WordPress.com and WP Engine Fight Over a Shrinking Pie

Dispute erupts as traffic has been shrinking to WordPress.com as well as its web hosting rival

Drama has broken out between the founder of the WordPress project and one of the most prominent hosting companies that supports WordPress websites, WP Engine. The conflict has caught WordPress business users in the crossfire and dismayed WordPress community open source developers and advocates.

A Similarweb analysis raises the question of whether conflict is breaking out because the competitors are fighting over slices of a shrinking pie, with traffic to both WordPress.com and WPEngine.com trending downward. The WordPress.com hosting service is operated by Automattic, which is also the main corporate backer of the open-source software project hosted at a separate domain, WordPress.org. WP Engine is one of many web hosting companies that takes the software from WordPress.org and bundles it with other software and services.

While WordPress remains the world’s most popular web content management system, used by small businesses and big companies alike, Similarweb’s analysis supports the findings of other analysts that its market share is stagnating. While web developers like the extensibility of the platform, WordPress faces competitive pressure from commercial alternatives like Wix and Squarespace promise greater simplicity. While no one website builder seems to be growing tremendously at WordPress’s expense, the alternatives continue to proliferate.

Key takeaways

• In August 2024, traffic to the main domains of WordPress.com and WPEngine.com were each down about 19% year-over-year (YoY), reflecting an ongoing pattern of shrinking traffic, according to Similarweb estimates.
• In the first 8 months of the year, main domain traffic to WordPress.com was down -16.3% YoY, and traffic to WPEngine.com was down -8.6%. By the same standard, Wix and Squarespace were doing better, with wix.com traffic down a comparatively modest 2% and squarespace.com traffic up 4% YoY.
• Traffic to the product shopping and buying pages of the two domains is down significantly. For example, traffic to the segments of the website that describe hosting plans and pricing was down -8.69% for WordPress.com and -38.76% for WPEngine.com. (Note that this sort of analysis is trickier and could miss activity on alternate buying paths.)
• Traffic was down 28.8% for the main domain of WordPress.org, which represents the open-source software project and provides access to free add-on software (themes for design and plugins for functional enhancements). That suggests a decline in interest by web developers and website owners.

Background: WordPress (the software) vs. WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and WPEngine.com

The core WordPress software is open source, and many different web hosting companies offer support for it. The primary corporate backer of WordPress is Automattic, led by CEO Matt Mullenweg, who is also a founder of the open source project and of the nonprofit WordPress Foundation.

Automattic operates WordPress.com, a website hosting service, whereas open-source access to the software is provided through WordPress.org. Automattic also operates a high-end hosting service WPVIP.com, is the current owner of Tumblr, and provides a variety of premium WordPress add-ons, including the WooCommerce ecommerce plugin.

In mid-September, Mullenweg wrote a blog post calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress,” a topic he also expounded on at the annual WordCamp US developers conference. He, his company, and the foundation that owns the WordPress trademark are claiming that WP Engine is misusing the trademark and failing to put sufficient money or labor into supporting the open-source project.

Detailing all the claims and counter-claims is beyond the scope of this article, but the dispute drew attention to the thin boundary between the for-profit and nonprofit/open-source versions of WordPress. After the parties traded cease-and-desist letters, WordPress.org began denying WP Engine API access to the plugin and theme repositories it hosts. That move drew widespread criticism because timely access to plugin updates is important to addressing cybersecurity issues with WordPress sites, with consequences not just for WP Engine but for all its customers.

The WordPress powers-that-be subsequently granted a reprieve but said WP Engine would have to create a “mirror site” to host plugins and themes on behalf of its customers, rather than accessing the repository directly.

What we can add is some context about how all versions of WordPress are seeing a decline in interest.

Interest in WordPress has been shrinking

While declining traffic doesn’t always translate into declining revenue, it does mean a smaller audience for a website operator to convert into paying customers. We based our traffic analysis on the main domains of the websites discussed below in an attempt to focus on their marketing presence, as opposed to subdomains used for documentation or, in the case of WordPress.com, personal websites with no registered domain of their own.

Traffic to WordPress.com has been shrinking for a couple of years, as has traffic to WordPress.org.

Meanwhile traffic to WPVIP’s website was down 48% YoY in August, and traffic to WooCommerce was down 45%.

WP Engine’s web presence is much smaller to begin with, and it’s not growing.

Both companies remain substantial digital businesses, but it’s hard to see what this fight does to improve the future of WordPress.

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Contact: For more information, please write to press@similarweb.com.

Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".