The disbanding of the WordPress Sustainability Team

Written by Chris Lewis - January 13, 2025

On Wednesday 8th January, WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg disbanded the WordPress Sustainability Team.

The team of volunteers have been working to embed sustainable practices into the WordPress community and its processes since 2023. In that time, they’ve worked openly and honestly to ensure WordPress’s social, economic, and environmental longevity. 

We should take time to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the now defunct team. Nora Ferreirós, Csaba Varszegi, Nahuai Badiola and Thijs Buijs worked to highlight the opportunities to improve sustainability at WordPress to a sometimes disengaged leadership. They are on the right side of history and we thank them.

Wholegrain’s stance

This decision feels regressive and extremely jarring in today’s world, where devastating wild fires ravaged California, home of the WordPress headquarters. Climate change and events should focus us all on making the world a more sustainable place.

In this case, reducing the environmental impact of the core code behind the circa 500 million websites (roughly 43% of the internet) that use WordPress would set an example for the rest of the internet to follow. Sadly, this will now not be the case – which is not good enough.

What does not change with this news, is the skills and vision of the community that has fuelled WordPress as an open source platform. The response to this decision has confirmed that this community cares about sustainability and at Wholegrain, we pride ourselves on pushing the envelope when it comes to sustainably designed and built WordPress websites. This will not change either.

The proof is in the performance of our sites, the experience of our clients and the satisfaction of their users. Excellent performance metrics should absolutely be a goal to aim for (as per the Slack conversations that have surfaced), but to focus only on those metrics is to ignore the wider picture. As an ethical, B Corp certified agency, it’s the wider picture that Wholegrain focuses on every day.

We hold our agency to a higher standard than the platform we work with. Our sites demonstrate that 43% of the internet can be more sustainable as standard. If the WordPress leadership can’t see the importance of that, then we, as a community, will continue to demonstrate how wrong they are.

Our mission continues

Create the best websites in the world. Use our business as a force for good. Help to accelerate the shift to an Internet that’s good for people and planet.

Our carbon calculator, Website Carbon, is the original online carbon estimator with its API being used in projects across the web, including a carbon footprint tool that the WordPress Sustainability team have been working to develop. 

All of the sites we build use WordPress’s core code and they all have high performance metrics and low carbon scores. They are built with care and attention for all users by an engaged and dedicated team who focus on their work being accessible, both on a technical and user level.

We will continue to take the best elements of WordPress, what the open source community around it offers, and use our talent and experience to elevate our sites to a higher level. 

We will continue to show how user focussed, beautiful and sustainable a WordPress website can be. 

On a personal note to those we work with

Whilst this is a really disheartening and careless move by one person within the WordPress leadership, this does not affect your website and you do not have to do anything. Nor does it affect our ability to deliver low carbon solutions for the websites that we design and build.

A high quality, low-carbon approach has always been one of our primary focuses when building sites; combining our own knowledge and expertise with WordPress as a rock solid foundation. This was the case for many years before the formation of the WordPress sustainability team [in 2023] and remains our focus into the future.

Tommy Ferry. Technical Delivery Lead at Wholegrain

One person is not WordPress. We are actively choosing to stay within a community of developers and technical specialists that have made WordPress the successful platform that it is – providing open source contributions that enable us to provide the best sustainable websites to you.

If you have any worries or concerns around this news and how it might impact your site, you can reach out to Georgie and myself, our Senior Leadership Team.