A lot of people in the WordPress space reacted strongly on May 12, 2026 when the StellarWP websites started redirecting to Liquid Web landing pages. Suddenly brands like Kadence, LearnDash, GiveWP, The Events Calendar, IconicWP and others looked like they had disappeared overnight.

I saw many tweets calling this “the end of an era”, and I understand the emotional reaction. These are products many of us have used for years. Some of these companies were founder-led businesses with strong identities, loyal communities, and recognizable brands at WordCamps and across the WooCommerce and WordPress ecosystem.

They also carried a lot of SEO value, years of backlinks, and strong brand recognition within the WordPress ecosystem. These were not random plugin websites. They were established businesses that many people trusted and followed for years.

Still, I think the reaction became bigger than the actual situation. My opinion is that this is not a shutdown story. It’s a consolidation story.

Everyone keeps asking the same thing… what’s WooCommerce market share right now?

And depending on where you look, you’ll get a different answer. One source says one thing, another says something else. It goes up, it goes down, sometimes it feels like it changes every week. And yes, it’s kind of interesting… I get it.

But here’s the thing: we’ve slowly turned that number into a scoreboard.

If it grows, we relax. If it drops, we panic. If it stays flat, we start wondering what’s wrong. Meanwhile, the actual work—building, improving, communicating, supporting the ecosystem—doesn’t really change.

In this article I want to share a simple idea: we probably need to stop stressing about WooCommerce market share. And that’s because it’s not the thing that will move WooCommerce forward.

There’s always work to do anyway… product, developer trust, communication, community, brand. Even if the number was 99.9%.

Dear WooCommerce,

If there’s one thing Checkout Summit confirmed for me, it’s that what we’ve built around Woo is bigger than software.

For 14+ years, I’ve been inside this ecosystem. Working with small, medium, and large clients, building products, teaching developers, solving merchant problems, speaking with agencies, and watching thousands of businesses choose WooCommerce as the engine behind their livelihoods.

You spend enough time in an ecosystem like this and you start to understand its rhythm—its strengths, its weaknesses, and the things that keep it moving.

Last week in Palermo, something happened that reminded me why this ecosystem still matters so much. Checkout Summit brought people into the same room to talk about Woo, face to face, for the first time since WooConf 2017. And walking away from it, I felt compelled to write this.

Because something important is happening.

Over the past few days, I’ve been running a little experiment with the WooCommerce community—and let’s just say, it’s been incredible. What started as a simple idea quickly turned into something much bigger than I expected.

I’ve been keeping notes, tracking milestones, and seeing the energy and creativity this community brings to the table. The results so far have been both encouraging and, honestly, quite surprising.

In this post, I’ll take you behind the scenes, share some unexpected moments along the way, and explain why I believe this experiment could serve as an example for anyone in the WordPress ecosystem, and beyond.

There are so many reasons why WooCommerce continues to power millions of stores around the world. It’s flexible. It’s open source. It’s customizable. But none of those explain its success on their own.

What truly makes WooCommerce thrive is… us. The community behind it.

For almost 15 years, developers, freelancers, agencies, makers, and merchants have shaped WooCommerce in public. They’ve shared code, answered questions, written tutorials, organized events, built extensions, and helped strangers solve problems at midnight on a Sunday on a random forum thread. That effort has done more than improve the software—it has moved it forward.

In this post, I want to reflect on why WooCommerce continues to stand out in a crowded ecommerce landscape, why community is still its strongest advantage, and why that human layer it’s the real deal (also including a live case study!).