Pinpointing The Actual Problem

For a site that runs on Eleventy and Craft CMS, we sure write about WordPress a lot. But the fact of the matter is, we’re content nerds at heart, and when we got into the content-management thing, we did so with WordPress back … oh, about 16 years ago.

And folks that try to stay independent like us are likely to find a lot about WordPress that matches their needs and desires. And I want to look out for those people because I care about them as a fellow small publisher.

So, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that, after a nuclear-level meltdown on the part of Automattic and its CEO Matt Mullenweg, that the company announced that it would be scaling back its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project to a level essentially considered the bare minimum under the WordPress project’s “Five For The Future” program: 45 hours per week on WordPress core initiatives that benefit the entire project, not just Automattic’s own WordPress ecosystem. This is down from thousands of hours, and the note makes clear that the reason the company is doing this is essentially because the WP Engine lawsuit is not going their way. As the company put it:

This legal action diverts significant time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward supporting WordPress’s growth and health. We remain hopeful that WP Engine will reconsider this legal attack, allowing us to refocus our efforts on contributions that benefit the broader WordPress ecosystem.

To critics, this is likely to be seen as petty on the part of Automattic’s leadership, which makes sense given that many of its other actions have also been similarly seen in this light.

But what actually surprised me about the statement was a phrase buried in the last section of the 500-word blog post, my emphasis added:

While our sponsored contributions are reduced, Automattic remains deeply invested in the WordPress platform. We will redirect our energy toward projects that can fortify WordPress for the long term—ensuring its resilience, relevance, and vitality for the next generation of users and contributors. Part of this will be making WordPress.com much closer to a core WordPress experience, instead of having a different interface.

I don’t know if they were intending on this or not, but I think Automattic just diagnosed its own business problem—and to be clear, it’s not WP Engine. At least, not directly.

Currently, I would describe WordPress.com’s feature set as a variant of the open-source project, with roughly 50 percent of the features of the main project at the free level, along with a somewhat different design. You can post content on the site, you can select a theme, you can manage comments, and so on. The problem is, the model is extremely limited compared to the open-source version of WordPress—it has ads, you can’t install plugins or themes, and so on. You arguably get a lesser experience if you use the first-party version of WordPress, and have to pay significantly to actually get something approximating that experience.

WordPress, as an open-source project, essentially opens up the floodgates to the full-fat experience on a budget, and it’s an experience that its competitors simply do a better job at offering. Bluehost, for example, allows you to run up to 50 websites with up to 200,000 visitors per month for significantly less. And WP Engine comes at the issue from the other angle, offering a highly optimized version of the CMS for high-end users. Elsewhere in the CMS ecosystem, Ghost charges by subscriber these days (previously favoring a by-traffic approach), and Craft charges on a yearly model, but only for specific classes of users.

Clearly WordPress.com is the mothership, but it also doesn’t feel like it matches the rest of the WordPress ecosystem, and I think that has worked against Automattic over time. It leads companies that would otherwise have gone with the first-party option to favor plan B, because WordPress.com (at least not the ultra-premium VIP version) is not the “real” WordPress experience.

The company needs to do something about its unusually aggressive approach to competition and recalibrate its relationship to the open-source project it fostered. If that means doing less while encouraging others to do more, maybe that’s a necessary reset to move forward. But I think if they’re going to take a break from their traditionally aggressive approach to FOSS, it would do them some favors if they reset their own model to actually feel more like the open-source project it fostered, rather than a variant with a bunch of custom additions that actually discourage people from using the first-party tool.

Whether they like it or not, they have secretly been handing a huge advantage to its competitors on a platter—a better WordPress experience than you can get from WordPress. If this whole legal battle has been a ploy to get back on top, they should use the mandate to better compete within its own ecosystem.