Agency Partner Awards 2025.
WP Engine had a program for spotting the best agency-built sites on WordPress, and it had never been pushed to what it could be. I rebuilt it into a real awards program: a scorecard and a jury, hard data as a criteria for winning, five mini-documentaries I interviewed and cut myself, a promotion push behind every winner, and a slot on the biggest WordPress developer stage of the year. Budget: zero.
The work
It's way too easy for a software company to limit the creative stories in its arsenal to technical specifications, or utility, or time savings in the abstract. But a company hosting WordPress provides an infrastructure backbone to all kinds of businesses and causes doing all kinds of interesting work. There's an entire world of color and character you leave out of reach if you just focus on the boring stuff because it's clearly your domain.
So the program got a scorecard, a real panel, and a submission form that asked for numbers: ROI, engagement, page speed, hours saved. We made having good data a criteria for winning. Then I went and found the stories.
A small but mighty conservation charity protecting endangered species across Africa and Asia, where the work depends as much on storytelling and visibility as it does on fieldwork. The site StrategiQ built for them was gorgeous. What moved me about this one was the passion on all sides. The foundation had a genuinely compelling story to tell about conservation. And StrategiQ kept putting in hours the budget never covered, out of sheer love for the cause.
Watch on YouTube ↗Family Fund is the UK's largest grant-making charity for families raising a disabled or seriously ill child on a low income. Over 150,000 families a year. Grants for technology, or just for time out of the house. Mixd is one of the leading agencies working in web accessibility standards, so everybody coming for those resources can actually get to what they need, visual and mobility impairments included. Accessible design was a passion at my own web agency, so seeing that craft this central to someone else's practice, and this expertly deployed for a cause this good, was a genuine pleasure to dig into with the lovely teams on both sides.
Watch on YouTube ↗One of the world's largest event companies, stuck on a legacy system that was slowing them down. WebDevStudios rebuilt it on a front-end WordPress theme that fully uses block editing through Advanced Custom Fields, and open sourced the theme. Freeman's own team can now bulk-manage their entire global events catalogue in a slick interface. Bounce rate dropped by nearly 80%. WebDevStudios also ran the most generous shoot of the five. They wanted everyone who had touched the build in the video, not just the leads, so six of them ended up on camera.
Watch on YouTube ↗How do you make buying a home feel as seamless as shopping online? A headless site carrying a huge real estate catalogue with realtime localized data, floor plans, and all kinds of other detail. A site that complex could easily have been a bloated beast. It loads almost instantaneously on WP Engine's headless tech.
Watch on YouTube ↗One of the Southern Hemisphere's leading brain research institutes. Spark Digital rebuilt their digital presence to elevate the institute's global standing, make its researchers easier to find, and support the brain and mental health research that buys families more meaningful time.
Watch on YouTube ↗The films
I personally interviewed and structured the conversations with all of the agencies and their clients. I set up the recording, made the edits, all of it. And it was fun to do. They cost nothing: agency and client over Riverside, the sites screen-recorded as the visuals, stats punched in on top. Five documentaries, three minutes each, cut like commercials between segments.
The rollout
When we teased the submission process, the finalists and the winners, we put a ton of creative effort into promotion to make sure people were really excited to get involved and to get recognized. It was meant to feel like an honor, and we nailed it by borrowing assets we'd filmed but never gotten to use from our Why WP Engine 2024 campaign. So we had one of our turtleneck sages revealing the website, applauding the website.
Prior years of this had been a singular press release with a few blurbs about how great this was. This year was a dedicated social post for each winner as well as announcement fanfare. It was cross posting with the agencies themselves. It was great brand exposure for all parties involved. And coupled with DE{CODE}, we quite literally put them on a massive global stage as a key example of best in class web development work.
It's thinking about all the pieces you already own as an industry leader and finally putting them to use in a strategic way that lifts everyone up.