Paper Crane / partners / wp-engine

A digital transformation studio — Calgary / Vancouver

If you are already hosting on WP Engine, or you have decided that is where your WordPress site belongs, this is the short version of who we are and what we build on it.

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A Preferred Partner in WP Engine's agency program

We build managed WordPress on WP Engine for teams who want the platform's reliability without handing over ownership of the site.

WP Engine

Preferred Partner

Note

Good hosting does not rescue a bad WordPress build

WP Engine gives you fast servers, real staging environments, daily backups and a security team watching the platform. What it cannot do is fix what is inside the theme. Most WordPress sites that feel slow and fragile are slow and fragile because they are thirty plugins stacked on a purchased theme, and no amount of caching hides that for long.

We build WordPress component-first, with Sage and Tailwind under the hood. Editors get a set of blocks designed for their brand instead of a page builder that can produce anything, including a mess. YWCA Calgary's site runs on 51 custom blocks we built alongside Daughter Creative, and their team has run it themselves since launch.

Being in the partner program mostly makes the boring things faster. Environments, transfers and escalations get handled by people rather than a queue. And because it is still WordPress, the site stays yours. If you outgrow WP Engine or your procurement rules change, it moves.

What we actually do on the platform

Component-first themes, not plugin piles

Every block is code we wrote and your developers can read. Fewer plugins means fewer things to patch on a Tuesday morning, and nothing critical resting on an abandoned repo.

Accessibility built in rather than retrofitted

YWCA Calgary's site was built accessible from the first component instead of patched after an audit. Public sector and nonprofit clients get audited, so we build to the standard from the start.

Migrations that keep your traffic

RDCK's rebuild moved 240 pages with zero broken links. Redirect maps are built before launch, then we monitor 404s and Search Console after it, because that is where the damage shows up.

WordPress as an application platform

Custom careers and bylaws tooling for RDCK. A LearnDash learning platform and an AI resource assistant for Help for Dementia. WordPress handles a great deal more than brochure pages when it is built to.

Environments and a real release process

We work in development and staging before anything reaches production, so your team reviews changes on a real URL rather than approving them from a screenshot.

Handover that sticks

Training for the people who will run it, documentation written for editors rather than developers, and an install that transfers. AKBLG has been running their own site on an open source stack since we handed it over.