What Liquid Web’s New Investors Mean for StellarWP

At StellarWP, we lean into the idea that change is growth, and change is good. With that change comes some news! 

StellarWP recently brought on private equity firm One Equity Partners (OEP) as the newest Liquid Web investor. With new faces come new questions, curiosities and the opportunity for us to update our community on the latest and greatest happenings around StellarWP.

But first, a quick recap.

How It Started: Introducing StellarWP

By 2020, we acquired iThemes, Restrict Content Pro, and The Events Calendar, thus beginning our growth in the WordPress community. By 2021, we had acquired more plugins, including GiveWP, and suddenly, our collective plugins needed a home. So we nestled them under the name StellarWP. StellarWP became an umbrella brand within the Liquid Web family of brands.

Now, in 2023, StellarWP boasts some of the most useful and robust plugins and themes in the WordPress community: iThemes (rebranding in public to SolidWP), GiveWP, The Events Calendar, LearnDash, Restrict Content Pro, Orderable, IconicWP, WP Business Reviews and KadenceWP.

As each team from each plugin joined StellarWP, they continued to work with their core teams to maintain high levels of innovation and support for their products and their customers.

How It’s Going: StellarWP’s Growth

Over the last few years, we’ve been collaborating across our teams to share best practices between products and to lean into our collective strengths across brands.

Our development, support, marketing and customer experience teams are working more closely together and sharing successes we can replicate as well as challenges and solutions with one another.

Ultimately, we’re in a position to bring the best innovations to our products and help our customers succeed in ways they might not have imagined before.

What Else Has Changed?

With building strong teams comes strong leadership, and we’re excited to celebrate Carrie Wheeler in her new role as President of Liquid Web. Formerly, Joe Oesterling led our acquisition strategy that built StellarWP. We’re immensely grateful for what he constructed. He has moved on to a new position as Managing Director & Chief Technology Officer at Falfurrias Capital Partners, and Joe continues to be a valued advisor for us.

Carrie has a proven track record within Liquid Web leadership, and she is excited to help guide our teams as we continue to build the best solutions in WordPress for hosting, plugins, security and themes. Zach Tirrell and Devin Walker continue to serve as General Managers, overseeing the day-to-day operations and strategy of StellarWP brands.

What’s On the Horizon?

We couldn’t consider ourselves among the best if we weren’t continually listening to our customers, conferring with one another, and innovating for the future. 

So of course we’re up to a few things we can share!

• We established a new StellarWP marketing team under the leadership of Lauryn Johnson, and the team has come together into groups that allow us to focus on growth areas like automation, events, content and more. 
• We also created a new customer experience department, led by Matt Cromwell. This team includes technical support, account services and customer success across all StellarWP brands. And again, each brand is laser-focused on maintaining its brand-specific knowledge and expertise for the benefit of its users.
• KadenceWP has been working to implement AI into its blocks package in some exciting and unique ways. They are thinking outside of just an AI prompt extension. They are implementing AI content inside their design library so that you can drop beautifully designed sections into your page with AI content generated specifically for your site. You can follow along and join the waitlist on the KadenceWP site. 
• iThemes is undergoing a complete brand overhaul along with massive improvements to the core set of products. We are all very excited to see SolidWP go to market with a suite of foundational offerings that will soon expand further.
• GiveWP has added a visual form builder, making it even easier for nonprofits and fundraisers everywhere to build forms that are intuitive and tailored to their audiences.
• LearnDash recently launched some new and exciting LearnDash add-ons and LearnDash bundles, which are already gaining popularity in the LMS space!
• And we just launched WP Constellations, a new podcast that explores the WordPress universe both with our constellation of brands and in the WordPress community as a whole. Check out our first episode now!

Why We Embrace Change at StellarWP

At StellarWP, one of our top-line goals is to be the people and plugins the WordPress community knows they can trust. And with the rate of change and improvements happening in WordPress – and especially in the broader tech space – change is a constant factor. For all of us.

We’re excited to embrace change that pushes both our team and our products toward success alongside the future of WordPress.

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