The WP Engine vs. Automattic Situation, Explained — And Why It Should Concern Small Business Owners

If you've been in WordPress circles over the past year or two, you've heard about the conflict between Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com and, to a significant degree, WordPress itself) and WP Engine, one of the largest managed WordPress hosting companies.

If you haven't heard about it, here's the summary — and here's why it matters for any small business that runs a WordPress site, regardless of who hosts them.

What Happened

The conflict became public when Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic and one of the original creators of WordPress, began publicly characterising WP Engine as a bad actor in the WordPress ecosystem. His core argument was that WP Engine profits enormously from WordPress while contributing relatively little back to WordPress core development.

Automattic then took more aggressive steps. WordPress.org — the platform that hosts the official WordPress plugin repository, which is where nearly all WordPress users download their plugins — began restricting WP Engine's access. A major plugin that WP Engine had developed and maintained was temporarily taken over by Automattic without WP Engine's consent, which caused significant alarm in the community about the security and stability of the plugin ecosystem.

WP Engine sued Automattic. There were counter-suits. The situation got genuinely ugly.

Why This Matters Beyond the Two Companies Involved

The WP Engine situation exposed something about WordPress that many small business owners didn't fully appreciate: the WordPress ecosystem is not a neutral public utility. It's a set of overlapping interests — open-source software, commercial companies, individual plugin developers, hosting companies — that mostly work well together until they don't.

The plugin repository is controlled. When a conflict arose, WordPress.org was able to use control of the plugin repository as a weapon. This means that the plugins your site depends on exist at the discretion of relationships that have nothing to do with you.

"Open source" has limits. WordPress's code is open source, which means it can't be taken away. But the ecosystem around WordPress — the hosting recommendations, the plugin repository, the official theme directory, the certification programmes — is controlled, and that control can be exercised in ways that affect your site.

Commercial interests are embedded in the infrastructure. Automattic is a commercial company with significant financial interests. Those interests sometimes align with the WordPress community's interests and sometimes don't. The WP Engine situation was a moment when they didn't, and the community suffered for it.

The drama created real instability. During the height of the conflict, developers and site owners who relied on the affected plugin found themselves in genuine limbo — a plugin they depended on was under contested control. This kind of instability is difficult to plan around.

What the Situation Revealed About Platform Risk

The WP Engine conflict is the most dramatic example of a broader issue: WordPress sites are subject to platform risk that most business owners didn't sign up for and don't fully understand.

Platform risk means that the continued proper functioning of your site depends on relationships and decisions made by companies you have no relationship with. Your site works because WordPress core continues to be developed, because the plugin developers you rely on continue to maintain their work, because the hosting infrastructure continues to function, because the licensing relationships between all these parties remain intact.

Most of the time, this is fine. The ecosystem is large and stable enough that the risk is low. But "most of the time" is different from "guaranteed," and the WP Engine situation was a vivid demonstration of what can happen when the relationships break down.

The Alternative: No Platform to Have Drama

A site built in plain HTML and CSS has no platform in this sense. There is no ecosystem of relationships on which your site's continued functioning depends. There is no plugin repository to be weaponised, no licensor who can change terms, no commercial interest embedded in the infrastructure.

Our sites run on commodity hosting infrastructure — like electricity or water. If our hosting provider changes something we don't like, we can move the files to any other host in an afternoon. There is no lock-in, no dependency, nothing to have drama about.

We're not suggesting that what happened to WP Engine is likely to happen to the average WordPress site. But it's a useful window into the kind of risk you carry when your business depends on an ecosystem you don't control.

The businesses that moved to plain, owned, dependency-free websites before this situation unfolded didn't have to watch any of it with concern. That's a nice position to be in.

If the drama has made you think about what your WordPress dependency actually looks like, we're happy to have that conversation.