How WordPress VIP Represents a Complete F1 Racing Program for Your Content Experience Needs

Running a content program poses similar challenges regardless of which industry you work in. There’s a constant pressure to do more with a small team and a limited budget. 

You’re frequently required to wear multiple hats to publish content on time. There are tradeoffs to be made in choosing whether to spend your budget on a publishing solution or on the content that delivers outcomes for your business. And all of this comes with pressure to demonstrate faster time to value, so that you can prove the program is performing effectively.

You might not realize it, but content programs have a great deal in common with Formula 1 racing. Winning a Grand Prix isn’t about having the fastest car with the best engine. Instead, it requires a complete program that includes experts who know how to build the car and keep it on the road, an expert training plan, scouting the track to coordinate a race day strategy, and a team of people who get the car race-ready and keep the car on the track on race day. 

As a leader on your team, you are in the driver’s seat, leveraging the infrastructure, knowledge, and team you build around you to win the race. 

When it comes time to evaluate solutions for composing, managing, delivering, and optimizing your content experiences, there’s a temptation to opt for a familiar brand name. In F1 terms, this is like believing that Lamborghini or Ferrari has a race day advantage simply because they are known for high-performance cars. In the case of content platforms, it often means licensing a digital experience platform (DXP) because the company behind the DXP is a household name.

But name recognition doesn’t necessarily translate to better outcomes. A DXP is like buying the license to use the Lamborghini brand in your racing program. It isn’t race-ready out of the box. You’ll still need to invest more in the rest of the race program, from personnel to infrastructure to race-day strategy. 

When it comes to demonstrating time to value, a solution like WordPress VIP is more like getting an entire F1 racing program out of the box. The open source WordPress core is already a complete racing machine, and the WordPress VIP team handles all your worries about keeping the car on the track.

Proprietary DXPs and the luxury car trap

When you sign up for a DXP, it’s like purchasing the rights to put the Lamborghini logo on your car. To keep that logo, you need to keep paying for that right, year after year, with an annual license renewal fee. It doesn’t mean your brakes work, or that the engine is tuned, or that you’re anywhere close to race-ready. That golden bull you licensed might be slapped on the side of a 1996 Toyota Corolla.

After you license the DXP, you will still need a completely custom build-out before you can publish any content: 

• You will need a team of developers trained in customizing the DXP. 
• You will need additional investment in website hosting, monitoring, and security. 
• Each feature of content publishing will need to be custom-built. Ongoing maintenance will gradually start to consume your content budget over time.

Drawing parallels to an F1 racing program, if you want to actually drive your DXP on race day (i.e. create content and launch campaigns), your needs look something like this:

F1 Racing needs	Proprietary DXPs
Pit crew	An army of specialized developers and consultants trained on a specific DXP. These are the only people allowed to touch the car.
Garage	Hosting, DevOps, monitoring, and security — the basic infrastructure you need to purchase before you can even turn the key.
Mechanics	Constant, complex maintenance, bug fixes, upgrades, and integrations — the perpetual cost of keeping an exotic, brittle machine from breaking down.
Custom parts	Every essential feature you’ll need that is not included out of the box, which turns additional functionality into a custom-built expense.
Track access	Training, support contracts, and implementation services — the non-negotiable fees just to learn how to operate your own luxury asset.

By the time you account for all the required additions to be ready to race, you’ve more than doubled the cost of the initial DXP contract. Not to mention, you can’t publish a single article, blog post, or content campaign until you’ve completed all those customizations.

Where is that additional budget going? It’s keeping the car running, not making it faster, better, or track-ready. 

Your proprietary DXP starts looking more like paying for a Lamborghini but getting the performance of a Toyota Corolla, all while spending more time in the pit than on the track. No offense to the Corolla, they are great cars that run forever, but they will never be an F1-caliber machine. 

In terms of your content program, over time, the platform becomes the project, instead of staying focused on creating winning content experiences.

WordPress VIP as a complete racing program

There’s a now-famous story in Formula 1 racing. Back in 2004, Ford decided to discontinue its Jaguar F1 racing program. Jaguar is one of the oldest luxury and performance car brands, with a longer history than Lamborghini. 

Around this time, Red Bull was looking to expand beyond the extreme sports, like cliff diving, skiing, and skateboarding, that it was already known for. With no experience or credibility in F1, Red Bull could have considered a Jaguar co-brand that would have given them instant credibility in the prestigious racing circuit. 

Instead, Red Bull abandoned the Jaguar name and acquired the complete racing program for one dollar. What’s noteworthy here is that they recognized the Jaguar brand wasn’t where the value lay. It was the existing end-to-end program they wanted. 

Flash forward a little over 20 years, and that Red Bull racing program has proven to be one of the most successful teams in Formula 1 over two decades.

WordPress, combined with the WordPress VIP infrastructure, has a lot in common with that existing program. WordPress doesn’t come with an expensive license fee because it is and always will be 100% open-source and free. There’s no annual fee to use it and no vendor lock-in. 

Red Bull was able to compete almost immediately because they acquired a fully realized racing program. Much like the Red Bull racing team, instead of spending your entire budget on a brand name, you can focus on having the best of everything else required for your content experience.

WordPress VIP takes years of experience in building, optimizing, and hosting WordPress and provides a future-ready solution that allows you to start publishing quickly. That speed to production translates to faster time to value in demonstrating outcomes with your content program.

When you do need to spend money to customize your experience, you are leveraging tools that are open and available to use without requiring additional licensing fees or locking you into proprietary technology. 

Comparing WordPress VIP to an F1 racing program looks like:

F1 Racing program	WordPress VIP
Fully-formed race car	WordPress Core: The proven high-performance foundation, optimized and battle-tested at massive global scale with no annual licensing fee, with all the tools to fine-tune for your needs
Pit crew	Global talent pool: Massive pool of developers ready to serve as your immediate, global response team
Fuel crew	Enterprise infrastructure: Automated, high-octane hosting and DevOps that scale to meet changes in demand, keeping you on track at all times
Strategy wall	Best practices & analytics: Real-time, data-driven intelligence gathered from running some of the world’s biggest sites, guiding & planning your next strategic move.
Race engineers	Expert consulting: Dedicated experts who focus on maximizing your competitive advantage and helping you win races, not just teaching you how to turn the ignition.

WordPress VIP is like getting the Ferrari racing program’s car, tuned for race day, along with the full complement of racing intelligence and expertise that it takes to win the race. You are Charles Leclerc in the driver’s seat. Throughout the life of your content program, a small fraction of your budget goes toward optimizing your program, while the majority delivers wins with each content experience Grand Prix.

Budget and growth realities

Budgets are often the limiting factor in how far you can take your content program. How your budget gets allocated can play a significant role in achieving your KPIs. A spending comparison between DXPs and WordPress VIP looks something like this:

• Proprietary DXP: 80% overhead, 20% growth
• WordPress VIP: 20% overhead, 80% growth

Because the DXP is only a partial solution, you need to purchase additional components and infrastructure in order to realize your project goals. There is additional overhead in hiring agencies familiar with the platform. Additional infrastructure, upgrades, and maintenance may translate to ongoing costs. Each new content capability is a custom add-on.

With WordPress VIP, you’re not spending time in the pit trying to rebuild the car in the middle of the race. There’s a massive talent pool of WordPress developers all over the world. WordPress VIP already includes all the infrastructure required. And most custom capabilities are already available via plugins that are vetted by the developer community.

When you’ve got a complete racing program in place, you also get the benefits of using that program. Some advantages include:

• Faster campaigns → Ship in days, not months
• Better content → Easy-to-use, let your team focus on content
• Real personalization → Not just theoretical capabilities
• Constant experimentation → Test, learn, and iterate without additional expenses
• Multi-site velocity → Add additional sites, without needing to add headcount to support them
• Data-driven decisions → Analytics that inform action, not just dashboards
• Future-proofed in the age of AI → Tools that help you adapt to ever-changing technologies

Proprietary DXPs vs. WordPress VIP head-to-head

In a head-to-head comparison, here’s how you might explain the differences between proprietary DXPs and WordPress VIP.

Together, these pillars provide a clearer way to measure progress and identify gaps.

If you want to win a Grand Prix, you need the right car and the right racing program.

• Proprietary DXPs are like paying for the same Lamborghini every year and still needing to add an engine and build a garage.
• WordPress VIP is like owning a championship Formula 1 racing program for a fraction of the cost of that Lamborghini.

Head-to-Head breakdown of the key differences

Open source (WordPress VIP)	Proprietary / closed-source DXPs
✅ Zero license fees	❌ $150K to $300K+ annual licensing
✅ Flexible, extensible ecosystem	❌ Rigid, closed architecture
✅ Massive global talent pool	❌ Scarce, expensive specialists
✅ Fast publishing & iteration	❌ Slow, developer-bottlenecked workflows
✅ Lower TCO, higher ROI	❌ High TCO, limited agility
✅ Future-proofed technology	❌ Vendor lock-in & forced upgrades

See you on the track

Just like Formula 1, the enterprise web isn’t won in the boardroom. It’s won on the track.

Proprietary DXPs want you to keep paying for the privilege of getting to the starting line. WordPress VIP lets you focus on the finish line.