Automattic Launches ‘WP Engine Tracker’ to Monitor Sites Leaving WP Engine, Sparking Controversy

The ongoing WordPress-WP Engine dispute has escalated with Automattic launching a new website – WP Engine Tracker, to track the number of websites leaving WP Engine hosting.

“An Automattic thingamajig,” this website tracks WP Engine hosting migrations from September 21, 2024, and also provides a downloadable CSV list of websites currently hosted on WP Engine, dubbed “sites ready for a new home.”

Other details on this single-page website include links to promotions offered by other hosting providers for migrating from WP Engine and the number of websites each hosting provider gained via migration. Pressable is the top gainer, followed by Bluehost and SiteGround.

Ironically, the site’s URL is wordpressenginetracker.com as the whole WordPress-WP Engine dispute started with Matt accusing the hosting company of misusing the WordPress trademark. Also Automattic had opposed WP Engine’s lawsuit claiming their allegations regarding lost customers should be viewed with skepticism.

Search Engine Journal reported that the website was blocked by Cloudflare for “suspected phishing,” but it is now up. It also reported about someone registering the domain name WPEngineTracker.com.

Eric Karkovack of The WP Minute tweeted, “Sort of like Ford tracking everyone who switched from Chevy. Doesn’t matter to me, I’m a Honda guy.” WordPress developer Brian Coords shared this: “This has nice design/dev, but it’s sad to see talent and resources poured into increased negativity in the community, criticism without substance, tearing down instead of building up. Just sad that’s what WordPress is becoming a symbol for.”

Security researcher Daniel Ruf dubbed it “amateurish”. He continued, “I’m not sure what the goal of this website is and what Matt tries to achieve. But the community is getting increasingly annoyed of such unprofessional behavior of Matt and in the security community some also think about dropping 0days for WordPress and related plugins/themes due to this whole situation. The feedback under the tweet from the official WordPress account and in the reddit community shows, what most of us think. The whole situation hurts everyone more than needed.”

Another person commented, “So Automattic has put together a list for spammers and hackers to use to target a bunch of sites who are no longer doing business with Matt Mullenweg’s nemesis. That’s… shortsighted. This will surely result in legal action from one or more of these sites?”

As of November 12, 18,280 websites have left WP Engine according to this website.

Update: An Automattic spokesperson shared this with us, ““The beauty of open source software is that everyone is able to access data on a granular level, because it’s all publicly available information. That public data has shown that ever since WP Engine filed its lawsuit – making it clear that they do not have an official association with WordPress and attracting greater attention to the company’s poor service, modifications to the WordPress core software, increasing and convoluted pricing structure, and repeated down times – their customers have left their platform for other hosting providers. WP Engine can and always has been able to access the WordPress software and plugins available on WordPress.org, as can anyone.”

Automattic also tweeted this, “We got the domains list from several third-party sources, not from .org. It’s pretty easy for anyone to do with services like W3techs, Builtwith, etc, you could recreate the same with a few hours of work and a few hundred dollars. These are all public sites in DNS.”