Key Takeaways
Jon Penland has been named the new chief executive officer at managed WordPress provider, Kinsta.
Although fresh to the CEO role, Penland is not a new face at Kinsta. Penland, who started out as a support engineer nine years ago, has also worked in sales, operations, customer success, and most recently as COO.
He has also sat on the board of directors for the past six years.
“I believe we are the best in the world at what we do. But we can be even better,” Penland told HostingAdvice. “We see tremendous opportunity to help customers adapt to massive shifts in how the world discovers, consumes, and drives web traffic. The sky is the limit.”
Outgoing CEO Mark Gavalda, who will remain as chairman, added that this appointment may have been a long time coming.
“Jon is the perfect person to lead Kinsta in its new stage of growth,” Gavalda said. “He knows the company as well as anyone — having worked across the organization to build it to what it is today.”
New CEO, New Priorities
One doesn’t become CEO unless they believe in the mission — and Penland, who’s been with Kinsta for nearly a decade, says the company’s success comes down to its people.
“Kinsta’s culture is special, and that won’t change,” he said. “My plan as CEO is to keep building on what’s worked for the past nine years — fostering a positive, high-performance culture where people are trusted to own their work, where we’re transparent about goals, and where we respect each other while working hard, having fun, and celebrating wins together.”
In the exclusive interview, Penland identified three priorities he plans to tackle as he takes on the CEO role:
- Pricing and packaging: Updating plans that better align with how customer needs are evolving in an AI-driven market
- AI and human support: Using AI to improve workflows internally, “while still giving customers the human touch they expect from Kinsta”
- Onboarding: Making sure the onboarding experience is as seamless as possible for new users
In addition to Penland’s appointment, Kinsta has hired Matt Reid as Chief Marketing Officer.
Reid, who most recently served as SVP at BigCommerce, will focus on scaling Kinsta’s go-to-market strategy. Reid brings experience in marketing from working with businesses of all sizes, including SMBs, agencies, and enterprises, according to the press release.
“I’m thrilled to be joining Kinsta at this exciting stage of expansion,” Reid said in the press release. “The company’s impressive track record of revenue growth and profitability, world-class service and product innovation is a recipe for success.”
A Pivotal Time for WordPress
It’s no accident that these changes have come now: Over the past few years, WordPress has been researching how to keep up with new market demands without losing its core principles that make it, well, WordPress.
At WordCamp U.S. 2025 in Portland, many of the event’s keynotes and workshops pointed to AI-driven search and site discovery as the biggest changes ahead, while cautioning that performance, usability, and open source values must remain central to WordPress’s foundation.
“We believe WordPress has a long and promising future, and our core focus is staying the best managed hosting provider for WordPress websites,” Penland said. “As we do that, we want to give customers more visibility into and control over how bots interact with their websites, especially as AI-driven traffic grows.”
Penland’s focus on redefining pricing and simplifying onboarding reflects a challenge facing all WordPress hosts: how to, meet market demands without rewriting what makes them work? By bringing in Reid from BigCommerce, Kinsta also signals an intent to strengthen ties with agencies and enterprises.
It could prove a smart move — and next year’s numbers will show how well it pays off.
