WordPress vs WP Engine: how does it affect you?

Let’s recap what WordPress is

WordPress is a powerful and versatile content management system (CMS) that has revolutionised the way websites are built and managed.

It’s an open source platform, meaning its source code is freely available for anyone to use, modify and distribute. That has spawned a thriving community of developers who contribute towards WordPress’ constant improvement.

All of this has lead to the platform powering a large portion of the internet. As of November 2024 WordPress is behind 43.6% of all websites – more than 493 million sites at the last count.

So what’s WP Engine?

WP Engine is a WordPress hosting provider which has been around since 2010.

In 2018 the business secured a $250 million investment from Silver Lake to fuel WP Engine’s growth.

WP Engine don’t just do WordPress hosting though. They also have a selection of plugins which includes…

• Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)
• WP Migrate
• WP Offload Media
• WP Offload SES

… And that’s where the conflict begins.

Fight! Fight! Fight!

This is a fight between WordPress co-founder & Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine.

On September 26th 2024, Mullenweg wrote a blog post calling out WP Engine for violating WordPress trademarks, going on to accuse WP Engine of doing so for many years.

Mullenweg states Automattic has been attempting to strike a licensing deal with WP Engine for a very long time and all WP Engine has done is string Automattic along.

An ultimatum was delivered to WP Engine: either pay a licensing fee or make in-kind contributions to the open source project. WP Engine refused to do either.

As a result WP Engine has been banned from hosting their plugins on the wordpress.org plugin repository, which means any websites hosted on WP Engine is unable to keep the affected plugins up to date.

The impact

This fight between WordPress and WP Engine will only affect you if you host your website with WP Engine.

The WP Engine engineering team has developed an alternative update mechanism for free community versions of its plugins and themes, so all you will need to do is manually download the latest version of any plugins from WP Engine.

When you install them on your site, the update mechanism in WordPress will work again.

But… the fight between WordPress and WP Engine has led many WP Engine customers to take their business elsewhere. At the time of writing this post, 17,710 sites have left and set up with alternative hosting providers – including several brands who’ve called upon G&T for help.