized until decommissioning all legacy environments.
Once the eCommerce sites migrate, OUP expects to retire a range of environments and servers tied to Alterian, along with the associated load balancer. The initial migrations to WordPress and WP Engine have given the organization confidence and a clear roadmap toward unification and modernization across its portfolio.
Underpinning all of it is the WP Engine team itself. Gareth Brading notes that the relationship goes far beyond hosting alone. The team’s deep knowledge of OUP’s environment and proactive guidance on security and optimization have meant fewer problems reach OUP’s staff in the first place. The decreased stress alone has provided real value worth migrating for.