Key Takeaways
Last week, WP Engine announced it acquired Big Bite, a newsroom-focused WordPress agency, and plans to shut down the agency side entirely.
According to the press release, the agency side of Big Bite will “wind down,” with its engineering team moving into WPE’s product organization. The goal will continue to be to design enterprise-level tools for agencies that want to “elevate publishing capabilities.”
WordPress has always been a hot spot for large publishing teams, though it usually requires heavy customization and in-house tooling, but that’s exactly where Big Bite shines.
Best known for building editorial platforms for major media brands like The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post, Big Bite has focused on highly customized WordPress setups, including bespoke editorial dashboards, multistep approval and scheduling workflows, access controls, preview environments, and of course, ad placements.
It’s there where WordPress isn’t just a CMS but quite literally the operational backbone of everything for a publication. WordPress already has a slight learning curve, but when entire teams are involved, it gets even more complicated.
The option to build a publication has always been possible, but the functionality and predictability has long been handled via custom admin interfaces, internal tooling, plugins, and a lot of institutional knowledge from experienced devs.
So WPE gobbling up Big Bite (pun intended) only suggests that the WordPress-managed host wants more of the responsibility on the platform side. At its current scale, with more than 1.5 million sites and about 8% of daily global WP traffic, WPE is one of the few hosts that’s actually positioned to productize tooling that’s otherwise custom-built.
It’s also pretty consistent with where the company’s been heading for a while now. Over the past few years, WPE has gone beyond traditional managed WordPress hosting and added headless setups, deeper developer workflows, and enterprise-level offerings.
A few other platforms have been nudging in that direction, too. Pantheon, for example, has long positioned itself as a WebOps-focused platform, with multidev environments and governance features aimed at larger teams.
For now, it’s still a niche approach. Most WordPress hosts are quite reasonably focused on performance, pricing, and simple onboarding, which means it’s great for smaller sites. But what happens when a site gets big, and there are multiple teams that need different features?
It’s the question WPE has been asking and the answer Big Bite has. Of course, this acquisition isn’t changing the WordPress hosting market overnight. But it does show us the kind of customers WPE is hoping to prioritize.
