GoDaddy Acquires WP Curve, Aims to Become a One-Stop Shop for WordPress Professionals

WP Curve, a WordPress services business that focuses on completing small jobs for customers, announced this week that GoDaddy has acquired the company. Founders Dan Norris and Alex McClafferty bootstrapped WP Curve in 2013 and have processed 105,000+ jobs through its pipeline.

“WP Curve complements GoDaddy’s expanding WordPress offering including Managed WordPress and the recent ManageWP addition,” the company said in the announcement.

Existing customers will be on-boarded to GoDaddy accounts with their current subscriptions. After the transition, the newly acquired WP Curve team will assist in scaling the services to support GoDaddy’s WordPress customers. Norris plans to exit the company and McClafferty will lead the team at GoDaddy.

GoDaddy’s Plans for WP Curve

Gabe Mays, head of WordPress Products at GoDaddy, said the WP Curve acquisition is an important part of GoDaddy’s goal to become “a one-stop shop for WordPress professionals.” Roughly one third of all GoDaddy sites are running on WordPress, and half of all new sites are using the software. This is one of the reasons GoDaddy plans to invest in improvements to WordPress’ core customizer component.

“WP Curve will help us in two ways,” Mays said. “First we’re adding WP Curve’s WordPress experts to the company and we’ll leverage their expertise to improve the training and tools for the hundreds of GoDaddy Customer Care representatives that support our customers globally.

“Second, we’ll directly offer WP Curve’s services to our customers,” Mays said. “This combination will be amazing for our customers and create a compelling one-stop shop for WordPress professionals and their clients.”

Mays said WP Curve’s services “will continue to be offered as standalone services” but GoDaddy may consider adding them to its hosting plans sometime in the future.

“Down the road it’s possible we’ll see aspects integrated into our Hosting plans to improve the customer experience, especially for nascent WordPress users,” Mays said.

Mays would not comment on whether GoDaddy has more acquisitions in the pipeline, but the company is likely to require additional expertise if it aims to become a one-stop shop for WordPress professionals. GoDaddy is part of a more recent trend of hosting companies acquiring WordPress products and services, including its ManageWP acquisition and Flywheel’s purchase of Pressmatic. The trend has sparked some recent discussion on Twitter regarding “hosting companies eating WordPress:”

If software is eating the world, then hosting companies are eating WordPress.

— Cory Miller (@corymiller303) December 5, 2016

Mays sees this notion as a positive development and an opportunity for hosts to become more deeply invested in WordPress core and the surrounding ecosystem.

“We see it as win-win for hosts and the WordPress community, more investment in WordPress is better for everyone,” Mays said. “For example, this year we hired our first core contributor, contributed full translations to some of the most popular themes and plugins, built a number of themes and plugins and contributed them to the WordPress repo and more. As a WordPress community we need all the investment we can get to reach our 50% goal and beyond.”

Just days after the WP Curve acquisition, GoDaddy announced its acquisition of Host Europe Group (HEG) for $1.8 billion. HEG is Europe’s largest privately-owned web services provider in Europe and the purchase delivers 1.7 million new customers to GoDaddy, expanding the company’s international reach.