WPEngine vs Wordpress

Intro

Dave: The news of WP Engine being banned by WordPress org has caused huge shock waves for the web companies who have clients on WP Engine.

But unless you're a developer, you probably don't understand how this impacts your WordPress website. 

So I asked Lydia Chu at DubDub, my web development partner, to join me in this episode to help us understand what this can possibly mean if you're a host, if you're using WP Engine as your hosting company.

Hey there, Lydia.

Lydia: Dave. Thanks for having me.

Dave: I'm so glad you're here. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Lydia: Sure , my company is JubJub Interactive, and we are a full service web development agency. We've been around since the late 90s, so we've seen a lot of things.

Dave: Very cool. So why don't we start out with, with the basics?

What is Wordpress.org

Dave: What is wordpress. org and why do they even matter?

Lydia: So, , WordPress. org is owned by Automatic, the company, Automatic. WordPress is important because they run the last figures I read were anywhere between 40, 45 to 60 percent of the websites out there, but all the websites in the world, 45 to 60 percent of them are on this platform.

Now it's software, it's not necessarily hosting.

This company owns WordPress. It also owns a lot of WordPress support companies as well, like Woo, the makers of the, it's the de facto e commerce for WordPress. They also own other tools like Jet. WordPress and a lot of other companies that help support it. 

Dave: So even though wordpress is open source, wordpress. org is kind of like the, the mothership. Automatic is kind of the mothership that kind of has all that control, I guess I'd say.

Lydia: Yes, they own the trademarks. They shepherd the open source. They contribute greatly to the open source project. Uh, they so and trademarking is actually at the crux of what's going on. Of the, the matter here. So yes, they own the trademarks, apparently 

What is WP Engine?

Dave: And then, so what is WP Engine?

Lydia: WP engine is one of the biggest hosting providers for WordPress.

They have approximately, according to their website, they have approximately 1. 5 million sites on their platform. WP engine only hosts WordPress, they don't host generic PHP applications, any other types of applications on their vertical. Focused on WordPress, their customer base is typically businesses. It's typically entities that are more serious about keeping their WordPress, sites up to date, all of those types of things, 

Dave: What's the appeal of WP Engine? Why do so many businesses and companies choose to host on WP Engine?

Lydia: so one of the challenges with WordPress being an open source platform is that. It's a huge target for hackers because there are so many sites that are built on it. And so in order to keep your site running smoothly and not hacked, you have to update it constantly.

And when I say constantly, it can be daily that there are security releases that come out depending on which plugins you are using. And part of the reason why people like WP Engine, it's because they focus solely on what on WordPress and they provide a lot of tools to make it as easy as possible to update and keep secure.

They have a lot of really great tools for these are the best tools on the market as far as I'm concerned for moving your sites , if you have a development site they make it super easy to move from environment to environment, to take a backup, which is all things that are, it can be cumbersome and problematic on other platforms.

And, those are some of the reasons why people might be using that hosting. It's just extremely easy to use.

Dave: And they have a good reputation and they're well known within the development community as a hosting platform.

Lydia: Very good reputation. One of the things that's I, in my opinion is great about them is they also. Regulate the plugins that you can use on your site. One of our biggest challenges when we inherit a WordPress site is we don't know what somebody's done. There's a million different ways to, to build a WordPress site.

You have no idea if the plugins are up to date. And so they actually have a list of plugins that you can use and you can't, I mean, everything else you can't. And it makes it, it makes, Everybody's job a lot easier, and so I think a lot of developers like ourselves really appreciate that.

What happened between WP Engine and Wordpress.org?

Dave: So, can you tell us what the heck happened between WordPress and WP Engine?

Lydia: So this, it's been fairly typical and open source projects where. Factions develop and people who like certain things go one way and people who like other things go another way and it splits off and becomes two different products. But we, what happened this past week is automatic. The CEO of automatic accused WP engine of breaking their trademark and WP engine, because they have built their entire business around WordPress. They have a lot of tools specifically designed around WordPress. And I don't know the, I don't, I don't know the ins and outs of the trademark dispute, but I think the more important thing is it got ugly.

And it was not just, "Oh, I'm going to sue you." It was, it was communicated in an ugly fashion, and they blocked WP Engine from accessing the updates through the WP Engine admin panel as they typically would. And so, obviously, that's mission critical to WP Engine's services and so it's become, a point of notice and concern in, in the developer community, for sure.

Dave: And so, specifically, did they ban the automatic updates? So, it's still possible to update the themes and plugins manually?

Lydia: It is the updates. Yes. It's the automatic automatic updates through the WP Engine tools. And so, again, that's why people selected them is because they have all these great tools and now you're being blocked by the maker of the software

Dave: so all the automatic updates have been disabled then. Not, I don't know if all, but the automatic updates, which was the main feature of WP Engine has been disabled.

So it's still possible to manually update the plugins and themes.

Lydia: It is possible. It's not as, clean as through their, their tools, but it is possible. Correct.

Dave: So, this is probably then, if you're on WP Engine, this is not something that you would recommend like an end user to go fiddle around with. This is something really that you want to have some technical knowledge from your

Lydia: I would definitely recommend that, especially, I mean, again, the great thing about their system is you can copy the script environment down and, and test it out and play around with it.

But in general, if it's a mission critical site, I wouldn't recommend having somebody go in there and I mean, in general, in WordPress, we don't recommend having somebody go in there and just click updates because without knowing anything about how their theme is structured, you don't know how that's going to be supported.

How do you know if you are hosted on WP Engine

Dave: So, with, you know, WordPress is an interesting tech stack, so I know most marketing managers and business owners don't even really know who their hosting company is. Usually when I ask them who's hosting, they point me to their DNS provider, which is different from the hosting provider. And since WP Engine is a hosting provider.

So how can, people figure out if they don't have at the top of their list, how can they figure out and find out who's hosting their website?

Lydia: yeah, it, it can be tough. For a non technical business owner to, to know, uh, you would probably, well, we typically advise people is we can look at their DNS and have a pretty good guess of who their host is sometimes though, depending on who has set them up, it can be obscured.

But we generally, if we have to approach it from a non technical standpoint, we actually go to finance and give them some companies that they may want to look for.

Dave: Yeah. So, when you say go to finance, you're like asking who's paying the invoices

Lydia: Right. Are you, do you see any invoices from, we give them a list of like the top 10 hosting companies

Dave: And you can always maybe reach out to whoever developed the website in the first place because they 

Lydia: Exactly. Yes, exactly. They probably would know.

Does this impact you if your are not hosted on WP Engine?

Dave: So just to alleviate any concerns out there, if you're not running or if you're not hosting on WP Engine, everything that we're kind of talking about doesn't directly impact you.

Lydia:  Correct. Not in the near term. It does not directly impact you. It doesn't, it doesn't directly impact you unless you are on WP Engine hosting.

Short Term options if you are on WP Engine

Dave: Need to do if you're on WP Engine for hosting. So in the short term, are there any impacts in terms of like performance, reliability, you know, those types of things? That's a big sigh.

Lydia: Yeah, it's a big sigh because I can't really say, and the, the vitriol that has gone back and forth between these two companies, so there were some outages initially, because what happened was WordPress blocked WP Engine and then WP Engine tried to do a workaround.

And that actually did, break the front end of a lot of, of a lot of sites. And then I think they rolled back on that. And there's been a lot of back and forth.

And I, to be honest, I haven't been able to keep up with every single step back and forth between these companies.

And so I think, um, right now for our clients, we are just recommending that everyone stay vigilant because we have to be aware if there are any major security updates anyways and make sure that we're going to be able to update them both on wordpress.org and on WP Engine.

They're both saying if you're having any difficulty contact WP Engine support.

Dave: So in the short term then, You should probably reach out to your development company for security updates and theme updates because they can apply those Manually because folks like you have that technical knowledge

Lydia: Yes

Dave: So that's how they can kind of get around this this WP engine automatic not being so automatic anymore

Lydia: Correct, yes.

Medium Term options if you are on WP Engine

Dave: And then, in the medium term, you know, no one knows how long this ban is going to persist, what's going to actually happen.

In the medium term, whatever that means, what should folks consider doing?

Lydia: Well, so there are, yeah, so there's a couple of options.

One might be to move off of WP Engine hosting. I would be reluctant to recommend that too quickly just because they have traditionally been so reliable. Because there are so many customers that rely on them and because there is, frankly, a lot of money at stake, hopefully, they are going to be able to work something out. 

Dave: Yeah, so if, you know, again, not knowing how long this persists in the median term, if they do, if companies do decide to move hosting companies, is this a big deal or is this a pretty well known process among the development community and different hosting companies?

Lydia: It's going to depend on the size of the site, to be honest. So if you have a, it's going to depend on the size of the site and the complexity of the site.

If you have a 10 page site that is using Elementor, which is A very well known framework, theme framework, then moving that using some tools is probably not that big of a deal.

If you have a lot of customizations, if you have some complexities, especially with advanced custom fields, moving away may not be as straightforward. And, um, Of course, that type of change, depending on, you know, depends on how big your site is. If you're running e commerce, all of those types of things, it can be a lot more challenging.

Dave: So, um, for those larger sites, moving hosting companies is not like a flip of a switch. Some careful consideration has to be given

Lydia: Definitely. And especially, especially if you have any kind of third party integrations, where data might be coming in and out, and there might be, There might be some firewall changes that people had made when it was originally developed that nobody documented and you don't find out that things are broken until you actually do flip the switch.

There's always for a site that is bigger and has more complex and has been around longer. The risk is higher for sure with a move.

Dave: So if you're a marketing manager or a business owner, considering a platform move, , basically, , it depends. And you should probably contact your developer to understand either how big or complex it's going to be.

Lydia: Right. For a hosting move, for sure. That would be, for a hosting move, I would be, I think it's good to definitely loop in your developer or, or get some advice from somebody who would be able to advise you on the pros and cons.

Long Term options if you are on WP Engine

Dave: And so then, we talked about the short term, medium term.

So in the long term, you know, we had a discussion a little while ago about some of the, uh, challenges that pop up with running WordPress sites, everything from the theme updates and plugins that are needed for security.

Is this another reason to consider, you know, kind of from our previous conversation of looking at other alternative platforms that are not so complex or I'm gonna use the word brittle.

Lydia: I think definitely. I think a lot of businesses who are running their websites or any kind of technology, any kind of anything with your wet, with your business, actually, you look at risk. What is the risk involved? So with websites and technology, there's sort of the cool factor. That's one consideration.

How cool can I get my website to be? Or something like that. But then there's the risk.

And I think that this just illustrates how, um, before we talked about risks with WordPress sites, where because of the updates, the complexities, because there are a million different ways to put together a WordPress site, no one's really regulating certifying anything like that with with those with this platform, you really don't know what you're going to get.

And. So I think the risk, this just brings yet another level of risk.

It is definitely an opportunity to look at tech stacks that are more intended for business.

So something like a HubSpot or a Shopify, if it's, if it's e commerce, there's just, a single provider, the, their record in the marketplace for dealing with business websites and the fact that they have so many it's first party. Software, the fact that they have so many people on their platform, so many websites on their platform, they have the benefit of all of their millions of customers. They see what's happening across the board and they implement it, tactics for security across the board. And so you just don't see those types of issues or it's just a lot more rare on a, on a Shopify top type platform.

And the same thing is can be said for, for HubSpot and normal security type things.

Dave: Yeah, you know, we talked a little bit about some of the complexities involved in moving hosting companies. But now we're talking about moving from like WordPress to HubSpot, Shopify, or Expression Engine. When's the best time to move like tech stacks like that?

Lydia: Well, if you're if you're considering a redesign, if you're considering any type of new initiative.

So one of the things I think that we've seen in a lot of our mutual clients is they understand that prospects. They want to learn from your website before they buy and especially for certain types of either larger purchases or professional services or something like that.

They want to learn. And so a lot of our clients are building up resource sections. And whether that's beefing up your blog articles to where they're really more of sort of a full table of contents with a more of a, almost like a research paper, or having a resource library with videos and case studies and all of those types of things before, if it's going to be a fairly substantial addition to your website, it may be worth considering a platform change before investing a lot into an existing platform.

Also, if you're going to be doing any type of marketing initiatives where HubSpot might make sense, sometimes we, we have some clients who are on HubSpot using HubSpot for their marketing and CRM, but they're using a WordPress website.

And I think that there, it can oftentimes be a lot more straightforward to just bring the word, the website into HubSpot. And so if you're doing HubSpot marketing already, then that's something to definitely something to consider.

I think if you're, if you're considering any type of investment in your website, I think it's worth looking at what that investment would, would be on another platform.

Final Thoughts on the Wp Engine and Wordpress Issue

Dave: Very cool. So, any final thoughts on this whole issues between WP Engine and WordPress?

Lydia: Well, I am very curious to see what it, what, what comes of this. I think that it's, there's always these sort of tech wars and I think that this is just sort of the latest in it, but it's, it's, there's a lot of intrigue and so we'll be watching it, we're keeping up to date with what's going on.

And so it could change from day to day. This week has been very interesting with what, all has gone on back and forth.

And so I think the main thing is if you have any questions, be sure that you're talking to a trusted advisor who can offer some practical advice and some big picture, big picture knowledge as well.

Dave: Yeah, you know, from my perspective as at CMO, I think this is just another wake up call. In the latest news of the risk factors, which you talked about, that people need to think about if they're having WordPress sites. And, if they're thinking about redesigning their website on WordPress, like you said, that might be a good time to consider actually switching off of WordPress into a true CMS platform like Expression Engine or HubSpot or a true e com like Shopify.

Lydia: Yes, that's all. Exactly.

Dave: I'm going to link some reference materials in the transcript as well as Lydia's website and LinkedIn profile. Um, thank you Lydia, um, for explaining what the heck is happening here in WP Engine Land. It was great talking with you.

Lydia: Likewise. 

Update Sept 27, 2024

Dave: So just to show you how fast things are moving here, while I was editing this video over the weekend, Lydia slacked me and let me know about the WP Engine reprieve. At least it is there until October 1st. Both Lydia and I agree that the short, medium and long term guidelines and recommendations that we had during our discussion still applies.

Let's hope that WP Engine as well as WordPress come to a more permanent resolution quickly. 

There's more great educational content and interviews for you at do what. works slash podcasts.