TL;DR – WP Engine’s acquisition of Big Bite, a newsroom-focused WordPress agency, matters not because it “changes the market.” It is part of a long-term trend observed for over a decade: hosting companies increasingly acquire SaaS tools, software, services, and agencies to cover the entire customer lifecycle in their offering.

This time, however, WP Engine didn’t buy software or features. It will not add a new product or services line. The agency side will be shut down entirely, and the team is moving directly into WP Engine’s product organization.

Why WP Engine wanted Big Bite in the first place

The infrastructure side of WP Engine’s offer is already rock-solid. It delivers multi-region AWS infrastructure, page caching, CDN integration, SLA-backed uptime, and mature backup and security tooling, to name just a few elements.

The real value of Big Bite for WP Engine is not its existing tools, services, or customer base. What really matters is the absorbed engineering talent and its expertise in highly customized, enterprise-level WordPress setups. 

Big Bite was acquired to internalize how work gets done: editorial dashboards, multi-step approval and scheduling workflows, access controls, and preview environments.

As stated clearly in Big Bite’s own announcement, the team will now work inside WP Engine to strengthen enterprise-scale services:

“As we transition into WP Engine, we’ll gradually shift from client services to product development. […] We’ll be putting our experience to work on tools and solutions that can benefit teams and organisations on a much larger scale.”

Customers running large sites, managed by multiple teams with different requirements, will no longer need to rely on external agencies for customizations or dedicated setups. WP Engine is positioning itself to cover those needs directly.

Where enterprise WordPress actually breaks

At scale, WordPress fails because of how people use it:

  • editorial workflows that don’t map to how newsrooms actually publish,
  • permission models that ignore compliance requirements and brand risk,
  • release processes that collapse under constant content pressure.

Support tickets stop being about uptime and start being about why a workflow breaks when three editors touch the same post.

This is where agencies like Big Bite excelled, and that is what WP Engine actually bought: years of experience in how enterprise WordPress publishing works, what problems it encounters, and how to solve them.

How WP Engine’s strategy fits a broader pattern

As we already mentioned, WP Engine’s acquisition of Big Bite fits into a long-term pattern of hosting companies acquiring SaaS tools, software, services, and agencies to cover the full customer lifecycle.

Two companies that have already executed this strategy successfully are GoDaddy and Automattic.

GoDaddy

Over the past decade, GoDaddy has systematically acquired and built the components needed to support small businesses well beyond infrastructure:

  • Elto (2015) added access to professional services for site creation and improvement,
  • Main Street Hub (2018) extended GoDaddy’s reach into social presence and ongoing marketing,
  • Sucuri (2017) addressed security and site maintenance,
  • The acquisition of Poynt (2020) and the launch of GoDaddy Payments (2021) added payments and point-of-sale capabilities,
  • Website Builder and Commerce completed the picture by removing the need for external tools to build and sell online.

The result: GoDaddy now sells a full operating stack for running a small business online. Most customers no longer need third-party tools or services, GoDaddy already covers their needs.

Automattic / WordPress.com

Automattic followed a different path, but reached a similar destination:

  • WooCommerce turned publishing into commerce,
  • Jetpack bundled security, backups, and performance into the core experience,
  • Payments, subscriptions, and learning tools extended monetization and ongoing operations.

The result: A controlled ecosystem where a WordPress.com user can move from publishing to selling to running a business without leaving the platform.

WP Engine following the same pattern

WP Engine started as a managed WordPress hosting provider focused on performance, reliability, and developer experience. Over time, it acquired:

  • Flywheel (2019) to strengthen agency and developer tooling,
  • Delicious Brains (2022) to bring migration and local development expertise in-house,
  • and now Big Bite to internalize expertise in enterprise publishing workflows and customizations

The result: WP Engine is reducing its dependency on external agencies by absorbing know-how and, as a next step, strengthening its enterprise-scale offering.

The implication for the market

Hosting companies that stop at infrastructure and basic upsells become interchangeable. Ones that secure their value across the entire customer lifecycle become harder to replace.

Big Bite isn’t a headline-grabbing acquisition. It’s a signal that WP Engine believes the next competitive layer is control over how WordPress runs at organizational scale.

Sources:

1. WP Engine’s and Big Bite’s official acquisition announcements

2. TechRadar Pro

3. ContentGrip