Make a move from
Arc XP to WordPress. Avoid long term risk.
Keep every URL, subscriber, and pageview.
Your editorial team deserves stable infrastructure you own, not a platform your competitor could abandon. WordPress powers Penske Media, Al Jazeera, TIME, TechCrunch, and thousands of publishers who’ve already made the switch.
Trusted by leading media brands worldwide
Fortune 500 marketing teams. Award-winning newsrooms and publishers. Global automotive networks.
They chose WordPress. Then they pick rtCamp to build it right.
WordPress VIP Gold Agency Partner since 2016
Top Partner Innovator Award
WPVIP 2022
Why publishers are re-evaluating Arc XP
Arc XP pricing adds up fast. Companies pay anywhere from $100K to $4M+ annually, depending on seat count, bandwidth, and support tier. That’s a significant commitment for a platform where customization requires feature requests instead of code changes, developer talent is scarce, and the engineering team keeps shrinking.
A customization ceiling that gets lower every year
The Google News Initiative’s CMS review found Arc XP “very developer-intensive” and noted that “developers tend to find it arcane, inconsistently documented, and not always leveraging AWS best practices.” With only 3 Gold Partners globally, finding outside help requires a search party. Compare that to the 50,000+ WordPress developers available today.
Three rounds of layoffs in 18 months
Arc XP cut 25% of its staff in September 2024. Another round hit in January 2025 as part of a broader reduction. In early 2026, approximately 75 more positions were eliminated. The Washington Post itself lost $77 million in 2023. A CMS is infrastructure. When the team building your infrastructure keeps shrinking, your platform roadmap shrinks with it.
Your CMS vendor is also your competitor
The Washington Post licenses Arc XP to publishers, then competes with those same publishers for readers, advertisers, and subscribers. The platform has never turned a profit as a standalone business.
What your licensing budget could build instead
The Arc XP vs WordPress cost comparison is stark. Moving to WordPress VIP can reduce your annual platform investment by 2-3x. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study found WordPress VIP delivers 415% ROI over three years, with a 40% reduction in total cost of ownership and 45% lower development costs.
Hear their success stories
We’ve been very impressed with the flexibility and expertise of rtCamp’s team, who implement a wide range of website features and functionalities for us. Their work continues to add so much value to our articles and award-winning special features. We’ve also been thankful to rtCamp for consistently being available and on point for last minute projects and tasks. The team also chimes in when it’s time to optimize and improve different core components of our site, on top of juggling multiple moving parts day to day. Lastly, collaborating and communicating with the rtCamp team has been a real pleasure. I look forward to what else we can accomplish together.
Jason Castro
Product Manager
rtCamp’s thoughtful and low-disruption approach to the migration made the process smooth and seamless. This partnership has laid the groundwork for a powerful platform that can support advanced features and expansion—the proof being our recent acquisition of Pinstripe Media, adding 4 additional media properties to our portfolio. rtCamp remains a reliable partner as our platform continues to grow and evolve.
Kevin Cooper
Chief Growth Officer
rtCamp has helped our organization in so many ways! Their incredible wealth of knowledge and experience around the WordPress platform has brought peace-of-mind to our teams and leadership. Not only have they built us sustainable enterprise-class WordPress sites, but they have also helped streamline our go-to-market process with the solutions they have helped us architect.
Randall Benson
Senior Manager, Marketing Operations
What you stand tolose in a migration, and how we protect it
83% of enterprise data migrations fail or exceed their budgets, according to Gartner.
The average publisher CMS migration takes 229 days to recover its organic search traffic. 17% never recover at all.
These numbers are real. They’re also avoidable.
Every piece of content, structured and validated
We map every Arc XP content object to WordPress custom post types and taxonomies: articles, media assets, editorial metadata, bylines, custom fields, and media relationships. This is hands-on migration engineering, not a CSV dump.
Your media workflows, rebuilt and improved
Arc XP’s Photo Center and Video Center migrate to WordPress’s centralized media library with bulk operations, focal point cropping, native video embeds, and custom gallery blocks. Multi-brand publishers get a shared Content Hub that centralizes assets across properties.
SEO equity preserved, not rebuilt from scratch
URL structures, canonical signals, 301 redirects, XML sitemaps, schema markup, and internal linking architecture all transfer to your new WordPress environment. We run automated validation against your existing site to catch gaps before launch, not after.
Your integrations keep working
Paywalls, ad tech, analytics, syndication feeds, and video partnerships all connect to WordPress through established integration patterns. We’ve rebuilt these across dozens of publisher environments.
Zero downtime for a live news operation
Your new WordPress site runs in parallel on staging while automated content sync maintains near-real-time parity with Arc XP. DNS switches during a low-traffic window. Your Arc XP environment stays available for immediate rollback.
Why choosertCamp for this migration
300+ enterprise CMS migrations, including publisher CMS migrations from platforms with the exact characteristics that make Arc XP complex. Proprietary content models, enterprise-scale content volumes, custom editorial workflows, deeply embedded integrations, and zero tolerance for downtime.
Known for complex WordPress migrations
We have migrated enterprise publishers from AEM, Sitecore, Kentico and spaghetti custom CMSs to WordPress. We migrated Cox Automotive’s multi-brand portfolio from AEM to WordPress, delivering 7 sites in 12 months with 103% higher engagement and 70-80% design reuse.
Purpose built editorial workflows
We worked with Al Jazeera, PMC (parent brand of Rolling Stones, Hollywood Reporter..), and Grist, where we built custom Gutenberg blocks and editorial workflows for newsrooms. Grist won a Sigma Award and an ASME National Magazine Award for their data-driven journalism, enabled by our elegant solutions.
Deep expertise.
Proven track record
Every CMS migration is unique. Yet there are patterns. Getting it right requires deep WordPress expertise. We’re a WordPress VIP Gold Agency Partner, deeply embedded in the ecosystem, hundreds of core contributions over last 34 releases, a headless WordPress framework, and a multi-brand governance platform.
Exceptional migrations, done right!
Scaling multi-brand publishing: Private Media’s WordPress VIP multisite transformation
Powering Grist’s award-winning journalism with Custom development, content syndication, and Parse.ly
How we migrate fromArc XP to WordPress
rtCamp by the numbers
What you gain on WordPress
WordPress has become the default Arc XP alternative for a reason: it powers the largest share of the web, backed by the largest developer ecosystem in publishing.
An open-source foundation you actually own
WordPress Core is open source. No per-seat pricing. You own every line of custom code and control your roadmap. WordPress VIP adds enterprise hosting, security, custom development and support on top of that open foundation, and the combined investment still runs 2-3x lower than a comparable Arc XP deployment.
A publishing experience editors actually want to use
WordPress with Gutenberg gives editorial teams a visual, block-based editor where they control layouts, embed rich media, and publish without developer tickets. Grist’s team uses custom blocks we built for in-content donation prompts, scroll-activated visualizations, and one-click syndication.
Headless architecture when you need it
Al Jazeera runs GraphQL with React. TechCrunch uses React and Redux. Fortune and BBC America use Next.js. All powered by WordPress. Traditional rendering and headless delivery from the same backend.
The largest developer ecosystem in publishing
Among Arc XP competitors, none can match WordPress for available talent. 43% of all websites run on WordPress. No “key person” risk. No bidding war for one of twelve developers who understand your platform. Arc XP has 3 Gold Partners worldwide. WordPress is an entire ecosystem.
Enterprise infrastructure through WordPress VIP
TIME handles 100,000+ requests per second on WordPress VIP with 100% uptime. FiveThirtyEight sustained 132,000 requests per second during election coverage. You get built-in Parse.ly analytics, automated security patching, a global CDN, and SOC 2 compliance.
| Arc XP | WordPress | |
| Annual platform cost | $100K-$4M+ (all-in) | 2-3x lower at comparable scale |
| Open source core | No | Yes |
| Vendor lock-in | High | Full Independence |
| Ability to swap tools | Medium | High |
| Talent availability | Niche and expensive | 50,000+ developers globally |
Start with a no obligation discovery, not a contract
Book a free migration consultation. You’ll speak with an enterprise migration specialist who’ll assess your Arc XP environment, estimate the timeline and complexity, and outline a path to your Arc XP replacement. You’ll leave the call with clarity on what this migration involves, whether you work with us or not.
20 hours of free technical consulting included. No pitch deck. No pressure.
Trusted by enterprise publishers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.
Arc XP to WordPress migration FAQs
Get answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about migrating website from Arc XP to WordPress!
It depends on your content volume, integration complexity, and editorial workflow requirements. A mid-size publisher with standard integrations typically migrates in 12-16 weeks. Complex multi-brand operations with custom syndication, paywalls, and bespoke editorial tools may take longer. Our discovery phase gives you a precise timeline before development begins. The timeline applies whether you’re on the current Arc XP platform or the legacy Arc Publishing version.
Not if the migration is executed properly. We preserve URL structures, implement comprehensive 301 redirects, transfer all SEO metadata, and validate the entire redirect map before launch. A study of 892 CMS migrations found that well-executed migrations can deliver up to 5x traffic increases when legacy technical debt gets cleared alongside the platform change.
Yes. WordPress VIP serves some of the highest-traffic publisher sites on the web. TIME handles 100,000+ requests per second. FiveThirtyEight sustained 132,000 requests per second during election coverage. Bloomberg, CNN, NBC Universal, and News Corp all run on WordPress. The infrastructure question is settled.
All major publisher integrations have established WordPress connection patterns. Piano and Zephr paywalls, Google Ad Manager and header bidding setups, Parse.ly (built into WordPress VIP), Apple News syndication, AMP, Connatix video. We audit every integration during discovery and rebuild each one in your new WordPress environment.
Because the hard part of a publisher CMS migration is building the right WordPress environment, not extracting content from the source platform. Arc XP stores content in a documented JSON format (ANS). The extraction is a known engineering problem. Building a WordPress architecture that handles your editorial workflows, scales for your traffic, preserves your integrations, and gives your team a better publishing experience requires deep WordPress expertise. We have 300+ enterprise migrations, a WordPress VIP Gold Partnership, and over a decade of publisher-specific work including Al Jazeera, PMC, Grist, and Private Media.
Arc XP’s ANS (Arc Native Specification) JSON format gets parsed and mapped to WordPress custom post types and taxonomies. Composer articles become WordPress posts with preserved metadata. Photo Center assets migrate to the WordPress media library with alt text, captions, and credits intact. Video Center content transfers with embed codes and metadata. WebSked editorial metadata maps to custom fields. Taxonomy structures, author profiles, and content relationships all migrate with automated validation at each stage.
Our blue-green deployment approach means your Arc XP site stays fully operational throughout the migration. We build and test the WordPress environment in parallel. Automated content sync keeps both platforms current until the DNS switch. If anything unexpected occurs at launch, we revert DNS and your Arc XP site is immediately live again. In 300+ migrations, we’ve maintained a 100% completion rate.
Either approach works. If you want to keep your current design, we recreate it pixel-by-pixel as a custom WordPress theme. If you’re ready for a refresh, a migration is the ideal time for it since you’re rebuilding the frontend anyway. Many publishers use the migration as an opportunity to modernize their design system with reusable Gutenberg blocks, which gives editorial teams more layout flexibility going forward.
Arc XP’s annual costs range from $100K to $4M+, depending on your deployment. Moving to WordPress VIP typically reduces your annual platform investment by 2-3x at comparable scale. WordPress Core is open source, so you’re paying for enterprise hosting, security, and support rather than platform licensing. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact study found WordPress VIP delivers 415% ROI over three years. We provide detailed cost projections during discovery.
We’re a WordPress VIP Gold Agency Partner, one of a select few agencies globally with this status. For publisher migrations, we typically recommend WordPress VIP because of its built-in Parse.ly analytics, SOC 2 compliance, global CDN, and purpose-built infrastructure for high-traffic editorial sites. We also work with other enterprise WordPress hosts depending on your specific requirements.
Our OnePress platform was built for exactly this scenario. OnePress provides centralized governance across a multi-brand WordPress network: shared design systems, unified security policies, centralized media management, and coordinated updates. We consolidated Cox Automotive’s 8 brand sites onto a unified WordPress backbone with 70-80% design reuse and 103% higher engagement.
Every migration includes 30 days of Hypercare: dedicated monitoring, priority bug fixes, and performance optimization. After Hypercare, you can choose from our managed WordPress services for ongoing maintenance, security patching, and growth optimization. Or manage it internally. WordPress’s open architecture means you’re never locked into our services.