The WordPress drama is real, and it lives in the wrong layer to scare you.
A client asked us last month if she should be worried about WordPress. Her CEO had read something about a lawsuit and a fork and people walking away, and now there was a meeting on her calendar about “platform risk.” The panic and the shrug both miss where things actually stand.
Automattic and WP Engine are in a genuinely ugly fight. Fact discovery closed in May, the judge hears the motions to dismiss on June 25, and a jury trial is set for September 2027. WP Engine says Automattic planned to go after ten hosting companies for trademark royalties. None of that is the software, though. WordPress the codebase, the thing your site actually runs on, did not change because two companies decided to sue each other. The fight is over who controls the front door to wordpress.org, the plugin and update directory. That distinction is the whole game.
And that’s the part worth paying attention to, because the fight exposed a real single point of failure. For years, basically every WordPress site on earth phoned home to one server, controlled by one person, for plugin updates. When that person started cutting off access during the dispute, a lot of people learned for the first time that they’d built their business on someone else’s switch. That’s the actual lesson. Not “WordPress is dying,” but “you don’t want one switch with one hand on it.”
You don’t want one switch with one hand on it.
The good news is the ecosystem already moved. A project called FAIR (the Fair Package Manager), now hosted by the Linux Foundation, lets WordPress sites get plugin updates without routing everything through wordpress.org. It’s not a fork. It’s still 100% WordPress. It just cuts the one cord everybody was nervous about. A healthy answer to a governance problem, and the direction we like.
So our posture, the thing we’d tell your CEO, is boring on purpose. We’re staying on WordPress. The live sites we run today are on it, and we’re not migrating anyone off because two companies hired lawyers. What we do instead is keep clients off the single points of failure the drama exposed: owning our own hosting, keeping an independent update path, and never depending on any one vendor’s switch. WordPress is a tool. A good one. You just don’t hand anyone the only key to it.
WordPress is a tool. A good one. You just don’t hand anyone the only key to it.
The drama will keep making headlines through 2027. Your site will keep loading the whole time. Both of those are fine.