WP Engine Announces $132M in Annual Recurring Revenue

Surpasses 90K Customers Globally, Triples Number of Agency Partners, Expands WordPress Digital Experience Platform With Key Technologies; Multiple Workplace of Choice Honors

AUSTIN, Texas — Jan. 29, 2019 –  WP Engine, the WordPress Digital Experience Platform, today announced it has passed annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $132 million, as well as grown to serve more than 90,000 customers globally while improving upon its world-class NPS score to 86. Since January 2018, WP Engine’s Agency Partner Program (APP) has enjoyed 84% growth and its global employee count is up 37%. The company also continued to build out its WordPress Digital Experience Platform with key technologies and earned numerous honors throughout the year, including multiple workplace of choice and leadership awards.

Founded in 2010, WP Engine is a market leader in one of the fastest growing segments of the Web, providing digital solutions for companies of all sizes to build, manage and deliver compelling digital experiences. The company’s Digital Experience Platform is the leading software and services solution for websites developed on the WordPress content management system, the preeminent open source software for website creation that powers approximately 33% of the Web, up from 13% in 2010. Today, WP Engine powers more WordPress websites  among the one million most trafficked websites on the Internet than all other managed WordPress hosts combined.*

“We are both humbled and honored to experience this type of stellar employee, customer and business growth,” said Heather Brunner, Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer of WP Engine. “However, it’s the fact that we did so while improving both our customer NPS score and securing several international best places to work accolades that made 2018 a truly incredible year. I am excited about the opportunities ahead for us and the WordPress community in 2019.”

In January 2018, WP Engine secured $250M in funding from Silver Lake. At that time it outlined how the strategic growth investment would inject further momentum into four strategic priorities:

• Accelerate innovation on its Digital Experience Platform
• Ramp investment in the success of its Agency Partner Program
• Fuel future growth internationally, particularly in EMEA, Australia and New Zealand, and further raise brand awareness
• Double down as a workplace of choice – investing in WP Engine’s people and culture who help power the company’s customer success

Sales and Customer Growth

WP Engine has now passed $132 million in ARR while growing its customer base 20% from a year ago. Regionally, from this time a year ago, customers grew by 23% in the U.S., 21% in Australia/New Zealand and 11% in Europe. Some of the brands that began leveraging the WP Engine digital experience platform over the past year include Klarna, Microsoft, the NBA, News Corp., RetailMeNot and Thomson Reuters.

Positive customer experiences are a leading indicator of customer growth. WP Engine’s award-winning Customer Experience team continued to deliver outstanding outcomes for our customers by improving upon its NPS score and achieving a score of 86; further reinforcing the company’s heritage as a world-class provider of customer support.

This past year, the company announced the promotions of David Brolsma to Chief Financial Officer and Tina Dobie to Chief Customer Officer. Brolsma and Chad Costello, General Counsel were also new appointments to WP Engine’s executive team.

Digital Experience Leadership

In 2018, WP Engine acquired StudioPress, creators of the Genesis Framework, the world’s most popular theme framework for millions of WordPress websites. The acquisition underscored WP Engine’s commitment to and investment in the WordPress open source community and further strengthened its platform, allowing designers faster time-to-market, a path to Gutenberg, the new editor in WordPress 5.0, and far greater ease and agility building digital experiences.

WP Engine also added Array’s themes and the associated Atomic Blocks to its growing list of digital solutions. Atomic Blocks is the most popular and most downloaded library of beautiful, responsive and customizable blocks for Gutenberg allowing users to add great-looking elements to their web pages at significantly reduced turnaround times that convert at higher rates, all without touching a line of code.

With cybersecurity a top boardroom imperative for companies of all sizes, WP Engine launched Global Edge Security, the world’s first complete perimeter security solution for WordPress, built from Cloudflare’s Internet performance and security solution. WP Engine customers and WordPress site owners benefit from business operations protection, customer data security, improved app and server availability, protection from WordPress-specific vulnerabilities and emerging threats, and reduction of network latency and congestion for a greatly enhanced, more consistent digital experience.

THE WordPress Partner of Choice

Launched in 2017, WP Engine’s Agency Partner Program enables agencies of all sizes to use WordPress to grow their business by driving creative, engaging experiences that deliver clear impact for their clients. Since its launch, the APP has grown exponentially, enrolling over 2,250 agency partners thanks to the availability of extensive thought leadership and content resources, its digital experience platform, advanced developer tools and the opportunity for new business leads. New agencies to the program, signing up within the last 12 months, include: Edelman, Grey, Huge, The Richards Group and W2O Group.  

WP Engine expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by launching the Amazon Polly plugin, which transforms text into lifelike speech, and the integration of Amazon Translate into the Amazon Polly plugin translating English content into any of 26 languages. These tools allow publishers to turn written content into podcasts to reach even more consumers, such as those on the go and the visually impaired.

Workplace of Choice Growth and Recognition

WP Engine grew its reputation as a workplace of choice again last year. The company increased its employee base 37% across its six offices, which now numbers over 600 total employees. The team’s international employee base grew 83% in Europe and 60% in Australia/New Zealand. 67% of WP Engine’s C-suite are women, 29% of the non-executive managers are women, 29% of its employee base are non-white and nearly a third are non-degreed. The company received 17 industry and individual accolades since January last year, including Fortune’s Great Places To Work for Technology #8, Millennials #61 and Small and Medium Workplaces #14; Excellence in Wellbeing Programme from Great Places To Work UK; and International Business Awards (“Stevies”) for Customer Experience and Marketing Executive of the Year.

WP Engine consistently reaches these levels of recognition because it remains true to its five core company values. One of them, “Aspiring to lead and committed to give back,” motivated WP Engine employees to give generously of their personal time and money in 2018, totaling over $61,000 and 1,380 hours to improve the communities where they live and work by focusing on health, hunger and education initiatives.

About WP Engine

WP Engine is the WordPress Digital Experience Platform that gives companies of all sizes the agility, performance, intelligence, and integrations they need to drive their business forward faster. WP Engine’s combination of tech innovation and an award-winning team of WordPress experts are trusted by over 90,000 companies across 140 countries to provide counsel and support, helping brands create world-class digital experiences. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has offices in San Francisco, California; San Antonio, Texas; London, England; Limerick, Ireland and Brisbane, Australia.

*Based on WP Engine research identifying the Web Content Management systems’ digital fingerprints for the most visited 1,000,000 sites as identified by Alexa. The fingerprints can sometimes be found inside the HTML and in other cases, they are located in the HTTP headers.