Recent conflicts between the owner of the WordPress platform servers and WordPress companies and users have created a lot of uncertainty on the WordPress community as a whole. A prevailing sentiment is that the WordPress community is done. It is believed the co-founder of WordPress is intentionally sabotaging the community in order to have full commercial control of the project.
There is certainly a lot of controversy happening so let’s take a closer look.
Losing Market Share
For the past couple of years WordPress has been losing a lot of market share very quickly. It seemed like almost overnight the platform went from slowly gaining market share to losing. I have been part of several discussions with various WordPress groups and managers discussing the loss in shares and strategy for regaining.
There seems to be no real conclusion on why this is happening or what to do about it. Here at Mat Lipe Dot Com we’ve concluded the root cause of the issue is the platform has been moving away from supporting developers to supporting small scale end users.
Supporting end users is great. In fact, at Mat Lipe Dot Com we spend much of our time proudly doing just that.
Without developers a platform is not pushed forward toward truly creative enhancements. A platform evolves away from sustainable enterprise level applications. Architectural decisions begin to be made by developers who do not yet have the experience of scaling.
Evolving Away from Developers
For the majority of WordPress history, the platform has been an inspiring and energizing place for developers to build and contribute. Changes to the platform were made with development in mind. Starting from about the same time the beta Site Editor was introduced, the focus shifted from developers to end users.
Let me explain.
Shaming Freemium Plugins
The plugin ecosystem is made up of about a million different free plugins. Plugins are reason WordPress became so successful because they allow WordPress to do anything you want. Without plugins, WordPress was a simple little CMS which could make a blog or brochure website just fine but that is about it.
Maintaining plugins costs money. Even the most simple and humble developer still needs to pay the internet bill to keep maintaining. When the original plugin maintainers graduated college or had children, they needed a way to afford continued maintenance.
Freemium plugins were born. A freemium plugin allows a developer to offer a free plugin while providing optional upsells or premium versions for a fee. Now developers had funding to keep creating and maintaining plugins and the WordPress ecosystem thrived.
A couple of years ago a new idea of freemium plugins was introduced to the WordPress community. This idea suggests that any plugin which offers upsells is creating plugins solely for profit and does not care about the community or what WordPress stands for. Statements like, “They are not doing it for the love of WordPress” became common. New systems started getting introduced which filter out plugins with upsells from plugin searches.
As expected, a lot of long-time plugin developers either lost their income or were offended by the shaming. Developers left the WordPress community leaving their plugins and tools abandoned and millions of users without support.
Site Editor
When the site editor was first introduced, we were all hopeful that it would be really neat and flexible way to build templates. Then we started trying to use it.
We almost immediately realized that the site editor could not be used in any kind of multi-environment setup and provided no way to effectively integrate a CI/CD workflow. We were told that it was still in beta and the workflow would be fine-tuned before it was stabilized. Unfortunately, this never happened. I have been part of numerous round table discussions with project maintainers discussing the issues with workflow and have not even received any sort of solution.
The site editor was stabilized into something which resembles the wordpress.com site editing experience. Virtually unusable for any enterprise level applications or really any website with a proper QA/release workflow. The site editor left users feeling incompetent because they couldn’t figure out how to properly use it without publishing changes to production and doing testing there. I’ve been in video calls with designers who spent weeks trying to figure out a workflow only to feel defeated.
Site Editor adoption continues to be very low.
Endless Deprecations
From the beginning, WordPress came with a promise of backward compatibility. This promise required architecture decisions to be made thinking about the future and not just the present. Rarely was a deprecation introduced and only for good reason.
The present process of deprecation involves simply pointing a package export to another package and adding a warning message to the browser console. This is a problem for a number of reasons.
- Architecture decisions are made quickly without thinking about the evolution of the packages.
- Pointing a package to another package does not guarantee any kind of backward compatibility as the pointed to package evolves.
- The browser console becomes virtually unusable as it fills with warning from various plugins and themes.
- An exponentially higher amount of time is spent on updating WordPress to resolve deprecations.
Updating WordPress used to be a simple process, now it is time consuming and exhausting. Supporting multiple WordPress versions is even more difficult because different packages are used for the same requirement depending on the WordPress version.
Endless depreciations have shifted our resources away from innovation to maintenance.
Go Fork Yourself
The past few days a prevailing message given to the WordPress ecosystem is we should fork the WordPress project and maintain it ourselves.
Forking WordPress is not reasonable for the following reasons:
- It takes thousands of developers to maintain a platform of this size.
- All the plugins and themes are connected to the original WordPress platform.
- WordPress is successful because users are able to switch hosts or development agencies and get a consistent experience. A fork breaks this consistency.
Some forks have already surfaced to solve the uncertainty caused by the current situation. With each fork we lose more of the WordPress community to the new project.
Why Did This Hurt So Much?
For the past 20 years or so we all believed that WordPress was “Ours”. The WordPress community was something we could all be a part of. The community has spent millions of dollars and millions of man hours sustaining this community because we all took ownership. We believed the story we had been told that WordPress belongs to all of us.
Learning that in fact WordPress had never belonged to any of us hurts. We feel taken advantage of and mislead. We feel like we spent our whole career dedicated to something only to be told that we should have known all along we are working for free for someone else.
I want to be clear that we do not agree with the social media attacks on Ma.tt. We simply emphasize with how the community members are feeling right now.
A Sobering Reality Check
Recent actions taken affecting the WordPress plugin system have been alarming.
- Blocking servers from accessing the plugin repository.
- Taking ownership of plugin developers’ plugins and all existing users.
- Banning users from access.
- Requiring declaration of being unaffiliated with certain companies to access your plugin accounts.
For 2 decades we have been freely using this system without intervention or disruption. We all believed they would simply always be there. The WordPress platform requires this system to be a usable application. Learning that at any moment we or our users could lose access was a sobering realization.
Any platform which relies on a system we do not yourself control is susceptible to outside influence and disruption without notice. We had forgotten this with WordPress because we thought it belonged to all of us. We are fully aware now.
Contribution Requirements
One of the messages being pushed around the WordPress community is that users are expected to contribute a particular amount to the WordPress project, or they will be susceptible to being blocked from the platform and public shaming.
We agree that contributions are important for a platform to thrive. Measuring contributions on the other hand is difficult to do. For instance, Mat Lipe Dot Com contributes thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to the WordPress ecosystem every year through things like sponsorship, code contributions, free plugins, free tools. etc. yet we don’t seek recognition and rarely mention our contributions. In the eye of WordPress project, we are probably seen as a company who does not contribute enough. Sure, we could start publishing real-time information about all our contributions but that defeats the purpose of contributing for the sake of contribution. Contributing under threat is extortionate and not healthy for an ecosystem.
We also feel that if you offer affordable WordPress hosting you are providing an extremely valuable service to the WordPress platform. Without which the platform would likely have millions fewer users and contributors. Seems this should be considered before labeling a company as a non-contributor.
Let’s not forget, the WordPress code is open source. It was written by all of us. Under the open-source license, we are all free to do whatever we want with it regardless of contribution.
Shortly after writing this article we received an email from Automatic stating that Mat Lipe Dot Com was not contributing enough and must either contribute more or remove Mat Lipe Dot Com from the contributors list. We strongly doubt the email had anything to do with us writing this article, just helps to make our point.
The writing of this article began in October 2024. Since then we have received many emails from Automatic stating we are not contributing enough.
Mat Lipe Dot Com’ Response
From the beginning we have been a company focused on providing the coolest and most useful solutions to our customers and to the open-source community as a whole. We have never gotten involved in the business politics of the WordPress ecosystem as profit has never really been a motivation.
Like the majority of the WordPress community, we are hurt by the actions being taken and feel a level of uncertainty about the future. We have had numerous internal discussions and brainstorming sessions to figure out what the future of our company looks like and how we can be proactive.
Ultimately, our decisions came down to this, “We have always worked to put our users first.” For this reason, we will not be moving away from WordPress and will continue to develop and support our WordPress plugins and tools. As long as there is a WordPress, Mat Lipe Dot Com will be a champion for our users.
As an aside, we did remove Mat Lipe Dot Com from the contributors list per Automatic’s email request.
Some Light at the End of the Tunnel
In early 2025, Automatic announced they would no longer be contributing to the WordPress project and would instead shift their resources to their commercial wordpress.com system.
Now instead of spending the majority of our resources on triaging WordPress updates, we can get back to focusing on innovation and creative solutions. You may have noticed our plugins are receiving larger, more frequent updates.
Another benefit of WordPress updates happening less frequently is the community gets a chance to think through changes and the larger goal before being shipped. We are hopeful this will reduce deprecations and improve backward compatibility.
Whoops, I May Have Spoke Too Soon
WordPress 6.9 was released after a nice long break. Like everyone else we had hopes it would be a polished and stable release like the WordPress of ole. We were not so lucky.
WordPress 6.9 forced all classic theme users into the load, parse, then serve rendering flow of the block themes. One of the many reasons the majority of WordPress users are still using classic themes, is they don’t sacrifice stability or performance for and theming UI. The WordPress release team acknowledged the loss of performance in their release post stating something like, “the loss of performance is acceptable because it puts the performance in line with block themes”.
Taking the thing that made WordPress great in the first place and slowing it down to make the tool that no one likes not look so bad is not a reasonably business strategy.
It gets better…. The new rendering flow broke a ton of websites. The reported issues came flooding in almost immediately. The WordPress team responded by saying, “There is no rush to fix this, we can guide webmaster on how to directly hack the code on their sites while we work on a long term solution”.
WordPress updates have no “undo” button. Even worse, you could have automatic updates turned on which means you really can’t undo them. But don’t worry, if you site breaks you can always enable code editing on your server and hack some WordPress core files to fix your site. Don’t worry about the next update wiping out your hacks because we can just give you new hacks. BTW, we won’t support you personally, we’ll just assume you can find the hacks to use doing a Google search.
The irony here is the whole flued started because “the Matt” was losing market share to WP Engine. WP Engine is the host that makes backup points before doing WordPress updates. By making updating WordPress such a disaster, WP Engine becomes a much more valuable place to host.
In Closing
WordPress is not dead, they are just trying to hard to be.