Fujifilm Zooms In on WP Engine for Stability, Security, and Support
Fujifilm Corporation completes a strategic migration to WordPress, empowering localized content creation and providing site visitors with a vastly improved user experience.
Industry: Digital Imaging
Site: Fujifilm-x.com
Challenge: Remedy performance issues and internal bottlenecks to support Fujifilm’s growing content requirements. Replace third-party site management with a trusted partner for added visibility and confidence across internal teams.
Solution: Migration back to WordPress from Typo3 with a new site hosted on a dedicated server via WP Engine’s industry-leading WordPress platform.
Results: Returning to WordPress with WP Engine has unlocked greater content autonomy and agility for Fujifilm’s internal teams, as well as the speed, security, and support today’s large enterprises demand.
Fujifilm Corporation is a leading manufacturer and provider of imaging products and solutions. Continuously innovating, it creates new technologies, products and services that inspire and excite people around the globe. Fujifilm’s goal is to empower the potential and expand the horizons of tomorrow's businesses and lifestyles.
With an open and flexible attitude to innovation, Fujifilm combines its own original technology with human resources, expertise, and technology from around the world. This powerful synergy enables the company to develop new solutions rapidly and nimbly to address the needs of its global customers.
“Working with WP Engine, we quickly learned what sets them apart at the enterprise level. From amazing support to providing peace of mind around security and backups, WP Engine helped us find our way back to WordPress with incredible results.”
—Toshiya Fuji, Professional Imaging Group, Imaging Solutions Division, Fujifilm Corporation
Finding the Right Solution for Growing Digital Demand
Fujifilm Corporation is a multinational conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. While the company’s web presence has long been established, Fujifilm first began using WordPress in 2018, as it built out Fujifilm-x, a digital property meant to live alongside Fujifilm’s corporate website with a curated content collection focused on innovative photography.
The initial project was designed as a place for the company’s marketing and creative teams to bring new ideas to life quickly—without the lengthy development cycles and developer-heavy systems associated with the company’s corporate site.
Over the following two years, as business needs expanded, so too did requirements across the new website, including the need for updated functionality and a solution for increasing infrastructure demands.
As the site became heavier with content, it became harder to use and more difficult to manage. In an attempt to improve site functionality, the Fujifilm-x team moved away from WordPress, rebuilding the site with a new CMS and hosting it with a new provider.
While the Fujifilm-x team’s initial hope was that a redesigned site and a different web host would remedy previous pain points, issues with server infrastructure continued, ultimately creating further site slowdowns and even downtime—the worst of which resulted in an eight-hour-long site failure.
It quickly became apparent that the problem wasn’t the site’s underlying CMS but the way it had been built and previously managed. In 2021, Fujifilm carried out a full remigration back to WordPress and discovered a whole new world, unlocked by WP Engine’s industry-leading WordPress platform.
A Seamless Migration Instills Confidence and Peace of Mind
Migration to WP Engine's platform was seamless, and per the Fujifilm-x team’s request, the new site was rebuilt so that the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was clustered and the web server and database were in one place.
“This led to an immediate improvement in response time,” said Toshiya Fujii, who oversaw the remigration as part of his role with Fujifilm’s Imaging Solutions Division, “and it led to longer-term stability that has been crucial. I don’t have to worry about the site going down anymore.”
Another key benefit, Fuji added, was the close collaboration his team enjoyed with their WP Engine counterparts, including a dedicated migration specialist, a customer manager with a close understanding of Fujifilm’s unique needs, and 24-hour expert support to ensure the Fujifilm team could troubleshoot in real- time, with real experts, whenever the need arose.
“I felt completely supported during the migration process,” he said.
“The team was very patient and walked through any questions or problems without rushing me. It felt like a true collaboration, and together, we were able to find and activate solutions."
In addition to WP Engine's in-house WordPress technical experts, Fuji noted the level of support his team received was something they had not encountered with other hosting providers.
"Working with WP Engine, we quickly learned what sets them apart at the enterprise level. From amazing support, which included detailed testing to ensure we found the optimal server for our needs, to providing peace of mind around security and backups, WP Engine helped us find our way back to WordPress with incredible results.”
“With a carefully-managed migration and access to tools and features built specifically for WordPress developers, WP Engine has enabled us to maximize our digital footprint on Fujifilm-x.com and engage larger audiences with more dynamic content, all while setting a solid foundation for future growth.”
—Toshiya Fuji, Professional Imaging Group, Imaging Solutions Division, Fujifilm Corporation
The Results
With a new site up and running, Fuji and his team immediately began to refocus their efforts across Fujifilm’s global digital footprint.
As one of the world’s most well-known imaging brands, Fujifilm is established in more than 50 global markets, each with its own website, where editors are encouraged to create original, localized global content and have the autonomy to publish it with ease.
“WordPress is built for editors,” Fuji said. “The platform is easy to use and extremely agile, enabling creatives to activate and bring projects to life in real-time, without breaking their budget.”
“Since the new site was launched, we’ve experienced a great improvement to internal workflows. Our local editors are essentially free to create their own content, and with WP Engine behind it all, they feel empowered to create more—more often.”
These new capabilities came in especially handy during the Covid-19 pandemic, as Fuji and his team experimented with new ways to keep customers interested and excited about Fujifilm’s products when in many cases, they couldn’t touch them.
“We challenged our local subsidiaries to come up with an idea that would resonate in their markets and we turned this into a global content series,” Fuji said.
“With the new WordPress site up and running, we were able to see the idea materialize very quickly as local subsidiaries were enabled—and empowered—to create and manage the content themselves.”
All in all, taking a new approach to content management using WP Engine’s platform has allowed Fuji and his team to unlock the full potential of WordPress with industry-leading performance and support.