Wordpress and WP Engine Dispute - What this means for you and what to do?

WP Engine is in a legal dispute with WordPress co-founder and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg over alleged libel, stemming from a recent public disagreement around WordPress trademarks and open-source issues.

Who's Involved?

• WP Engine is a managed hosting provider specializing in WordPress, with over 200,000 websites. WP Engine partnered with private equity firm Silver Lake in 2018.
• Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic. Automattic owns the WordPress trademark (among many others) and uses WordPress.com to sell a hosted version of the open-source WordPress software.
• WordPress website owners who host with WP Engine and find themselves caught in the crossfire of this dispute.

What Happened?

Things came to a head after a weeks-long volley of cease-and-desist letters between WP Engine and Automattic over disparaging comments made by Mullenweg, alleged infringement by WP Engine of several WordPress-related trademarks, and WP Engine's obligation to pay licensing fees to use the WordPress project's open-source software.

This conflict became an issue for WP Engine customers at the end of September when WP Engine servers were blocked from accessing the WordPress.org repository. This blockage meant affected sites could no longer access plugin and theme updates from WordPress.org and had to be manually updated.

In a move that surprised many in the open-source community, Automattic escalated the fight by taking over WP Engine's popular Advanced  Custom Fields (ACF) plugin in their WordPress plugin listing.

While this change didn't affect ACF Pro users, it did cause update issues and confusion for those using the pared down free version of the popular site-building tool.

WP Engine provided an update to their clients from their perspective via their blog on October 25th. Mullenweg and Automattic have made various statements from the initial volley that 'WP Engine is NOT WordPress' to posts promoting WP Engine hosting competitors. All in all, this dispute is leaving many WordPress website owners and IT teams who host on WP Engine bewildered.

Should I Switch My Site Host?

After the initial hiccups, WP Engine took legal steps to cease further disruptive activities and maintain the status quo while this case is litigated. They  also launched their Secure Updater plugin to ensure that sites hosted on other platforms using their free plugins and themes could continue to receive updates and support.

As of today, we don't recommend a drastic move like migrating your site(s) to a new host based off this conflict alone. Depending on the size and functionality of your site, migrating to a new host can be a hassle that's only worth it if you're experiencing a current or potential degradation in service or if some of the issues brought to light in recent weeks have made WP Engine unappealing as a vendor.

For now, we're paying extra attention to plugin and theme updates on our WP Engine sites, but we're very much in the "wait and see" phase. We've had great experiences with hosting options like Pantheon, Kinsta, or DigitalOcean and even shared hosting from SiteGround, but each hosting service comes with ups and downs and a switch shouldn't be undertaken lightly.

We'll definitely be factoring these issues into our decision-making processes when it comes time to choose a content management system and hosting platform for new sites we're developing, but the situation isn't looking so dire that we feel the need to make big changes today.

If you are hosted on WP Engine and need help exploring how this conflict may impact your site, or if you're already experiencing issues, please schedule a time to chat so we can help you avoid any disruption in services.