The Secret Sauce of Big Enterprise WordPress Websites

Welcome to WORDPRESS for ENTERPRISE$, where we go behind the scenes of BILLION-DOLLAR websites.

In this issue, you'll discover:

• How do large enterprises use WordPress to power their multi-billion-dollar businesses?

• What makes enterprise WordPress stand out?

• What do top enterprise agencies, like Multidots, do when building massive websites?

WordPress: Small Enough for Mom-and-Pop Shops, Powerful Enough for Big Enterprises

Curious if billion-dollar enterprises are using some rare, exclusive, gold-plated version of WordPress?

Drumroll, please... 🥁

Nope!

The same WordPress powers everything from mom-and-pop shops and high school projects to billion-dollar enterprises—about 90% of the code is the same across the board.

So, what's different about WordPress for Enterprises?

While it's the same WordPress at its core, building and optimizing it for large enterprises requires a different approach due to their size, structure, complexity, and high stakes.

While not strictly defined, we consider enterprises to be those handling 1 million+ page views or generating $100M+ in revenue or valuations—or those representing a famous celebrity or brand.

The Secret Sauce of Big Enterprise WordPress Websites

After over a decade of working with 50+ big enterprises, I've put together a list of 7 key ingredients (aka the secret sauce) that make their WordPress sites shine. These are the must-watch areas we, as WordPress enterprise experts, focus on when working with large-scale businesses to help them succeed.

Now, let’s dive into these key points and explore why they matter so much for big enterprise websites. I’ll also walk you through the tools, techniques, and strategies we use to meet and exceed these high expectations.

1. STRUCTURE

These big enterprises usually have a lot going on—multiple products, operations in different countries, customers speaking different languages, and content being pushed across all sorts of platforms. Managing these websites can get pretty complex, with custom setups for ownership and control.

We're not just talking about one or two websites—sometimes it’s dozens, even hundreds.

A standard WordPress setup won’t cut it for businesses like this. That’s where we come in, using two main approaches to make it all work:

Multisite Network: Many enterprise clients need multiple websites sharing users, content, and design. WordPress Multisite is ideal for this. It lets us create many websites under one central hub, with easy management of users, content, and design across all sites.

Headless WordPress: With a headless CMS, you manage content in one place and push it out across different platforms like mobile apps or websites. This setup lets marketers easily manage content, while developers can build faster, automate updates, and scale across multiple digital platforms.

2. COMPLIANCE

Cool, so we’ve got the website structure sorted. Now, let’s talk about the legal stuff. These big enterprises can lose millions of dollars for non-compliance with some data-handling and design best practices laws. And it’s not just about avoiding legal trouble, it's about building trust with their customers. Different country has different regulations, so we partner with legal and specialized agencies in compliance and ensure these enterprise websites are built and designed with compliance in mind.

3. SPEED TO PUBLISH

Speed of publishing is crucial, especially for enterprise-level businesses. Unlike small websites, large organizations push out hundreds of articles weekly, often involving complex workflows with multiple contributors.

That’s why we create custom workflows, plugins, content blocks, and templates in WordPress to help them hit publish faster.

Take Wonderwall, for example. They thrive on breaking celebrity news during events like the Oscars and Emmys, needing to publish hundreds of articles at lightning speed.

We’ve developed a powerful, custom collaboration and workflow tool—Multicollab, that helps major publishers like SmartAsset, Gannett, and Politico create and publish content faster in WordPress.

4. PERFORMANCE

A slow website is a dealbreaker—it tanks your search rankings, frustrates visitors, and drains your sales. While page load speed is critical for everyone, the stakes are even higher for big businesses.

Optimizing a large enterprise site isn’t the same as tweaking a small business website. With a global audience and tons of high-res images, videos, and ad placements, speed becomes a major challenge. But how do we solve it?

Our enterprise performance strategy is built on three pillars:

#1 Code Quality: We write clean, efficient code, using the latest optimization techniques and minimizing plugin overload.

#2 Top-Tier Hosting: Our partnerships with enterprise-grade hosting platforms ensure our clients benefit from high-performance servers that handle heavy traffic and large media files with ease.

#3 Global Delivery: We tap into a powerful CDN to deliver content at lightning speed across the globe, optimizing performance for users in every region.

Learn: How We Optimize Big, Busy, and Bulky WordPress Sites for Performance (and You Can Too)

5. SECURITY

Enterprise websites are prime targets for hackers due to the sensitive data they manage and the severe damage a breach can cause to a company’s reputation. While WordPress is sometimes unfairly labeled as less secure, the truth is that any platform can be vulnerable without the right measures.

Security boils down to two critical areas: systems and users.

System security focuses on protecting the code and server infrastructure, while user security aims to prevent breaches caused by human errors like phishing or weak passwords.

Here’s how we strengthen system security:

Robust Coding: We follow best practices and use tools like code sniffers to identify and eliminate vulnerabilities.

WordPress Hardening: We lock down WordPress by disabling risky features like XML-RPC and admin code editing, and we use plugins like WordFence and Jetpack to boost security.

User Protection: We implement two-factor authentication and provide thorough security training to ensure users know how to protect their accounts from unauthorized access.

6. INTEGRATIONS

Enterprise businesses juggle a complex ecosystem of tools—from customer data management to sales performance tracking. For their WordPress websites to run efficiently, seamless integration with these platforms is essential.

We’ve helped enterprises connect a wide range of tools, like Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and Zendesk, to streamline their workflows.

The good news? Many of these platforms come with great documentation and ready-to-use WordPress plugins, making integration straightforward.

When custom solutions are needed, our expertise with the WordPress REST API ensures everything fits together perfectly.

7. ENTERPRISE SUPPORT

Comprehensive support is essential for long-term success with enterprise clients. For billion-dollar businesses, website downtime can be incredibly costly, both financially and reputationally.

These enterprises require ongoing, custom monitoring and dedicated support. Here are a few examples of the enterprise-level support we provide to meet their unique needs:

In-depth technical documentation: We create detailed technical guides for all custom development work, ensuring clarity and easy future maintenance.

User guides and video tutorials: We provide step-by-step guides and video tutorials to empower content and editorial teams to manage content efficiently.

Custom Enterprise SLAs: Our tailored Service Level Agreements cover IT services, cloud infrastructure, software, networks, and data centers, focusing on availability, performance, security, and capacity. These SLAs often include financial penalties, escalation procedures, and detailed reporting, ensuring top-tier service management.

TL;DR:

And there you have it—the secret sauce behind enterprise WordPress websites. If you're intrigued, stick around (and subscribe). Over the next few weeks, I'll be diving deeper into each of these topics and sharing even more insider secrets from billion-dollar websites. Stay tuned!

Here is a quick recap of everything we discussed:

• WordPress Versatility: WordPress powers both small shops and billion-dollar enterprises, but large-scale sites need tailored solutions for complexity and scale.

• Custom Structures: Enterprises often need multi-site networks or headless WordPress setups to manage multiple sites and platforms efficiently.

• Compliance: Legal compliance is crucial. We partner with experts to ensure enterprise websites meet data handling and design regulations.

• Speed to Publish: Large enterprises need fast content publishing. We build custom workflows and tools to streamline content production.

• Performance: We optimize enterprise sites with clean code, top-tier hosting, and a global CDN to ensure fast loading and smooth performance.

• Security: Enterprise sites need strong security. We use robust coding, WordPress hardening, and user protection measures like two-factor authentication.

• Tool Integration: Seamless integration with tools like Salesforce and HubSpot is essential.

• Enterprise Support: Comprehensive support with custom SLAs, technical documentation, and user guides to ensure long-term success.

I gave a talk about this topic and explained everything about Enterprise WordPress in more detail. If you are interested, you can watch the full recording here.

👋 Until next time, Anil / CEO & Co-Founder of Multidots.

P.S. In the next issue, I’ll share how big enterprises use Headless architecture in WordPress to run their multi-billion dollar business.

P.P.S. Sh-h-h… don’t tell anyone yet; we are refreshing our agency website. Don’t click! No, don’t!! 🙅🏽‍♂️

WORDPRESS for ENTERPRISE$ is brought to you by Multidots, an enterprise WordPress web agency that’s been empowering big enterprises to scale and succeed with WordPress.