WP.org vs WP Engine

Conrad Saam | October 1, 2024

Many of you have undoubtedly heard something about the brewing fight between WordPress.org and WP Engine, so we wanted to take a moment to put everyone at ease and let you know how this will or will not impact your Mockingbird hosted websites.

Mockingbird has been hosting our websites on WP Engine since 2017 and find their mix of service, speed, and security to be a good fit for our clients’ needs, despite Mockingbird paying a bit of a premium vs. other options. 

What’s The Fight About?

The fight between WordPress.org and WP Engine includes multiple issues but centers around a trademark disagreement. From WordPress.org’s position, they don’t like that customers can be confused by the name WP Engine and assume that WP Engine is the official paid version of WordPress (while WordPress.org receives no financial compensation from WP Engine). WP Engine, on the other hand, points out that “WP” is not technically a WordPress trademark and is used by any number of companies producing WordPress-related software products who also pay no trademark licensing fees to WordPress.org. A far more thorough breakdown can be found on TechCrunch but the net-net is that WordPress.org has now “banned” WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org’s resources.

What This Means for You Today

In the short term, no action is required. WordPress sites running on WP Engine are no less secure today than they were two weeks ago and we expect no degradation of the excellent site loading times that we’ve come to expect from WP Engine’s streamlined purpose-built WordPress servers. From our standpoint, access to WordPress.org offers efficient access to the most current stable versions of plugins but is not actually required, as the plugins are available individually on the developers’ websites or via other plugin repository sites. Over the weekend, WP Engine integrated another plugin repository to streamline the process.

What’s the Long-term Plan?

In the longer term, If WP Engine and WordPress.org can’t work out their differences, we will evaluate migrating our sites to another server company to mitigate any exposure to the long-term risk that this dispute could actually put WP Engine out of business, requiring us to do multiple migrations in a rushed manner. If a decision to migrate is made in the future, Mockingbird will do everything in our power to make it a straightforward and easy transition. 

If you have any specific questions, feel free to reach out to your Mockingbird Client Success manager.