At the height of the WordPress-WP Engine dispute in late 2024 and early 2025, the coverage was relentless. Every new court filing, every account deactivation, every public statement from Matt Mullenweg generated another wave of commentary. Tech journalists, WordPress developers, bloggers, hosting companies, and plugin authors all had something to say. The conflict had a cast, a timeline, and stakes that affected hundreds of thousands of websites.
By mid-2026, the noise has subsided. There are no more viral open letters. The flurry of Twitter threads and blog posts from alarmed WordPress contributors has quietened. Mullenweg is still CEO of Automattic. The lawsuit is still proceeding. And the structural problems that made the whole dispute possible are still entirely unresolved.
The quiet is not resolution. It is fatigue.
What actually happened, briefly
The dispute began in September 2024 when Mullenweg publicly criticised WP Engine — one of the largest WordPress managed hosting companies — for profiting from the WordPress brand and ecosystem without contributing proportionally to the open-source project. Automattic alleged that WP Engine had artificially inflated its business value and misled customers about its relationship with WordPress. WP Engine denied the claims and, in October 2024, filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg personally, alleging extortion, defamation, unfair competition, and intentional interference with its business.
What followed was an escalation that shocked even those accustomed to open-source governance disputes. Automattic blocked WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org plugin and theme update infrastructure, affecting over 200,000 websites. A California federal judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in December 2025, ordering Automattic to restore access within 72 hours. Automattic had also seized control of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, one of the most widely-used plugins in the WordPress ecosystem, citing security concerns — a move WP Engine and many in the community viewed as an act of retaliation.
The case is still progressing through the courts, with a motion to dismiss hearing scheduled, WP Engine filing a third amended complaint in February 2026 with newly unsealed details, and arguments on both parties’ motions to dismiss set for June 4, 2026. Automattic has denied the core claims and filed counterclaims accusing WP Engine of trademark misuse and misleading marketing. Nobody has won. Nobody has settled.
The governance problem that was always there
The legal dispute is real and consequential. But the underlying problem it exposed is older than the lawsuit and will outlast it regardless of the verdict.
WordPress is simultaneously an open-source software project, a commercial ecosystem, and an infrastructure controlled by entities with intertwined but distinct interests. WordPress.org — the infrastructure that hosts plugin and theme distribution for the entire ecosystem — is operated as Matt Mullenweg’s personal project, with no formal governance structure, no oversight board, and no mechanism for the broader community to appeal decisions made about access or resource allocation. Automattic, the commercial company Mullenweg leads, has an exclusive commercial licence to the WordPress trademark held by the WordPress Foundation.
This arrangement worked, more or less, for two decades. It worked because the incentives were broadly aligned and because no one had tested what would happen if they weren’t. The WP Engine dispute was the test, and the answer it produced was stark: a single individual could, without community approval or formal process, block a major commercial actor’s access to shared infrastructure, seize control of a widely-used plugin, and publicly campaign against a competitor — all while simultaneously serving as the steward of the open-source project those actions affected.
The Repository’s reporting on the community response captured the consequential fallout: long-time contributors describing a “culture of fear” around criticising Mullenweg’s decisions, prominent community members having their WordPress.org accounts deactivated — including Joost de Valk, creator of Yoast SEO, and Karim Marucchi, CEO of Crowd Favorite — after suggesting governance reforms. Several senior contributors told reporters they feared professional retaliation for speaking publicly. The executive director of the WordPress project resigned. Naoko Takano, who had worked at Automattic for fourteen years, quit in protest.
None of these people came back. The governance structure that enabled their departure is unchanged.
What the market share data actually shows
Meanwhile, W3Techs data shows WordPress’s share of all websites fell from 43.2% in December 2025 to 41.9% by late May 2026 — six consecutive months of decline after a period of sustained growth. For context, WordPress still powers roughly 59.4% of all websites running a known CMS, and its nearest rival Shopify, accounts for around 5.2% of all websites. This is not a collapse. It is, however, the first sustained contraction in years, and the direction matters more than any single data point.
The category gaining share is not Wix or Squarespace — both have grown only by fractions of a point. The growing segment is sites with no detectable CMS at all: static generators, frontend frameworks, and AI-built sites that have no need for the infrastructure WordPress provides. The platform is not losing to a competitor. It is watching a portion of its potential audience bypass the CMS category entirely.
TechnologyChecker’s data shows WordPress active domain count peaked at 5.8 million in early 2025 and has since seen its first sustained contraction. The dispute did not cause this — these structural shifts predate it — but it almost certainly accelerated a reconsideration among bloggers and publishers who were already weighing their platform options and had spent 2024 and 2025 watching the ecosystem’s single point of control demonstrate exactly how it could be used.
Where Mullenweg stands
Calls for Mullenweg to resign intensified through late 2024 and early 2025 and have since become background noise rather than an active campaign. In a TechCrunch interview, Mullenweg made clear he has no intention of stepping down, has rejected the idea of handing leadership to a committee, and intends to eventually find a successor who will continue to run Automattic and the WordPress project as he would. He has described his actions throughout the dispute as necessary to protect WordPress’s integrity from commercial actors who benefit from its brand without sustaining its development.
Whether that framing is persuasive depends almost entirely on whether one accepts the premise that Mullenweg’s judgement about what constitutes fair contribution to WordPress is the appropriate standard — a premise the governance structure, as currently constituted, does not require him to justify to anyone.
What the quiet actually means for bloggers and publishers
For the blogging and publishing community, the WordPress dispute raised a question that the subsequent quiet has not answered: what does it mean to build on a platform whose governance depends on the continued goodwill of its founder?
The answer most publishers have arrived at is not to leave WordPress — the platform is too deeply embedded in the independent web’s infrastructure for mass departure to be practical or necessary. It is to hold the dependency with more awareness than before. The dispute made explicit something that was always structurally true: the open-source licence guarantees access to the code. It does not guarantee access to the infrastructure, the community resources, or the ecosystem relationships that make WordPress functional at scale.
That is not a reason to abandon WordPress. It is a reason to understand what you are actually relying on when you rely on it — and to make platform decisions, plugin dependencies, and hosting choices with a clearer picture of where the structural risks actually sit. The argument may have gone quiet. The argument’s subject matter has not moved an inch.
