Expected behavior

For WordPress VIP sites, user attributes are used in place of user meta. It seems to be acceptable to do a check for user attributes, and use them if they are present.

Actual behavior

We don't currently check for this.

Steps to reproduce behavior

It could be something like

if ( function_exists( 'update_user_attribute' ) ) {
}

See this link. https://vip.wordpress.com/documentation/user_meta-vs-user_attributes/#user-attributes