The Future of Plugin, Themes, and Services Purchases on WordPress.com

Recently we shared that you can now purchase six popular Automattic plugins right from your WordPress.com dashboard. We’re intentionally testing this out with our own products before opening it up to the broader community. This is the first step in our plan to make taking your site to the next level faster, easier, and more flexible than ever before.

But it’s really just the beginning.

Today, we’d like to share a vision of what’s coming for instant purchases of plugins, themes, and even services – all from right within your WordPress.com dashboard. This will help you level up your site and make any goal you bring to WordPress.com a reality – with increased ease and convenience. 

WordPress.com already comes with a suite of powerful, adaptable tools to bring your site, blog, or store to life. On top of those tools, our Business and eCommerce customers have the option of making use of thousands of free and paid themes and plugins from across the wider WordPress ecosystem. In the near future, this will be available for all WordPress.com customers.

The new integrated experience will take that one step further, making getting up and running one-click simple and providing customers with:

• A curated selection of the best plugins for every need, saving you the hassle of searching for and comparing from the hundreds of options available.
• Premium themes that are designed to look beautiful the second they’re activated.
• Professional help to make your vision a reality – even when you don’t have time to do it yourself.
• Managed Plugins and Themes, giving you the peace of mind that any plugin or theme you purchase is fully managed by the team at WordPress.com. No security patches. No update nags. It just works. Leaving you to focus on the things that matter most.
• The knowledge that you’re supporting the ecosystem of WordPress community developers and service providers as they support you in turn with your personal or business goals.

WordPress isn’t the world’s most popular website builder by accident. Our roots in a huge, and hugely creative, open source community make the platform everything it is and can be.

Giving WordPress.com customers the very best tools and support to achieve their goals will take a village. We’ll be partnering with developers and service providers from across the WordPress ecosystem (and across every part of the world) to make that happen.

As Matt Mullenweg, our CEO and co-founder of the WordPress open source project said recently:

“We’ve got about 2 million people with saved payment details that we can make it one-click easy [for folks] to upgrade, so hopefully this represents a big new potential audience and customer base for people selling things in the WP ecosystem. And of course, we will prioritize working with developers and companies who participate in Five for the Future and contribute back to the WP community.”

If you’re a WordPress plugin or theme developer, or you provide professional services for WordPress users, we’d love to hear from you, today.

Drop your details in the form below, and as we work to expand the products and services we’ll bring to WordPress.com customers, you’ll be first on the list when we start reaching out to form new partnerships.

We can’t wait to work with you!