UpdraftPlus, a popular WordPress backup plugin actively installed on more than 1 million sites has acquired the Easy Updates Manager plugin for an undisclosed amount.
Easy Updates Manager disables core, theme, and plugin updates in WordPress and provides granular control over them. It was created in 2015, is actively installed on more than 100K sites, and is maintained by Matthew Sparrow, Ronald Huereca, Roary Tubbs, and BigWing Interactive.
Burnout was a contributing factor for selling the plugin. “Matthew Sparrow and I were both burnt out on the project, so the offer to sell was a no-brainer,” Huereca said. “It’s bittersweet letting our baby go, but it’s in good hands.”
Without proper vetting, selling established plugins to individuals or companies can be harmful to sites and tarnish its reputation. Because UpdraftPlus is a well established company, Huereca didn’t have to do a lot of research.
“We were looking for more backend plugins that we understand and it’s a great plugin, highly rated and growing,” A company representative said. “Updates and backups go hand-in-hand as people should really backup before updating.”
UpdraftPlus will focus its marketing efforts towards UpdraftCentral later this year. UpdraftCentral provides the ability for users to update, backup, and manage their sites from one dashboard. Easy Updates Manager and UpdraftCentral are complimentary products.
Users can expect to see more updates later this year and continued refinement of the user interface.
That is very cool to hear! It is nice to think that I might have taken a small part in it as I helped Ron with the user interface as well as the
logic making 7.0 much smoother then earlier versions. (I am hoping down the line that WP Core can integrate something similar in regards to auto updating.)
I just want to say that I was inspired by the toggles from Caldera Forms and made some test forms to show Ron how it could work in Easy Updates Manager. The toggles where then integrated into the plugin.