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Sarah Gooding

iThemes Rebrands to SolidWP

iThemes, one of the oldest brands in WordPress that originally launched around theme products nearly 15 years ago, is rebranding to SolidWP. Over the years, the company’s products became increasingly centered on plugins, yet the old brand had so much name recognition that its leadership was not quick to change it.

“iThemes is known today for security, backups, and site maintenance – none of which are well-represented in the name ‘iThemes,’” StellarWP Senior Director of Ops and Marketing Matt Cromwell said. “Additionally, the brand evokes the early 2000’s Apple era of technology, and we want to look toward the future.”

This week the company kicked off a “rebrand in public” approach to updating its identity to be more aligned with promoting iThemes’ key offerings – its security, backup, syncing, and educational products. They will all be rebranded to the following:

  • Solid Security
  • Solid Backups
  • Solid Central
  • Solid Academy

“This shift in branding signifies our renewed focus on providing a solid foundation for every WordPress website,” Cromwell said. “Our whole team, as well as our products, will pivot to focus on security, backups, site maintenance, and training as we enhance and improve our solutions for all of our users.”

The rebranding is a massive undertaking, as the company’s products have millions of users and years worth of articles, webinars, eBooks, and tutorials. SolidWP will present reworked pricing and retire some legacy products in the process.

“Currently on ithemes.com you’ll find a lot of products that are either part of a bundle, or sold on other websites in a variety of ways,” Cromwell said in the FAQ section of the announcement. “Some products will continue to thrive on their own, and others will be retired. We plan on reviewing publicly the complete inventory of our current products and bundles and working with the community to shape what the future plan is for each.”

The company is not planning to increase prices on its products at this time but Cromwell said they reserve the right to adjust pricing as needed. iThemes will also be consulting its community regarding products that are slated to be retired.

“We will continue to support any and all who land in our support queue with our best efforts and service,” Cromwell said. “The official end-of-life for the products being sunset will be discussed with the community and decided on before the full launch of our new brand.”

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10 responses to “iThemes Rebrands to SolidWP”

  1. Anything involving Matt Cromwell, I’m here for it.
    He must be one of the kindest, most generous people in the WP ecosystem.
    Yes, I’m biased… but I got to knownhom BECAUSE he was so great.

    Matt did not pay me to write this.

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    • Hi Marcus,

      RCP is a strong product. But it didn’t fit so well in the iThemes suite of products. It will continue to be a strong offering though, but it’s just shifting to be lead more directly by the Events Calendar team (TEC), where memberships and content management is more of a significant part of their functionality.

      The TEC has a lot in store for memberships, so keep an eye on them as well!

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  3. iThemes isn’t known for security, they are known for having a popular security plugin. Those are not the same.

    Their security plugin doesn’t stop attacks, despite marketing it that way. And it was less than a year ago that the really poor security of another of their plugins got websites hacked, https://wptavern.com/ithemes-patches-vulnerability-in-backupbuddy-wordfence-tracks-5-million-exploit-attempts. Their security plugin didn’t protect against that since it doesn’t stop attacks, but six other plugins did, including one with only a couple hundred installs versus iThemes Security’s 1+ million installs.

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  4. Thanks for chiming in. I know you pride yourself on your knowledge and experience with security, and it’s appreciated.

    That incident in particular was due to a lack of focus on product development for Backup Buddy, and one of the several important reasons why this rebrand is happening. We are sunsetting several of the tertiary products in order to focus more exclusively on Security, Backups, and Maintenance — our core offerings. Because we do know how important and valuable site security is.

    Regarding protecting sites against such vulnerabilities — that was true at that time, iThemes Security did not provide that specific type of protection. Since then, we’ve partnered with Patchstack and are working on providing “virtual patching” through their excellent services. Our partnership with Patchstack is going to be more and more important over the next years.

    So again, thank you for highlighting those issues, they are specifically things that we are focusing on resolving are part of our revamp of these products.

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  5. Nice new look and a much better name. These kinds of transitions can be scary, but at least it seems more of a rebranding than a buyout / sellout scenario.

    However, for myself and some of my colleagues who are long-time iTsec Pro users with Lifetime licenses and using it on the hundreds of sites we manage, there are some concerns.

    For examples:

    Those of us that manage a large number of WP client site’s security with iTsec Pro and basically keep the client out of the picture by sequestering access to only us and not the client – how will this affect us? Will our clients see an alarming change? Will we suddenly have to make major changes to the large number of sites under our license?

    Those of us that use a separate product for multiple site update management, such as MainWP Pro, running alongside iTsec Pro, does this mean the potential for the two separate plugins to “argue” with each other and generate code conflicts? Will it generate new upsell popups and notices in the WP Admin that will be visible to our clients?

    And one really big concern – “The company is not planning to increase prices on its products at this time but Cromwell said they reserve the right to adjust pricing as needed” – what exactly does this mean for Lifetime Unlimited iThemes Security Pro license holders who have already paid for the product for life? Is this a potential to edge us out of our lifetime unlimited license?

    I’d love to be able to join the live Webinar on April 11th to ask such questions, but like many of my colleagues I will be working the enormous amount of support tickets and inquiries that occur for us right on the heels of every holiday, and of course the Webinar for this is just 48~ hours after Easter Sunday.

    Looking forward to seeing what updates appear here and on the iThemes / SolidWP website as well. I’m really hoping other iTsec Pro license holders bring questions forth such as above.

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    • Hi David, these are great questions. I’ll reply as actionably as I can now, but let’s consider this an on-going conversation. There’s lots of ways to reach me and the rest of the SolidWP team.

      Will our clients see an alarming change?
      No, as you mentioned, particularly for iThemes Security Pro, the updates will be mostly cosmetic. You can of course leverage our User Groups features to customize what your clients see on the Dashboard, and we always suggest testing updates like this in a local or staging environment first.
      Regarding Admin notices
      We do not plan or intend to be intrusive in the admin. There will be intuitive and non-intrusive ctas particularly in the free product, but we avoid intrusive popups in our products.
      Regarding lifetime licenses
      We plan to continue to support all our iThemes customers and respect the licensing that they’ve already had to date.
      RE the town hall
      Sorry you can’t make it to this one, we will be offering more as we get closer to the full website and product launch. We want customers like you to be as informed and equipped as possible ahead of the launch.

      Thanks David!

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