WordPress.com – Close Read

Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg published a post on September 21 calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. For the uninitiated: WP Engine is an independent company that provides managed hosting for WordPress sites; WordPress.com is owned by Automattic and it leads the development of WordPress.org. WP Engine’s hosting plans start at $30 a month and it enjoys a good public reputation. Mullenweg’s post however zeroed in on WP Engine’s decision to not record the revisions you’ve made to your posts in your site’s database. This is a basic feature in the WordPress content management system, and based on its absence Mullenweg says:

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

The first thing that struck me about this post was its unusual vehemence, which Mullenweg has typically reserved in the past for more ‘extractive’ platforms like Wix whose actions have also been more readily disagreeable. WP Engine has disabled revisions but as Mullenweg himself pointed out it doesn’t hide this fact. It’s available to view on the ‘Platform Settings’ support page. Equally, WP Engine also offers daily backups; you can readily restore one of them and go back to a previous ‘state’.

Second, Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress but this is stretching it. I understand where he’s coming from, of course: WP Engine is advertising WordPress hosting but it doesn’t come with one of the CMS’s basic features, and which WP Engine doesn’t hide but doesn’t really advertise either. But I’d hardly call this “butchering”, much less in public and more than a decade after Automattic invested in WP Engine.

WP Engine’s stated reason is that post revisions increase database costs that the company would like to keep down. Mullenweg interprets this to mean WP Engine wants “to avoid paying to store that data”. Well, yeah, and that’s okay, right? I can’t claim to be aware of all the trade-offs that determined WP Engine’s price points but turning off a feature to keep costs down and reactivating it upon request for individual users seems fair.

In fact, what really gets my goat is Mullenweg’s language, especially around how much WP Engine charges. He writes:

They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

WordPress.com offers a very similar deal to its customers. (WordPress.com is Automattic’s platform for users where they can pay the company to host WordPress sites for them.) In the US, you’ll need to pay at least $25 a month (billed yearly) to be able to upload custom themes and plugins to your site. All the plans below that rate don’t have this option. You also need this plan to access and jump back to different points of your site’s revision history.

Does this mean WordPress.com is “strip-mining” its users to avoid paying for the infrastructure required for those features? Or is it offering fewer features at lower price points because that’s how it can make its business work? I used to be happy that WordPress.com offers a $48 a year plan with fewer features because I didn’t need them — just as well as WP Engine seems to have determined it can charge its customers less by disabling revision history by default.

(I’m not so happy now because WordPress.com moved detailed site analytics — anything more than hits to posts — from the free plan to the Premium plan, which costs $96 a year.)

It also comes across as disingenuous for Mullenweg to say the “cancer” a la WP Engine will spread if left unchecked. He himself writes no WordPress host listed on WordPress.org’s recommended hosts page has disabled revisions history — but is he aware of the public reputation of these hosts, their predatory pricing habits, and their lousy customer service? Please take a look at Kevin Ohashi’s Review Signal website or r/webhosting. Cheap WordPress in return for a crappy hosting experience is the cancer that’s already spread because WordPress didn’t address it.

(It’s the reason I switched to composing my posts offline on MarsEdit, banking on its backup features, and giving up on my expectations of hosts including WordPress.com.)

It’s unfair to accuse companies of “strip-mining” WordPress so hosting providers can avail users a spam-free, crap-free hosting experience that’s also affordable. In fact, given how flimsy many of Mullenweg’s arguments seem to be, they’re probably directed at some other deeper issue — perhaps what he perceives to be WP Engine not contributing enough back to the open source ecosystem?

WordPress.com rolls back its botched ‘experiment’

So, WordPress.com has restored the family of premium plans that it had until April this year, and has done away with the controversial ‘Starter’ and ‘Pro’ plans. The announcement on the WordPress.com blog yesterday has already garnered a high 65 comments, even as the post itself was brief and didn’t contain indication that WordPress.com had screwed up with the new plans. Excerpt:

Our philosophy has always been one of experimenting, learning, and adjusting. As we began to roll out our new pricing plans a couple of months back, we took note of the feedback you shared. What we heard is that some of you missed the more granular flexibility of our previous plans. Additionally, the features you needed and pricing of the new plans didn’t always align for you. This led us to a decision that we believe is the right call.

You might recall that when the new plans were announced in April, my blog post reacting to them became a big deal on the Hacker News forum on that day, and (probably) first drew the attention of Automattic chief Matt Mullenweg and WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin. Since then, WordPress.com has been working to adapt the ‘Starter’ and ‘Pro’ plans for different markets as well as introduced à la carte upgrades to remove ads, add custom CSS and buy more storage space. However, the company continued to receive negative feedback on the changes from the previous plans.

One vein that I really resonated with was a rebuttal of WordPress.com’s claim that the older plans were messy whereas the newer ones are clearer. That’s absolutely not true. But on July 21, they seemed to have finally really listened and changed their minds for the better. (And even then, there are many expressions of confusion among the 65 comments.)

I also want to point out here that WordPress.com is being disingenuous when it claims its new plans were an “experiment”. That’s bullshit. No experiment rolls out to all users on production, is accompanied by formal announcements of change on the official blog and, in the face of criticism, forces the CEO to apologise for a hamfisted rollout process – all without mentioning the word ‘experiment’ even once. WordPress.com is saying now that its development has followed the path of “experimenting, learning, and adjusting” when all it did was force the change, inform users post facto, then solicited feedback on which it acted (before doing that in advance), and finally reverted to a previous state.

Thoughts on the WordPress.com ‘Starter’ plan

WordPress.com announced a new ‘Starter’ plan for its users on May 25 after significant backlash from many members of its community of users that a previous price revision had completely disregarded the interests of bloggers – by which I mean those writing to be read and discussed, and not primarily to make money. My own post on the matter blew up on Hacker News and caught the attention of WordPress.com CEO Dave Martin and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

All of it was warranted: the previous price revision eliminated the ‘Personal’, ‘Premium’, ‘Business’ and ‘E-commerce’ plans in favour a single plan that combined all their features into a $15-a-month bundle that, WordPress.com added, users could only pay for 12 months at a time. WordPress.com’s rationale appeared to be that the ‘Pro’ plan was an almost perfect substitute for the ‘Business’ plan but was $10 cheaper.

But the company management, led by Martin, overlooked a few crucial details in the process: the pricing change was sudden and unannounced, and included an anathematic traffic limit on the free plan (which it removed shortly after); there were no plans between the free and ‘Pro’ plans, forcing even those indifferent towards making money – which was most bloggers including myself – to shell out $180 dollars a year just to add a custom domain; in exchange, these users received a trove of features most of which were useless (e.g. to sell products); and the free plan had its storage decreased by 66%.

I know “free” doesn’t really mean that when coming from the mouth of an internet platform or provider of internet-related services, but WordPress.com had set up exactly this expectation among its users: that they should never have to pay if they’re on the free plan. Look for Matt Mullenweg saying some version of “we want to democratise publishing on the web” (LMGTFY) and you’ll see what I mean. But it needs to acknowledge that what you get for free is less and less usable. I’m not saying don’t shrink the free plan; I’m saying stop pretending that it’s still just as good.

Members of the WordPress.com team should in effect stop claiming that they are rooting to improve access to any kind of publishing because the company’s actions on the pricing issue thus far haven’t been the actions of one with that vision. Instead, it should be more honest and recognise the conflict between increasing access to publishing tools and platforms on the one hand and its need to increase its profits on the other, and take cognisance of its apparent struggle to balance these priorities in its products and communicate the changes to its users.

This brings me back to the new ‘Starter’ plan. It costs $5 a month, also billable only yearly, and has two big changes from its most comparable legacy counterpart, the ‘Personal’ plan: it offers Google Analytics integration and it doesn’t remove ads. The former is confusing because almost none of the people who commented negatively on the WordPress.com post announcing the ‘Pro’ plan and the subsequent forum discussion mentioned wanting access to Google Analytics. The native analytics are pretty good and suffice for bloggers. The latter is more confusing because the ‘Personal’ plan cost $4 a month and removed ads. Why should I pay a dollar more every month and still put up with ads? Unless WordPress.com makes a lot of money through these ads (which I’ve been unable to ascertain with five minutes of googling). The confusion is exacerbated by the fact that most people who wanted a cheaper plan wanted the ability to add a custom domain and to remove ads.

(Interestingly, WordPress.com has many thousands of blogs lying dormant or unused, all of which also carry ads from WordPress’s WordAds network. If WordPress.com deleted these sites, would their hosting costs drop? Of course, doing so will raise questions about the importance of WordPress.com’s commitment to keeping the sites it hosts online forever.)

This said, I’m not very particular on this issue, especially after Dave Martin indicated to WPTavern that they need to make more money on subscriptions: “Finding the right balance between the value that we deliver to our customers and the price that we charge in exchange for that value is something that generally has to be iterated towards. We plan to do just that.” Costs are increasing, I understand.

But I’m still disappointed on three counts:

Importance of monthly pricing – Martin told WPTavern that the company plans to “experiment” with monthly billing, suggesting that it’s no longer on par in terms of importance with the pricing itself. I would have liked to sign up for the ‘Pro’ plan by paying $15 a month to access the ability to add plugins, use premium themes and access the “advanced” SEO and social media tools. This would have been comparable in benefits to managed hosting by Flywheel or LightningBase (no affiliate links), with the bonus that the people who make WordPress also being in charge of my blog’s hosting. But a one-time expense of $180 (or the new India price, Rs 10,800) is not one I can bear, nor, judging by the comments on the ‘Pro’ plan announcement post, most other bloggers who are not in North America or Europe.
India prices – The region-specific price for India for the ‘Starter’ plan is the same as that in NA/EU, and for the ‘Pro’ plan, it hasn’t come down by as much as would be required to make annual payments affordable. I don’t understand how/why the ‘Starter’ plan costs as much in India as it does in NA/EU when the erstwhile ‘Personal’ plan cost 1.5x lower in India – except perhaps if WordPress.com is eyeing big growth in India.
Uncertainty and triumphalism – Martin responded to my post, wrote on the forum and told WPTavern that his team’s communication deserved to be called out. But the ‘Starter’ plan announcement on the WordPress.com blog, which has more than 90 million subscribers, is bereft of any admission of wrong-doing (which Martin spelt out in other fora); together with a triumphalist tone for the announcement itself, issues with the ‘Starter’ plan and no clear roadmap on what comes next (“this was the first of a couple of phases of changes”, Martin told WPTavern), the announcement wasn’t nearly as fulfilling as I expected it to be.

This brings me to the last and also the most grating issue for me: “we are listening”, both Martin and his support-staff colleagues repeatedly said on the forum, but as one comment pointed out, listening is a passive activity. Listening when people are shouting at you out of frustration, disappointment and confusion is the bare minimum and not a virtue. And it’s because I know WordPress.com can do better that I take the trouble to say that it needs to do better.

What we wanted, and want, from WordPress.com was/is a constant and intimate awareness of the (not-insubstantial number of) people who don’t give a damn about using WordPress.com to make money but give a big damn about using it to publish posts for the world to read and talk about. We need to know whether WordPress.com intends to maintain this awareness going ahead, and whether it will listen to its bloggers first – as the least common denominators – the next time a big change is around the corner.

(A similar thing appears to have happened with the proposal of the ‘WordPress performance team’ to make WebP the default image type on hosted sites.)

2.5 weeks since WP.com’s price revision

WordPress.com squandered the trust of bloggers it had accrued for almost a decade (approx. since the advent of their Calypso editor) with the decision to introduce the Pro plan the way it did. There were many proclamations – direct and indirect – in between, chiefly by Automattic CEO Matt Maullenweg, about how this trust was important to the company. Now I’ve got to think that the Pro plan rollout was a true reflection of how WordPress.com perceived the trust, and wonder how WordPress.com will treat hobby bloggers in future.

The most popular request in responses to WordPress.com’s post on its blog and CEO Dave Martin’s post in the forums is that WordPress.com needs to bring back its old plans (which the Pro plan replaced) quite simply because none of the users found them confusing. I tend to agree. Both Martin and Mullenweg have said that WordPress.com created the Pro plan because the old plans were confusing – but considering I’m yet to come across a WordPress.com blogger who feels the same way, I suspect this is something WordPress.com wanted to do to “score the investors a higher multiple”, but which “seems like a move that is incongruent with the mission statement and the strengths of the existing brand” (source). And once they made this decision, they retconned it by claiming that it was what bloggers wanted. I’m glad all the bloggers in the post comments and on the forum spoke up.

Third, there are some WordPress.com staff members who are periodically encouraging WordPress.com users to keep sharing their feedback as responses on the forum. The WordPress.com blog post also said that they’re listening to users’ feedback, implying that users should keep it coming. I found this heartening at first but now, almost three weeks since the abrupt price change, these calls seem disingenuous. How much feedback does WordPress.com really need to understand the extent to which it screwed up? If it’s a lot, then it would mean the company screwed up big time. (I think this might be a valid concern based on this line in Martin’s forum post {emphasis added}: “We plan to test adding monthly pricing back in, but we don’t have a specific date for this just yet.”) Surely it’s the responsibility of the top management to obviate such a tremendous need for feedback by anticipating what it is that its users want. This also makes me doubt the short surveys that used to appear on the WordPress.com dashboard and what the people running it took away from the responses.

It’s annoying that WordPress.com staff constantly ask for feedback to be given right now, instead of in the many, many years in which bloggers were happily publishing on the platform. This is exacerbated by the fact that none of the staff members are able to provide a deadline for changes to the Pro plan, which I can only take to mean that the company didn’t anticipate any of these changes.