WP Engine Intranet

WP Engine is one of the most prolific WordPress-tailored platform providers, hosting over 170,000 websites, including several enterprises serviced by 10up. As they rapidly transitioned to remote work at the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, the pain of fragmented documentation and need for a centralized internal communication platform were amplified. Building on nearly a decade of partnership with 10up, and leveraging our own experience as a fully remote business from day one, WP Engine reached out to 10up to help envision and build Enginet, their in-house intranet.

Guided by 10up’s own remote work experience and drawing from over one hundred WP Engine employee interviews and surveys, 10up and WP Engine identified four areas of focus for the new intranet platform:

• Create a home for company-wide content, spanning evergreen policies, news, and events (virtual and in-person);
• Reduce reliance on tribal knowledge;
• Improve employee connectedness and engagement;
• Harmonize the modern and polished public-facing WP Engine brand with a more casual internal voice and character.

Survey and interview responses from WP Engine employees across roles, seniority, and business groups helped to frame these goals as well-defined, measurable, and quantifiable objectives – ensuring that the project met the needs of WP Engine’s global staff of over one thousand. These insights also informed the intranet’s information architecture and content strategy. Guided by user stories and problem statements rooted in employee experiences, the intranet organizes content by department, functional area, and employee need.

Under the hood, the WordPress-powered intranet uses 10up’s ElasticPress technology to deliver fast, accurate, and faceted search results, all running on WP Engine’s platform for a secure and highly performant site.

• To eliminate manual account and permissions management, Enginet integrates with existing WP Engine business tools – Okta, NetSuite, and Workday – and ingests employee information to support SSO-based authentication, automatically populate profiles, and set permissions based on an employee’s role.
• To reduce content maintenance overhead, a block-based content editing experience empowers WP Engine team members to quickly adjust content as they consume it: ensuring that stale content is updated as soon as it is noticed.

10up’s partnership with WP Engine empowered us to architect and build an intranet that serves as an on-brand central hub for corporate communications and embraces the company’s culture.

10up has led intranet projects for more than a half dozen major brands, and consistently finds that a carefully researched and crafted intranet experience can empower teams to work with less friction and more harmony towards business and employee experience goals. If you’re interested in learning more about how 10up’s designers, strategists, and engineers can help define and execute against your intranet needs, get in touch.