Over the last few months, the WordPress community has been a bit of a mess. The short version of the “mess” is that Matt Mullenweg (the man behind WordPress) is not happy with WP Engine (a major host of WordPress sites) and it’s causing a lot of fallout. My friend Aaron has a great timeline of events if you want to dig in a bit deeper.
While it’s all very unfortunate and it’s hurting the WordPress ecosystem quite a lot, it also shows why WordPress remains the best platform for most websites.
Because WordPress is self-hosted (you can download it and run it wherever you want), there is only so much that Matt (or anyone else) can do to break things. He’s causing a mess, and many of our clients are hosted on WP Engine, but the direct impacts have been minimal because with WordPress you fully own your site.
Matt isn’t happy with WP Engine, but he can’t do much about it. We have a lot of clients hosted on WP Engine, and their sites are fine.
Why not Squarespace?
This is the main difference between WordPress and other platforms like Squarespace or Shopify. If Anthony Casalena (CEO of Squarespace) or Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) had a similar beef, they could literally just shut websites down if they wanted to. They both seem like solid leaders, but many thought the same of Matt Mullenweg until recent months. Things can change.
We’ve actually seen this happen in small doses, like when Squarespace shut down the website for America’s Frontline Doctors. The question of “should they have shut them down?” aside, the fact is that companies like Squarespace have the power to do that with the push of a button. With WordPress, they don’t.
With WordPress, the worst case would be for your specific hosting company to decide to shut down your site, at which point you move to another host and keep going because you fully own your site.
This WordPress mess is frustrating, but it’s exactly the reason that we’ve been such a proponent of WordPress over the years. This may have long-term implications for the platform, but for now your WordPress sites will remain fully in your control and no one can take that away from you.
Please don’t forget that Automattic can force-push code changes / updates to all users. They used that option for the ACF => SCF change and did this also for (critical) security updates in thirdparty plugins. This backdoor gets even worse when you know, that the communication with wordpress.org is not cryptographically signed.
Good point. Their power is limited if you know what you’re doing, but it’s indeed a tricky situation that we’re finding ourselves in.