WP Engine announces Flywheel acquisition, HubSpot partnership

WP Engine, a WordPress digital experience platform, has announced a deal to acquire competitor Flywheel, while also launching a new partnership with HubSpot. Both announcements bring together technologies that seek to create better experiences for marketing and sales users within the WordPress ecosystem.

Flywheel acquisition

Financial terms of the agreement have not been shared, but according to the release, the deal is the biggest to-date in the WordPress space. Flywheel currently serves more than 28,000 global customers, and once the acquisition is complete, WP Engine will serve over 120,000 brands and agencies. WP Engine CEO and chairperson Heather Brunner declined to share WP Engine’s valuation but pointed to the forecasted combination of WP Engine and Flywheel annual recurring revenue reaching $200 million by 2020. “This powerful combination furthers our vision to be the most relied upon platform for WordPress,” said Brunner. Our continued investment in WordPress, our shared values and culture, our enterprise-class technology and support, our community of agency partners and most of all our people will be a powerful driver to bring our customers’ breakthrough digital experiences to life.”

HubSpot partnership

The partnership allows users to access HubSpot’s free CRM and marketing software natively within WordPress. The plugin should simplify sales and marketing processes and will allow for more personalization.

“Pairing a powerful CMS with an equally powerful CRM is an essential catalyst for a growing business,” said Brian Halligan, CEO and co-founder of HubSpot. “We think these two platforms can make 1+1=3. With integrated data and the right tools, you can do more than just store information — you can start more personalized conversations with prospects, understand and then tailor your site to be what visitors are looking for, and create an overall improved customer experience. WordPress powers 34% of all websites. By leveraging WP Engine and HubSpot together, those site owners can turn their websites into growth engines for their businesses.”

Why we should care

These two strategic moves by WP Engine are indicative of the consolidation trend we’re seeing across the martech landscape. Consolidation is particularly strong around WordPress, which currently accounts for 34% of websites globally. By bringing together HubSpot’s free CRM tools with the plugin, marketers can expect to manage fewer tools, find low-code solutions for marketing and have a centralized data source. The alignments with both Flywheel and HubSpot should improve marketers’ accessibility to technology and tools while creating better data management opportunities.

More on the news

The HubSpot features now be available to WP Engine users have been available through the plugin since 2011. They include:

• Forms and pop-up forms for better lead capturing on websites.
• Live chat to interact with website visitors in real time and bots to provide an automated response after-hours.
• Automatic syncs with HubSpot CRM that provide the full context across all forms, pop-up forms, and live chat interactions.
• Simple email automation to quickly engage with leads after each form submission.
• Ability to enable visitor tracking and lead intelligence for insight into which pages contacts view on websites for better personalization.