WooCommerce May Be Heading to Private Equity. Hosts Have a Lot to Watch

Ask any managed WordPress host what the common thread is among their most profitable customers and the answer will probably be: “Well, they sell something.” Which is why more than a few hosting execs are probably refreshing their feeds over a rumor doing the rounds about a plugin.

On Sept. 9, Online Store News reported preliminary discussions between at least two private equity firms and Automattic about a possible partial or full carve-out of WooCommerce. The anonymous sources — agency principals and a former product lead at Automattic — stress the discussions are exploratory. They’re the sort of thing where a person might ask, “What would this even look like?”

Automattic itself hasn’t confirmed anything. But the idea of a spinout of WooCommerce has been circulating in the trade press since early August. And now for the first time someone has said the PE meetings are actually happening rather than simply possible.

On the merchant side, the store will keep working, the plugin is GPL — so don’t worry. More interesting, though, is the angle for hosts. WooCommerce isn’t a plugin anymore, it’s a paid marketplace for extensions, payments, and tiered managed hosting sold via WooCommerce.com on top of a free download.

Follow the Money, and It Runs Through Hosting

According to Online Store News, in 2025 WooPayments alone handled over $12 billion in GMV and the extension marketplace has margins well above the average across the whole Automattic business. That’s what a financial buyer will pay for. No one pays for a GitHub repo.

One agency principal told Ecommerce Times in August: “Automattic has always treated Woo like a loss leader for the WordPress ecosystem. If someone writes a real check and says, ‘let’s actually monetize this thing,’ that changes the calculus for every plugin developer and hosting partner in the space.”

Notice the phrase “hosting partner.” Managed WooCommerce is a named SKU at many providers, including Nexcess and SiteGround, which Ecommerce Times highlighted. The key selling point of this SKU is the host does the hard work for a store that could otherwise be installed for free.

The Names Being Floated Are Hosting Names

In its Sept. 1 report, Online Store News’ sources said one of the firms they believe has had preliminary discussions with advisors of Automattic is Vista Equity Partners. But they also say in the same report Newfold Digital (owner of Bluehost and Web.com) has “been mentioned internally as a strategic fit” because it already has so much footprint in WordPress hosting.

What would a Newfold-owned WooCommerce look like for a provider like SiteGround, Hostinger, Kinsta, or anyone else selling against Bluehost on managed WooCommerce? The eCommerce product would effectively belong to a competitor. That’s exactly what Online Store News picks up: a buyer in the hosting space “could create perceived conflicts for merchants using competing WordPress hosts.”

And then there’s the WP Engine part. In the same report, at least two sources say they believe has had exploratory discussions about a “commercial partnership” with WooCommerce. One owner of an agency told the outlet that combining WP Engine’s infrastructure with a standalone WooCommerce “actually makes a lot of sense if you squint at it.”

A person would need to squint quite hard, though.

Online Store News describes the WP Engine lawsuit as settled in early 2026. It isn’t, though. On its own litigation page, WP Engine says it filed a motion for sanctions on July 28, and that the case has not settled. WooCommerce, Inc. is one of the counterclaimants. Whatever dinner the sources describe, it’s still going on in federal court between the two companies.

And no one in the WordPress world will miss this irony. Two years ago this month, Mullenweg took issue with WP Engine precisely because of its private equity owner. He argued Silver Lake was hollowing out the open source project. If at some point WooCommerce ends up in a private equity portfolio, that speech will be quoted back at him a lot.

The Install Base Isn’t Waiting for a Deal

As of Sept. 4, StoreLeads’ crawl of live storefronts shows 4,047,205 active WooCommerce stores, down from 4,776,386 in Q2 2024 — a decline of around 15% over two years. As of Q2 2026, the total was down 8% year over year.

Looking at churn over the last 90 days, 8,538 stores moved from WooCommerce to Shopify compared with 5,427 in the other direction. And adding up all platforms together, WooCommerce lost 21,797 merchants and picked up 16,310. A net outflow of around 5,500 stores in a quarter before any single piece of PE news reached a merchant’s inbox.

In its Sept. 1 sourcing, Online Store News says much of this churn is coming from the $2 million to $20 million revenue tier, traditionally WooCommerce’s sweet spot. For a host, these are the ones on dedicated plans with big object caches and the 3 a.m. support tickets. And they’re exactly the kind of account Shopify Plus is looking to steal.

What Doesn’t Change, and What Might

To be fair, the open source core is safe. WooCommerce is under the GPL, so with any sale the buyer gets the code and the license. And the stores keep working first thing after any announcement.

But it’s worth remembering the Magento story, as it’s probably the closest thing the industry has seen at this kind of scale where the underlying platform ended up in a private equity portfolio. In 2015, eBay sold Magento to Permira. Three years later, Permira sold it on to Adobe. Over the following years, the open source version dropped down the priority list and the community forked it. Hosts with an existing Magento practice spent much of the decade moving clients away from it.

All along the code remained free. But not the business.

More importantly for hosts, a deal for WooCommerce would hit the commercial layer: licensing terms for extensions, the economics of using WooPayments as a processor, and whether the hosting tier on WooCommerce.com moves from a sideshow to a priority. All three sit directly between a host and its eCommerce customers. All three would be levers for a PE owner looking to maximize value.

Speaking to Online Store News, an Automattic spokesperson said the company “does not comment on internal strategy discussions” and called WooCommerce “a cornerstone of Automattic’s mission to democratize publishing and commerce.” Mullenweg didn’t respond to either outlet.

For hosts, though? Well, the signal will more likely come in the form of an invite to a partner summit late in Q4 with a suspiciously high number of executives on the agenda.