By Samuel Shepherd

For many of us, the mechanisms behind how the online ecosystems we use every day actually work are something we gloss over. Even for those like myself who have chosen hobbies and professions that require a considerable amount of coding and specialised backend customisation of websites, most of us aren’t thinking about Shopify’s theme.liquid files or why the elements of a Squarespace page “work” in the way that they do from a fundamental standpoint. To put it simply, if the system works, then it works, and we focus our time and energy where problems are more likely to arise.

Cut to WordPress, one of the most important, significant, and most pertinently to this story, popular web content management platforms on the internet. This monolith within the website development and hosting space has spent decades as a darling of the web, with its website proudly stating that it powers “40% of the web”, which makes even the smallest of controversies or faults a major sticking point for the large portion of netizens who rely on their services.

WordPress has had its fair share of criticisms over the years, such as issues with inflexibility and its rather jarring statistic of making up 96.2% of all websites infected with malware according to a 2022 Sucuri study. However, whilst most of these criticisms can be put down to the simple nature of being a platform for widespread web development, the most recent fight with WP Engine has caused a lot more discussion than the platform often gets from impacted parties.

What is WP Engine?

Utilising WordPress’ open-source platform infrastructure, WP Engine is a managed web hosting provider that supports in the maintenance of web hosting services for many of WordPress’ websites. If you’re only vaguely aware of this service, which has been steadily growing in popularity since its founding in 2010, you might be surprised to learn that WP Engine has no official affiliation with WordPress, and is instead an independent entity with a strong codependent relationship with WordPress’ digital ecosystem.

It is this relationship that has made big news of the disagreements between WordPress and WP Engine, bringing a large number of businesses into an interesting quagmire of technical issues and raising some doubts regarding the future of the popular hosting provider.

WordPress & WP Engine: Understanding the Issue

To put the case simply, whilst WordPress is an open-source platform, the expectation it has of those who utilise its code is that it will contribute to the infrastructure and services that WordPress provides. This includes testing plugins, technical bug fixes, and other such actions that are seen as a net positive for the service as a whole. From the perspective of WordPress, this half of the deal was not being upheld by WP Engine, which led to WordPress sending a Cease and Desist letter to WP Engine to stop them from officially using the WordPress and WooCommerce brands in their materials.

This began a bit of a chain reaction, and thanks to many resources being updated to reflect new changes, the timeline gets a little more difficult to parse. However, on the 24th of September, 2024, Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and founder of WordPress’ for-profit parent company Automattic Inc., made posts on X regarding actions taken by WP Engine in the wake of their ban from certain services being announced.

From what users can piece together, in response to WordPress and Automattic’s Cease and Desist efforts, WP Engine manually removed the news widgets from their hosted websites in order to avoid the widespread proliferation of these events. From some accounts, as posted by Matt Mullenweg, this led to some websites breaking as a result. In turn, WordPress officially banned WP Engine from utilising major services, posting about these events on their website and telling users who are experiencing issues to contact WP Engine support directly.

The post claimed that WP Engine was attempting to “extract profit” by blocking and disabling core features of the WordPress platform, in turn leading to thousands of customer sites being broken.

“What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.” – Matt Mullenweg, Co-Founder of WordPress

In another post from four days prior, aptly titled “WP Engine is Not WordPress” Mullenweg went into more detail regarding the confusion he sees as being directly caused by WP Engine’s promotional branding, marketing and advertising as to whether WordPress and WP Engine are affiliated. To quote Mullenweg in this post:

“My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to customers is that they’re giving you WordPress, but they’re not. And they’re profiting off of the confusion.”

The post also goes into several ways in which Mullenweg believes WP Engine to be a net negative on the WordPress experience, including claiming that they turn off revision features as a cost-saving measure.

A Confusing Situation For All Involved

Given that Automattic Inc., the previously-mentioned for-profit parent company of WordPress invested in WP Engine back in 2011 (as stated by Tech Crunch in their coverage of the Cease and Desist letter, with a link to their coverage of the investment on November 15th, 2011) it’s clear that this current sense of ill-will towards the company has not always been there. So, there has been some confusion about why all this kicked up when it did, and what those who rely on the service are meant to do.

Adapting to Changing Perceptions

The role of WordPress development specialists during this time has been absolutely vital, as all of the drama between these two companies has left many businesses needing to rapidly fix issues and shift hosting. This is especially true with the fact that, whilst we have focused on the perspective of Mullenweg throughout most of this article, and in turn, have seen WordPress’ side of the argument placed front and centre, the actions of Automattic during this time have caused some significant backlash.

Looking through posts on the matter, the consensus of many WordPress users appears to be that, whilst WP Engine had been falling in the quality of their services and WordPress’ initial actions were mostly justified if not poorly executed, the extent to which Automattic and WordPress have made things worse for customers during that process has been unjustified. One example that I’ve seen brought up repeatedly is ACF, which is a plugin that has been dutifully maintained as an enterprise-level service since 2011, and which as of the 12th of October, 2024, was suddenly no longer available on WordPress.org.

In a post made by the official ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) X account, the team lamented that after over a decade of work, Advanced Custom Fields had control directly taken by WordPress.