2025 was a year defined by intelligent transformation and a continued commitment to delivering on our promises to the world’s most ambitious WordPressⓇ[1] builders. 

WP Engine made strategic changes across our platform and business, focusing heavily on product improvements intended to help our customers create smarter, faster, and more efficient digital experiences.

As the web evolves, our team won’t be satisfied with keeping pace; we aim to set the pace. From launching a comprehensive AI toolkit to strategically enhancing our products and agency support, every innovation was designed to simplify complexity, boost performance, and empower our customers to build, manage, and scale incredible digital projects with confidence.

As we look forward to the opportunities of 2026, let’s take a moment to review all that occurred in 2025.

Events, partnerships, and major milestones

2025 brought community engagement and historic milestones at WP Engine. We created educational events for our customers and the broader community, deepened our ecosystem ties through key partnerships and sponsorships, and celebrated a major company anniversary.

WP Engine educational events

WP Engine’s sixth annual DE{CODE} conference was the most successful ever, with 2,538 attendees representing 114 countries. This global virtual conference, alongside numerous webinars and in-person roundtables held throughout the year, kept thousands of customers and partners connected. Experts shared insights on topics ranging from AI ethics to cutting-edge product innovations to development best practices.

We also celebrated the outstanding work of our partners through the second-annual Agency Partner Awards, receiving 160 submissions from over 90 agencies globally. Awards highlighted the exceptional results agencies drove for their clients and the immense talent found within our Agency Partner Program, which is the largest agency ecosystem in the WordPress community.

Building community through partnerships and sponsorships

Our partnership with the Webby Awards continued for a sixth year through the Crafted With Code showcase, which celebrates exceptional sites built with WordPress software. This year, 30% of all Webby-recognized sites in the Websites & Mobile Sites category were built on WordPress, and 43% of those experiences were powered by WP Engine. 

Additionally, we maintained community connections by sponsoring key industry events, including CloudFest, PressConf, Color Code, and LoopConf.

Celebrating 15 years

2025 also marked a significant company milestone: WP Engine celebrated its 15th Anniversary. It’s a major step in our journey, as we’ve grown from a local Austin startup into a global leader trusted by more than 1.5 million customers across 150 countries. 

This achievement reflects a decade and a half of sustained investment in the open web and an unwavering commitment to our core values, which were reaffirmed by over 1,000 employees.

Driving innovation for the agentic web

WP Engine is proud to lead the charge as we all move toward a more intelligent web, bringing the power of AI directly into the hands of builders. 2025 brought AI-enabled tooling designed to enhance development, site speed, and content delivery to our platform.

Smart Search AI now includes AI-Powered Recommendations

In 2025, WP Engine improved our search offering by adding multi-modal indexing and AI-powered recommendations to Smart Search AI. A core component of the WP Engine AI Toolkit, this tool goes beyond traditional keyword matching, using natural language, typo-tolerant, semantic search to better understand user intent and serve the most relevant results, regardless of content type.

Smart Search AI with AI-Powered Recommendations delivers fast, accurate results that boost engagement and conversions. Offloading search queries to a dedicated server ensures sites maintain speed and scalability under high traffic.

The introduction of AI-Powered Recommendations further enhances the user experience by applying historical and session data to serve personalized content suggestions. For example, eCommerce stores can seamlessly serve up similar products, and media sites can boost engagement by recommending additional relevant content. 

Through a simple, three-step setup in the User Portal, these enhancements make advanced, AI-powered personalization accessible to all users without the need for deep technical knowledge.

Adding Managed Vector Database to the AI Toolkit

WP Engine also introduced the Managed Vector Database as the other key component of our AI Toolkit. 

A vector database is a specialized system that uses mathematical models to represent, store, and build contextual relationships between different types of site content. WP Engine’s managed service helps automate the process, ensuring the data is always fresh and ready for AI consumption without requiring manual re-indexing.

Our solution offloads processing onto specialized servers, improving site outcomes while delivering:

  • Automatic extraction, cleaning, and vectorization of data across your site.
  • Real-time, continuous, multi-modal indexing as site content changes.
  • A RAG chatbot blueprint.
  • Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search for highly relevant data retrieval.
  • An integration with OpenAI’s ChatKit for no-code or low-code AI chats on your site.
  • Flat-rate pricing added directly to your hosting plan for predictable costs.

By bundling the Managed Vector Database with Smart Search AI and AI-Powered Recommendations into a comprehensive AI Toolkit, WP Engine provided builders with a complete AI stack, lowering the barrier to entry for AI consumption and discoverability.

Introducing the Smart Search AI MCP server

WP Engine is investing in the architecture needed for the next generation of web experiences with the launch of the Smart Search AI Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which is currently available in beta. 

This advanced layer solves the “stale data” problem, acting as an intelligent bridge that allows external AI applications to query your content directly. Instead of surfacing old content from across the web, AI agents can discover your most up-to-date content via MCP, a universal language used by AI agents to understand your site’s current content.

This infrastructure is designed specifically for technical teams and agencies building mission-critical AI applications, as the server will provide the essential capacity, speed, and efficiency needed for real-time data retrieval and accurate AI-generated responses. 

By adopting the Model Context Protocol, WP Engine is investing in a new architectural standard for our customers, so they can quickly fine-tune sites for LLM consumption. 

Improving performance and reliability

Performance and security remain cornerstones of the WP Engine platform. In 2025, we rolled out more than 100 individual platform and product updates and introduced new features to increase site speed and set new standards for reliability and resilience.

Revamping seller experiences with eCommerce Performance Pack

WP Engine introduced the eCommerce Performance Pack this year, transforming our eCommerce offering into a flexible, site-level add-on available for any plan. 

The feature-rich toolkit is a complete solution for WooCommerceⓇ[1] sites, integrating tools like Dynamic Plugin Loading, Page Speed Boost, Site Monitoring, and Smart Search AI. 

Using this add-on, sellers on WP Engine see an average 128% increase in mobile page speeds, which is critical in creating exceptional experiences for the growing majority of mobile shoppers. eCommerce Performance Pack is also helping sellers reduce page size by more than 30% on average and cache up to 90% more pages for faster WooCommerce performance.

The goal is to maximize performance for our customers by accelerating load times, reducing bloat, and stabilizing carts, so they can deliver faster, more reliable shopping and checkout experiences to drive more conversions.

Ensuring reliable uptime with WP Engine Failover

WP Engine Failover, a new, enterprise-grade disaster recovery solution available for premium Core and Enterprise plans running on Azure infrastructure, provides near-100% uptime and business continuity. 

Launched this year, the solution safeguards mission-critical sites against failures across their primary data centers by synchronously replicating all website data to redundant disks in a secondary data center in the same region.

The solution offers a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero (meaning no data is lost during an outage) and an estimated Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of under seven minutes. 

If a site’s primary data center goes offline, traffic automatically reroutes to the secondary location, which loads the site from the continuously synced data. This hands-free, automated process ensures seamless operation and drastically reduces the financial and reputational damage associated with unexpected downtime.

Advancing bot mitigation efforts

WP Engine teams put their focus on responding to the surge in AI bot traffic, which now accounts for over half of all web activity, with sophisticated security and management measures. 

We partnered with Cloudflare to implement their proven bot management functionality, which we now use across our managed hosting platform to analyze traffic patterns. A combination of AI-powered categorization and our unique knowledge of what constitutes legitimate, healthy traffic informs bot mitigation efforts that can block, challenge, or rate limit traffic at the WAF layer. 

These efforts have mitigated 75 billion bot requests across our platform this year. We also updated our billing model to exclude suspected bots from billable metrics, furthering our promise to help our customers manage the rise in bot traffic.

Enhancing developer and agency workflows

Empowering our Agency Partners and streamlining the developer experience were key strategic initiatives. We delivered plan changes, better documentation, and critical updates to essential tools and features that will empower builders who rely on our products.

ACF new releases 

Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) version 6.6 released, bringing a powerful new evolution to custom block development. The headlining feature, ACF Blocks V3, drastically improves the content editing experience: block fields now open in a spacious sidebar panel while the block preview remains visible in the editor. This change allows content creators to see their modifications in context, which helps when managing complex fields like Repeaters.

Beyond Blocks V3, ACF 6.6 includes important quality-of-life updates that streamline workflows for agencies and content authors. New features allow developers to set user-friendly “display titles” for field groups, making the backend clearer for clients. They also provide the ability to define custom color palettes for the Color Picker field, ensuring brand-approved colors are used consistently across the site.

Plans built for agency growth

WP Engine introduced a new structure for its Agency Plans to support the evolving needs of agencies of all sizes.

The plan structure, including Essential, Plus, and Pro tiers, scales capabilities alongside your business growth, offering predictable per-site pricing and reducing à la carte feature management. 

The plans integrate essential features and add-ons across every client account, streamlining workflows, enabling maintenance automation, and providing access to 24/7 expert support to help agencies confidently increase profitability and delight their clients.

Expanded API endpoints and documentation site relaunch 

WP Engine has simplified and expanded its API documentation with a new site and a new name! Renaming the docs site from the WP Engine Customer API to the WP Engine Platform API provides clarity into the purpose of the documentation, and the refreshed site is cleaner and more user-friendly for the developers using it. 

To better support customers who manage sites at scale and improve their development workflows, our teams added or enhanced 18 individual endpoints this year, including purge cache, force HTTPS, and retrieve account or installation usage information, among others. By introducing a new playground, users can experience the power of the API right in their browser. 

These changes have driven a 15.5% increase in weekly customer API users, equipping developers and technical teams with tools, flexibility, and control they need to build with confidence.

Enhanced User Portal insights

WP Engine has invested heavily in our User Portal’s performance insights modules this year, giving customers greater visibility into site- and account-level performance metrics. New features provide actionable, data-driven analysis, so users can quickly pinpoint issues, identify optimization opportunities, and refine and monitor their ongoing performance efforts.

Some of the new features and insights include: 

  • Google Lighthouse Scores at the site and account level. This includes homepage analysis data and the compilation of that data across all install homepages associated with an account.
  • WP Engine Performance Scores at the site and account level. This proprietary metric compares a site’s performance to other WP Engine-hosted sites.
  • Account-level details on page traffic, slow pages, and errors and redirects.
  • Site-level details on page requests, cache hit ratio, page latency, errors and redirects, slow pages, slow queries, storage usage, bandwidth usage, visits, and more. Metrics display in filterable tables, comparison graphs, and location-based views, giving users the flexibility to digest their data visually or in long-form logs. 
  • Customizable, schedulable reports at the site level that include one or all of the available metrics. Since launching Site Reports in April, more than 8,400 reports have been run across over 4,300 accounts.

These detailed metrics give our users better oversight of performance improvement opportunities, and making those insights exportable through the Reports tab is especially useful for agencies and teams managing multiple sites.

Improved site transfer and migration experiences

Our team launched new Transfer Site and Bulk Site Migration functionality to improve the experiences when transferring sites to different accounts or migrating multiple sites to our platform.

Users can now transfer sites between WP Engine accounts directly from the User Portal without assistance. By selecting Transfer Site in a site’s settings and confirming the destination account, transfers begin immediately. Users can then track the progress of a transfer in real time and receive alerts once it’s complete. Since launching this functionality in March, more than 6,000 sites have been transferred by our customers.

For customers migrating multiple sites onto WP Engine, the Managed Migration Request form now supports bulk submissions for Premium and Agency Pro accounts. Using the Bulk Migration Request form, users can enter site details individually or upload a CSV file containing individual site names, admin URLs, and WP Engine account credentials. 

Each migration automatically spins up a new site environment under the destination account as well as a support ticket, so users can monitor progress and communicate with our team. Since its February launch, more than 2,800 sites have been submitted and created through Bulk Site Migration. 

Together, these changes are reducing operational burdens and streamlining large-scale site management for our customers. 

Building the agentic web, together

Great websites should be more than just fast and secure. Both the platform you build on and the features you build with should be intelligent, adaptable, and ready for whatever changes will come in 2026 and beyond. 

The innovations of 2025 are helping WP Engine become the definitive platform for those building the next generation of the web within the WordPress ecosystem. We are proud of the work we’ve done and excited about the incredible experiences our customers will continue to grow on our platform.

To all of our customers: Thank you for trusting us with your digital future. We are eager to continue learning, innovating, and future-proofing with you in 2026!

1WP Engine is a proud member and supporter of the community of WordPress® users. The WordPress® trademarks are the intellectual property of the WordPress Foundation, and the Woo® and WooCommerce® trademarks are the intellectual property of WooCommerce, Inc. Uses of the WordPress®, Woo®, and WooCommerce® names in this website are for identification purposes only and do not imply an endorsement by WordPress Foundation or WooCommerce, Inc. WP Engine is not endorsed or owned by, or affiliated with, the WordPress Foundation or WooCommerce, Inc.

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