25 Most Successful WordPress Businesses and Companies Today

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build a hugely successful business around WordPress? It’s a journey we know well, having grown WPBeginner from a small blog into a cornerstone of the WordPress community.

This path can feel both exciting and intimidating, but the WordPress ecosystem is filled with inspiring stories. It’s a space where passion and innovation can lead to incredible growth, creating tools that power millions of websites.

From hosting giants to the plugin creators behind your favorite tools, we’ve seen firsthand how these companies shape the web. Many of them started small, just like us, before becoming household names.

In this article, we’ll introduce you to the most influential businesses in the WordPress world. Let their stories inspire you as you explore the amazing opportunities within this industry.

Quick Glance at Top WordPress Companies

For a quick overview, here is a list of the top 10 WordPress businesses.

#	Company	Founded	Key Products / Services	Active Users / Installs
1	Automattic	2005	WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Akismet, Gravatar	409M+ monthly visitors; Jetpack 5M+ installs
2	Bluehost	2003	WordPress Hosting, WooCommerce Hosting	2M+ websites; Newfold Digital serves ~7M customers
3	Awesome Motive	2010	WPForms, MonsterInsights, AIOSEO, SeedProd, OptinMonster, Easy Digital Downloads	25M+ websites; WPForms 6M+, AIOSEO 3M+, MonsterInsights 3M+
4	Elegant Themes	2008	Divi Theme & Builder, Bloom, Monarch	945K+ customers
5	Caseproof	2004	MemberPress, Pretty Links, Easy Affiliate, WishList Member	Pretty Links 300K+ installs; MemberPress widely used
6	Liquid Web	1997	Nexcess, StellarWP, KadenceWP, LearnDash, The Events Calendar	500K+ websites; 185K+ customers
7	Envato	2006	ThemeForest, CodeCanyon, Envato Elements	11K+ WP themes; CodeCanyon 5,200+ WP plugins; Avada 1M+ sales
8	Rymera Web Co	2012	Wholesale Suite, Advanced Coupons, WC Vendors, Visser Labs plugins	Tens of thousands of WooCommerce stores (exact numbers not public)
9	Brainstorm Force	2009	Astra Theme, Spectra, Starter Templates	5M+ websites; Astra 1M+ installs
10	WP Media	2014	WP Rocket, Imagify, RocketCDN	WP Rocket 3.9M+ websites; Imagify 12.9B+ images optimized

1. Automattic

Automattic is the parent company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack. Founded by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, it also owns other popular services like Akismet and Gravatar.

In addition to its commercial products, Automattic heavily contributes to the open-source WordPress.org, bbPress, and BuddyPress projects.

Let’s look at the numbers behind some of its key brands:

• WordPress.com serves more than 409 million visitors and over 20 billion page views each month.
• WooCommerce is the world’s most popular open-source eCommerce solution, powering millions of online stores.
• With over 5 million active installations, Jetpack is one of the most widely used plugins in the entire WordPress ecosystem.

In terms of influence, revenue, and overall user base, Automattic is undoubtedly one of the top WordPress businesses today.

2. Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the world’s largest WordPress hosting companies and is an official WordPress.org recommended provider. It makes starting a website easy for beginners with its affordable plans.

Bluehost is part of Newfold Digital, a larger company that also owns brands like HostGator and Network Solutions. Newfold Digital has also acquired popular WordPress products like Yoast SEO and the YITH plugins.

What makes this family of brands so influential? Here are some facts:

• Bluehost alone powers more than 2 million websites around the globe.
• The YITH brand, known for its WooCommerce plugins, serves over 2.2 million users.
• Across all its brands, Newfold Digital has a massive user base of nearly 7 million customers.

You can see our team’s complete analysis of their services in our detailed Bluehost review.

3. Awesome Motive

Awesome Motive is a technology company known for its popular suite of WordPress plugins and software designed to help small businesses grow. It’s the management company behind WPBeginner and many of the plugins you probably use.

Founded by Syed Balkhi, the company’s portfolio includes well-known tools like WPForms, MonsterInsights, All in One SEO, SeedProd, and the popular lead generation software OptinMonster.

To understand the company’s reach, take a look at these key numbers:

• Over 25 million websites use Awesome Motive’s software to grow their business.
• Their top plugins, including WPForms (6+ million installs), All in One SEO (3+ million), WP Mail SMTP (3+ million), and MonsterInsights (3+ million), are among the most popular in the WordPress directory.
• It is a fully-remote company with more than 350+ team members in over 50 countries.

In recent years, Awesome Motive has also acquired other beloved WordPress products, including Easy Digital Downloads, Duplicator, SearchWP, Smash Balloon, and PushEngage.

4. Elegant Themes

Elegant Themes is a WordPress theme and plugin company best known for creating the Divi theme and the Divi Builder plugin. They also offer the Bloom email optin plugin and the Monarch social sharing plugin.

Let’s look at what makes Elegant Themes so influential:

• Since launching in 2008, Elegant Themes has grown to serve more than 945,000 customers worldwide.
• Their flagship product, Divi, is consistently ranked as one of the most popular WordPress themes, used on hundreds of thousands of top websites.

Apart from their products, the company also runs a popular blog with helpful tutorials and guides for the WordPress community.

5. Caseproof

Caseproof is the company behind a powerful suite of plugins for membership and affiliate marketing. Over the years, the company has become an industry leader by acquiring plugins like MemberMouse, WishList Member, ThirstyAffiliates, and Buy Now Plus.

Plugin	Function
MemberPress	The best WordPress membership plugin for creating and managing membership sites.
Pretty Links	Helps you shorten and track affiliate links, with over 300,000 active installs.
Easy Affiliate	Allows you to create and manage a complete affiliate program for your business.

How We Use It: We use MemberPress to run our exclusive video membership area for WPBeginner Pro members. We also use Pretty Links and ThirstyAffiliates across our sites to manage thousands of affiliate links.

Disclosure: To ensure full transparency, we want to mention that WPBeginner founder Syed Balkhi is an investor in Caseproof through the WPBeginner Growth Fund.

6. Liquid Web (Family of Brands)

Liquid Web is a family of brands that provides a wide range of services and products for the WordPress ecosystem. The company manages over 500,000 websites for 185,000 customers worldwide.

Their portfolio includes:

• Liquid Web: High-performance cloud and dedicated server hosting.
• Nexcess: Managed WordPress and eCommerce hosting.
• StellarWP: A collection of top WordPress plugins, including SolidWP (formerly iThemes), LearnDash, The Events Calendar, and KadenceWP.

7. Envato

Envato is a digital assets company that runs the massive online marketplaces ThemeForest and CodeCanyon. These platforms are go-to resources for thousands of developers and users looking for premium WordPress themes and plugins.

What is the impact of Envato’s marketplaces?

• ThemeForest features over 11,000 premium WordPress themes from third-party authors around the world.
• The most popular theme on the marketplace, Avada, has been sold well over a million times.
• CodeCanyon offers more than 5,200 premium WordPress plugins, with some selling over 400,000 copies.
• In 2023, sellers across their marketplaces earned a combined $111 million.

In addition to themes and plugins, Envato offers stock photos, videos, music, and other creative assets.

8. Rymera Web Co

Based in Australia, Rymera Web Co. is the company behind several popular plugins that extend the functionality of WooCommerce. In 2023, they significantly expanded their portfolio by acquiring WC Vendors and VisserLabs.

Their key products include:

• Wholesale Suite: Allows store owners to add wholesale pricing to their products.
• Advanced Coupons: Helps create smart coupons to boost sales in WooCommerce.
• WC Vendors: Converts a WooCommerce store into a multi-vendor marketplace.

9. Brainstorm Force

Brainstorm Force is the company behind Astra, one of the most popular WordPress themes ever built. While the company started in 2009 by offering freelance services, the launch of Astra in 2017 catapulted them to massive success.

A few facts highlight their impressive growth:

• More than 5 million websites use their products.
• Their theme, Astra, was one of the first non-default themes to achieve the milestone of 1 million active installations on WordPress.org.
• Their Spectra and Starter Templates plugins make it easy for anyone to build beautiful websites using the native block editor.

10. WP Media

WP Media is the company behind WP Rocket and Imagify. They specialize in creating products that improve WordPress performance and speed.

Their flagship product, WP Rocket, is widely considered the best WordPress caching and performance plugin on the market. Their Imagify plugin helps with image optimization.

• WP Rocket, launched in 2013, is now used on over 3.9 million websites.
• Imagify has optimized more than 12.9 billion images for users.

They also offer an add-on service called RocketCDN, which helps improve site speed by serving static content from a content delivery network.

11. Wordfence

Wordfence is a WordPress security company that develops the popular Wordfence security plugin, which includes a firewall and malware scanner. It provides comprehensive security alerts and maintains a massive database of malware signatures and malicious IPs.

The scale of their security operation is massive:

• The Wordfence plugin protects over 5 million active WordPress websites.
• On average, it blocks more than 9 billion attacks and over 144,000 malicious IPs every month.

The company also provides critical vulnerability alerts, site cleaning services, and security audits.

12. Human Made

Human Made is a UK-based WordPress design and development agency and an official WordPress.com VIP partner. This means they are one of a select group of agencies trusted by WordPress.com to handle large-scale, enterprise-level projects for major brands.

They specialize in enterprise development for global clients like News UK, USA Today, Sony, PayPal, and Airbnb. The company also contributes heavily to the open-source community through the Five for the Future program and offers an enterprise hosting platform called Altis.

13. WPML

WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) is the leading plugin for creating multilingual websites. It allows users to easily translate their content into different languages, making it a vital tool for global businesses.

WPML is a product of OnTheGoSystems, which also runs ICanLocalize, a professional human translation service. The plugin’s reach is impressive:

• WPML powers more than 1.5 million multilingual websites on the internet.
• Its clients are located in over 100 countries and use the plugin to translate content into a similar number of languages.

14. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is the company behind the most popular scheduled backup plugin for WordPress, also named UpdraftPlus. It is trusted by major organizations like Microsoft, NASA, and Princeton University for reliable backups.

Here are a few facts about the company and its products:

• The UpdraftPlus plugin has over 3 million active installations.
• It allows you to store backups in many remote locations like Dropbox and Google Drive, and also offers its own storage solution, UpdraftVault.

The company also offers UpdraftMigrator for simple site migrations and UpdraftCentral for managing multiple website backups from a single dashboard.

15. Elementor

Elementor is the company behind the popular drag-and-drop WordPress page builder of the same name. Since its founding in 2016, its visual builder has become one of the most widely used tools for web creation.

Their page builder plugin powers over 5 million websites. In addition to their core plugin, Elementor also offers a minimalist free theme called Hello Elementor and a range of shared WordPress hosting plans.

16. Themify

Themify is a premium WordPress theme and plugin shop. It is the creator of the powerful drag-and-drop Themify Builder plugin and offers dozens of themes for various industries.

The company helps more than 120,000 customers build beautiful websites with its products. Their club membership gives users access to all 48 themes, 12+ plugins, and 25+ Builder addons under a single subscription.

17. Beaver Builder

Beaver Builder is the company that develops a popular drag-and-drop page builder plugin and theme framework for WordPress. Started in 2014, the company’s products are known for their reliability and developer-friendly code.

Here’s a look at their market presence:

• The Beaver Builder page builder plugin is used on over 1 million WordPress websites.
• The Beaver Builder theme framework powers over 175,000 websites.

18. 10up

10up is a web design and consulting firm that specializes in open-source platforms like WordPress. They are also a featured WordPress.com VIP partner, which means they are trusted by WordPress.com to handle large-scale projects for enterprise clients.

The company has an impressive client list that includes brands like TechCrunch and organizations like the World Economic Forum. 10up is also a major contributor to the WordPress open-source project, having developed multiple free plugins and sponsored the jQuery Foundation.

19. Strategy11

Strategy11 is the company behind the popular Formidable Forms plugin. Founded in 2007, the company’s portfolio also includes several other niche products.

• WP Tasty: An easy-to-use recipe plugin for food bloggers.
• Business Directory Plugin: Allows users to easily create a business directory in WordPress.
• AWP Classifieds: Enables users to add a classifieds section to their site.

20. SiteGround

SiteGround is one of the best WordPress hosting companies, offering fast and secure plans for websites of all sizes. The company hosts more than 2 million websites on its powerful infrastructure.

SiteGround is highly rated for its speedy customer service and also provides managed WooCommerce hosting for online stores. To learn more, read our in-depth SiteGround review.

How We Use It: We host the WPBeginner website on SiteGround’s enterprise hosting infrastructure. Their performance and support have been a key part of our growth. See our SiteGrount case study to learn more.

21. Hostinger

Hostinger is an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider that offers shared, managed, and cloud hosting plans. Launched in 2004, the company has grown steadily and is praised for its performance and support.

They use cutting-edge technologies like LiteSpeed web servers, object caching, and built-in CDN integration to provide a faster hosting platform. For more details, see our complete Hostinger review.

22. Web Dev Studios

Web Dev Studios is a leading WordPress design and development agency with clients like Microsoft, Viacom, and Time. They are actively involved in the WordPress community and have authored several books on the platform.

The agency also offers several popular free plugins. Their plugin Custom Post Type UI is one of the top 100 free plugins on WordPress.org, with over 1 million active installations.

23. IncSub

IncSub is the company behind WPMU DEV, CampusPress, and Edublogs. WPMU DEV offers managed WordPress hosting, plugins, support, and site management tools.

CampusPress helps universities and schools manage their websites, while Edublogs serves as a blog platform for teachers and students. Their plugin Smush, an image compression tool, has over a million active installs.

24. WP Engine

WP Engine is one of the first and most successful companies to offer managed WordPress hosting. They provide fast and secure hosting services for sites of all sizes and are popular with developers and businesses.

The company hosts over 1.5 million websites for more than 185,000 customers. Besides hosting, WP Engine has acquired several popular WordPress products, including:

• LocalWP (local development software)
• Flywheel (another managed WordPress hosting brand)
• Advanced Custom Fields (a top developer plugin)
• StudioPress (creator of the Genesis Framework)

25. GoDaddy

GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar and a major provider of affordable shared hosting. In addition to these core services, GoDaddy has acquired several key WordPress businesses.

• ManageWP: The original WordPress website management service, used to manage over 1 million websites.
• Sucuri: A leading provider of WordPress security and firewall services, cleaning over 700 websites daily.

Additional Resources

Now that you’ve been inspired by these successful companies, you might want to explore more about building your own presence with WordPress. Here are a few guides to help you get started:

• Must-Have WordPress Plugins for Business Websites
• How to Start a WordPress Blog (the Right Way)
• Top Brands Using WordPress on Their Websites

Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Businesses

Here are answers to some common questions people have about the WordPress industry.

What is the most profitable type of WordPress business?

While profitability varies, some of the most successful business models include premium WordPress plugins (SaaS), specialized WordPress hosting, and high-end theme development. Creating and selling products with recurring subscriptions often leads to the most stable long-term revenue.

How do WordPress companies make money?

WordPress companies make money in several ways: selling premium plugins and themes, offering managed hosting services, providing maintenance and support plans, running development agencies for custom client work, and earning affiliate commissions by recommending other products and services.

Can you still start a successful WordPress business today?

Absolutely. The WordPress ecosystem is always growing, which creates new opportunities. Success today often comes from identifying a specific niche or problem that isn’t well-served and creating a high-quality solution for it, rather than trying to compete directly with the largest companies.

Wrapping Up

The WordPress ecosystem is evolving rapidly, and new companies are appearing all the time. There is plenty of room for new businesses to join, and hopefully, we will see many more rise to the top.

Looking to start a business? Use our free AI-powered business name generator tool to come up with a catchy name.

We hope this article helped you discover the most successful WordPress companies and businesses today. You may also want to take a look at our list of the top brands using WordPress.