The WordPress Acquisition Feeding Frenzy
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We came from a few people writing blogs to large agencies creating websites for multi-national businesses.
There’s been a lot of talk about the number of WordPress projects that are being purchased by larger companies. These larger companies are creating toolboxes of plugins, themes, and services that they can use to create an attractive all-in-one offering.
Some see this as an inevitable maturation of the WP ecosystem, while other see this as a dirty commodification of a beautiful community that’s about helping others over profit.
No matter what camp you’re in, when a community gets to a sufficient size, business isn’t going to leave money sitting on the table.
The Change
There is a lot of very professional products and services that are available to the WordPress community that can make it easy for everyone to develop faster and better. In a small community of developers, working in their spare time in between creating websites for local businesses, this wide range of available products just isn’t possible.
- If you want to be able to create complicated pages faster and better, increasing your value and bottom line, you have a plethora of page builders that can make short work of these complicated tasks.
- If you want good solid hosting for your websites that’s going to be fast, reliable, and affordable, you have enough options no matter what type of website it is that you need hosted.
- If you want to jump into creating websites or just increase your own skill level, there’s so many resources for you, many of them free.
Some may feel that the commoditization and consolidation of WordPress products may take something away from the community. I’m not sure myself how that’s going to happen, but we’re not a bunch of innocent children putting on a show in grampy’s barn anymore
Stay Gold Ponyboy
Is it even possible to build a website without getting involved in the WP “big business” rigmarole?
Yes.
You can still download WordPress for free, use one of the many free themes, then build your site using the built-in block editor. You can host your website on your own computer running free Linux. Not only is that possible, but you could totally create a fantastic website using zero dollars.
There’s nothing stating that you need to jump onto the corporate bandwagon if you don’t want to.
Note: while I didn’t reference it directly, if you’re interested in this type of thing, you should head over to poststatus.com and view their list of WordPress acquisitions. It’s an interesting read.