WordPress is at a Crossroads
WordPress vs. WP Engine is the start of big changes, finally.
As of 2024, 43% of all websites run on WordPress, an open-source content management platform that was started by a freshman college student in his bedroom in 2003.
The American Dream. Hack your way into fame and fortune, while making an enormous contribution to society. That’s an oversimplified version of what Matt Mullenweg did.
Today WordPress is an integral part of the business world. No other platform comes close to WordPress in ubiquity –– it dominates the web and conversations about web design. So much so that big money is now heavily invested in the WordPress world. In addition, tens of millions of people make their living in the WordPress ecosystem –– developers, designers, SEO experts, bloggers, YouTubers, financiers and so many more.
Started in 2003, WordPress is now a critical part of our economy. And we have a guy named Matt Mullenweg, that college student, to thank for its prominence. He has been able to guide this onetime small program into something larger than any other web platform. He had help –– Michael Valdrighi actually started it and Mike Little and helped build it early on, then many others, but Matt has been the godfather of the growth and scalability of what is now a very complex software platform and development environment.
Today, Mullenweg is the undisputed king of the WordPress ecosystem, spending most of his waking life shepherding it for over 2o years. He has also built several companies and products around it, and most of all he developed the ultimate glue for this ecosystem –– a rich community of millions of people who live and breathe WordPress and support each other selflessly.
One of the key tricks to the WordPress system is it’s a host and template based system, where most of the software and data sits on servers across the internet. This allows for dynamic assembling of pages, almost instantaneous updates and beautifully rendered, consistent websites that look and feel like state of the art digital art.
The web hosting part to the platform has been a big part of WordPress’s problems since the early days, and a hinderance to even faster growth. Finding and setting up a host can be confusing and intimidating for most people, separating them from developers who are comfortable with this process. That limits the market. Hosting has spawned an entire multi-billion dollar industry of 3rd party “WordPress hosting” companies, which can cause many more headaches. Their quality and compatibility isn’t always the best, the speed is often very slow, and the costs can be pretty high.
New Competitors
The necessity and confusion of WordPress external hosting has also allowed non-WordPress companies like Squarespace, Wix and Webflow, companies who handle the hosting seamlessly in the background, to take market share from WordPress. They’ve eaten into the WordPress pie and are all growing faster than WP. They’re not open source, but a lot of the world doesn’t care.
Everyone’s talking about “stagnation” in WordPress growth, and Matt and his team are trying to figure out how to stimulate growth with training, ease of use and new marketing splashes. In the meantime, WP Engine is pissing him off.
WP Engine vs. Matt
“This is a watershed moment in the history of Wordpress, for sure.”
- reddit user 9/27/2024
But WordPress and Matt have a bigger problem right now, to me a good problem. A bomb has just dropped on the WordPress World. The WP Engine debacle has opened up a conversation about the operating practices of the WordPress project. Is it open source with no “boss”? or is it a benevolent dictatorship? Matt has nurtured this open source code base into something amazing; everywhere you go you find wordpress. But he has also gained personally hundreds of millions of dollars by keeping such a tight grip on all things wordpress. People are finally talking about this.
As the milestones clicked off over the years we were all in awe, and felt like we were watching a fascinating business story was unfolding before us, and we were a part of it. Except we really weren’t much more than users and volunteers and builders, not allowed into the inner sanctums of their powerful hybrid profit + nonprofit business network. This network includes Automattic, Woo Commerce, the WordPress Foundation, Jetpack, Tumblr, WP Tavern, and WordCamps.
WP Engine has built their company around hosting WordPress sites of all sizes, focusing on premium, higher costing services, targeted at the enterprise level customers. They’ve been all WordPress from the beginning, hence their company name starting with WP. They position themselves as high performance, high quality, and more expensive. Essentially a higher touch service. But Matt feels that they are taking advantage of the large ecosystem that’s he and his company Automattic have built, including using many free services that Automattic provides without doing their part to contribute to and support the WordPress ecosystem. Matt has essentially declared war against WP Engine, calling them a “cancer on the ecosystem” and taking his battle public.
As I mentioned earlier, to me this war is a good thing. No matter what happens, good things will come from this disruption of the status quo in the WordPress world, and will communicate to other partners how Matt and co. feel about contributions from larger partners. As WordPress growth has been flatting, Matt and his have already been looking to make some step-function changes to keep it from going down the other side of market the share bell curve. This acute issue will help them reevaluate everything.
What’s Next?
I’ll follow this story and give my opinions and hopefully share the opinions of a few of my contacts in this ecosystem. The next few months will be interesting.
In the meantime, there is one CMS platform in particular to look out for - Webflow. Webflow is a powerful new full featured seamlessly hosted platform that is growing very quickly. They have a great chance to displace WP. I’ve been studying and using Webflow for a few years now and am very impressed.
The CMS market size is estimated at $22 billion in 2024 (Statistica) headed to $30 billion by 2028. I think these numbers are low. As AI is blended into CMS platforms those numbers will accelerate to over $60 billion. The status quo of using 20 year old technologies like PHP and MySQL will soon be over.
The war is on.
