Nathan Wrigley welcomes Zach Stepek of WP Tavern to the Jukebox Podcast to explore how the WordPress ecosystem functions when agencies, product companies, and hosting providers work together — and what happens when trust and long-term thinking are sacrificed for short-term gains.
A varied path into WordPress
Zach Stepek’s career moves through design, development, teaching, and platform work. He cut his teeth on ColdFusion and Flash, taught as an Adobe Certified Instructor, and later migrated into support and product work as Flash declined. He first encountered WordPress while designing electronic medical records and again while building sites at Comply365. A WooCommerce project for a record label and a viral spike for the Oscar Mike Foundation — where an appearance on TV overwhelmed their store — exposed him to e-commerce, hosting, and scaling challenges and pulled him deeper into the WordPress community. From speaking at WooConf in 2017 and founding an agency, to focusing on hosting and partnerships, Zach now does fractional partnerships and eCommerce consulting through mightyswarm.com and zachstepek.com.
Three interconnected pillars
Zach frames WordPress success as three mutually dependent layers:
– Agencies and builders who design and implement sites.
– Product companies (themes, plugins) that provide functionality.
– Hosting and infrastructure that deliver performance and reliability.
Those layers operate like a knot: each supports and depends on the others. A weakness in any layer — an agency unfamiliar with a product, a product that doesn’t support agency workflows, or hosting that can’t handle real traffic — drags down the whole experience. This is especially acute for e-commerce, where performance directly affects revenue.
Hosting as critical infrastructure
Zach likens hosting to retail real estate: cheap, underpowered hosting is like renting a back-street shop that customers can’t find or that collapses when demand rises. For stores and high-traffic sites, premium hosting is a strategic investment to protect conversions and reputation. He also contrasts self-hosted WordPress with SaaS marketplaces like Shopify: the latter trade discoverability and operational simplicity for ongoing platform fees, while self-hosted setups must invest more upfront in products and hosting to match that reliability.
How meaningful partnerships form
True partnerships go beyond vendor badges and affiliate links. They grow from shared values, time, and mutual investment. Zach points to organizations that evolved tools from client needs — Fueled, WebDevStudios with Theme Switcher Pro, and ElasticPress — and turned those tools into community assets. Often agencies become product companies and product teams take on agency-like roles; the lines blur when each layer contributes solutions back to the ecosystem.
The shift from cooperative to transactional
Zach and Nathan discuss a perceived shift from the cooperative, volunteer-driven ethos that built WordPress toward a more transactional, ROI-first culture. Venture and private equity pressures can accelerate that shift, pushing companies to prioritize short-term returns over community investment. That change can erode trust and long-term value because much of WordPress’s growth has depended on contributions and relationships that don’t immediately show up on balance sheets.
The high cost of short-term thinking
Treating partnerships as one-off revenue sources can produce quick wins but damages relationship equity and reputation. Enterprise sales and agency work often require patience — deals can take months or years to close — and trust compounds over time. When companies stop investing in relationships and community stewardship, they sacrifice an asset that drives durable growth.
Economic and hardware pressures
The landscape since COVID-19 has introduced tighter budgets, shifting sponsorships, and different WordCamp attendance patterns. On the infrastructure side, demand for AI compute (GPUs, RAM, and specialized servers) strains component supply and raises costs for hosts. Providers built on thin margins may find rising hardware and operational costs force price increases or a rethinking of service models.
Measuring partnership value beyond revenue
Revenue is only one indicator of partnership health. Zach recommends tracking softer but meaningful signals: mutual trust, frequency of proactive collaboration, improved customer outcomes resulting from cooperation, and community perception. Relationship equity often precedes revenue; those willing to invest patiently in partnerships tend to build more durable advantages.
Practical takeaways
– Treat WordPress as an ecosystem: agencies, product companies, and hosts must collaborate to deliver reliable, high-performing sites.
– Favor values-driven partnerships that prioritize mutual success, not only immediate revenue.
– Invest in hosting: underpowered infrastructure undermines conversions and reputation.
– Evaluate partnerships with broader metrics: trust, collaboration, customer outcomes, and community standing.
– Be mindful of economic and hardware trends that affect hosting costs and strategy in 2026.
Conclusion
Nathan and Zach close by noting the ecosystem is at an inflection point. Businesses that choose short-term wins risk eroding the trust that sustained WordPress growth; those that invest in long-term relationship equity and community stewardship will likely shape the platform’s future. For more from Zach, visit mightyswarm.com or zachstepek.com, find him as zstepek on social platforms, and see the full episode and show notes at wptavern.com/podcast.
