There are 1,000 separate state of California ca.gov websites that receive more than 20 million visitors each month. At the California Department of Technology, it’s the CA Web team’s job to give state agencies and departments the tools they need to publish information online quickly and easily.
We invite California’s state entities to join CDT and the CA Web team’s own website on WordPress VIP (WPVIP). Our goal is to migrate all ca.gov sites to this more robust, scalable platform that will accommodate our future needs.
Last year, our partnership with the Office of Digital Innovation on the COVID-19 website ensured Californians had the information they needed to stay up to date during the pandemic. It showed us how critical web performance is – and we didn’t want to wait for the next crisis to learn whether our hosting environment might struggle to meet the demands placed on it by our state partners or our residents.
That’s why we’re moving the state’s suite of ca.gov websites to WPVIP, the enterprise hosting platform owned by the same company that is responsible for WordPress. WPVIP powers many of the world’s most visited sites. WPVIP has its FedRAMP certification, and their commitment to the government sector makes them an ideal partner for us for the longer term.
WPVIP ensures that all of our sites will enjoy the same stable, performant environment – while preserving the security of the sites themselves so that visitors can trust the content they find on any site hosted by the state.
This is another milestone in a much longer journey. The recently announced California Design System gives us a path forward for a consistent, accessible interface for each of California’s new websites. With the CDT and CA Web Team sites migrated to WPVIP, we will spend the next few months migrating the remaining 70 WordPress sites that the CA Web team manages.
If you maintain a website for a state department or agency, or you’re thinking about creating one, drop us a line! We’d love to help get your site added to the growing family of sites hosted by WPVIP and maintained by the CA Web team.
Commentary: Join the State’s CA Web Team on New Platform
“Our goal is to migrate all ca.gov sites to this more robust, scalable platform that will accommodate our future needs,” writes Blaine Wasylkiw, California’s chief web officer.
