Media & Publishing | North America | |
250,000+ Media artifacts migrated to WordPress | ||
25+ Years of content migrated seamlessly |
Unlocking Innovation with WordPress
Since its inception in 1967, Rolling Stone Magazine has been an influential voice at the crossroads of music and popular culture. Renowned for its impactful journalism, Rolling Stone not only documents the evolution of music but contributes significantly to broader cultural discussions, leaving an enduring imprint on our cultural landscape.
This is the story of how XWP, as part of a wider partnership with parent company Penske Media Corporation, helped Rolling Stone transition seamlessly to WordPress; unlocking scalability, empowering its teams with modern editorial workflows, and amplifying its capacity for innovation.
The Solution
After completing the Discovery phase, we were able to map and execute a comprehensive, stable, and secure migration solution:
- We leveraged secure cloud services to build a highly scalable, multi-stage import routine for existing content, achieving impressive processing speeds and allowing us to capture live changes.
- Content was mapped and transferred into WordPress without data loss, and technical SEO was preserved by redirecting old URLs during migration—all while being accomplished significantly faster than traditional methods.
- QA played a major role in the solution’s success. By the time our team was ready to push the ‘migrate’ button, we had thoroughly tested the process to ensure it would run without issue and with complete accuracy.
- Because of the clever cloud-based functions our team created, Rolling Stone’s migration took minutes and seconds rather than hours and days.
- Post-migration, we focused on new features, collaborating with Rolling Stone’s Editorial team to engineer custom (SEO and revenue-driven) functionality for ‘listicles,’ including dynamic URL changes, numbered workflows, and dynamic header adjustments.
- Finally, we focused on custom site-wide functionalities such as numbering and reordering list items, focal-point image cropping, template selection, and pagination—and because Rolling Stone has now joined other PMC heavy hitters on WordPress, these custom functions have since been shared across the portfolio!
If you want to learn more about any step of this solution with extra technical detail, check out our full technical breakdown.
Key Results:
Don’t Just Take Our Word For It
“This was one of our smoothest and most successful launches to date. Everyone who reviewed the site – both before and after launch – commented on the exceptional quality. This was down to an incredible effort led by you all, with a focus and dedication that was a joy to be involved in.”
Nicki Catton, Director of Development at Penske Media Corporation
Project Highlights
Looking for more detail on any of the aspects of this project? Check out our full run-downs!
Tune in: XWP, Rolling Stone & WordPress VIP
Learn how Rolling Stone and their parent company PMC have optimized their technology stack on WordPress, enabling them to respond quickly to market changes and create customer experiences that drive revenue.
More Case Studies
News Corp Australia
A major migration of 90+ brands to a highly customizable core publishing platform.
Heavy.
Optimized for speed rankings (99+) while focusing on continued ad monetization growth.