WordPress site builder Elementor buys Strattic in all-Israeli deal
Strattic founder: ‘Joining forces with Elementor means that we can put Strattic in the hand of millions of users that need it, to get the most out of their WordPress sites’
Ricky Ben-David is a Times of Israel editor and reporter
Israeli company Elementor, the developer of a building platform for WordPress websites, has acquired Strattic, a web development and hosting solutions outfit based in Jerusalem, in an all-Israeli deal announced on Wednesday. Calcalist said the transaction was estimated at “several million dollars.”
Founded in 2016 by Yoni Luksenberg and Ariel Klikstein, Elementor’s open-source, drag-and-drop platform allows web creators to build code-free WordPress-based sites. The no-code website building concept is similar to what Israeli company Wix created — just for WordPress, the global leader in content management systems (CMS).
WordPress has about 43% of the world market share, and over 450 million sites use WordPress, according to the latest data. The system powers almost 40% of the top 10 million high-traffic sites like The New York Times and Bloomberg.
Strattic was founded in 2018 by Josh Lawrence and Miriam Schwab, a web developer with years of experience with WordPress sites, who set out to solve the “noise” around managing and securing WordPress sites.
Schwab has said WordPress was the best website and content management system out there but managing the life cycles of WordPress sites can be time-consuming and cumbersome, demanding solutions to issues of security, performance and reliability — challenges she experienced first-hand as a web developer.
“Strattic was born to solve my own pain points as an agency owner building custom WordPress sites for clients for over 12 years. Over the years, I found myself also having to become somewhat of a WebOps/DevOps/security expert along the way in order to handle the infrastructure aspects of managing a live WordPress site,” she described in a blog post on Wednesday announcing the acquisition
By building static replicas of sites, Strattic says it helps make sites secure and fast as they don’t engage a processing server.
“What could be better than deploying just the frontend without any of the challenges of an underlying processing server? And what if there was a way to allow users to continue benefiting from all the power of native WordPress at the same time?” she asked herself
Schwab told The Times of Israel in a phone call Wednesday that Strattic has built a “world-class product that does something very innovative, and that really isn’t available [elsewhere].”
Strattic’s offering allows users to “continue using WordPress without all the noise,” she said. In its native format, WordPress has a number of issues like “performance issues, security issues — it’s like a never-ending job — so with Strattic, our users click a button and generate a static replica of the site. That replica looks the same, sounds the same, feels the same, but it’s a collection of what’s known as static files, HTML and CSS…So there’s no underlying processing server that can cause all of the issues that WordPress site owners experience. With Strattic, you would get all the benefits of WordPress, with all the stability of a static site.”
Strattic customers include global companies, government agencies and non-profit organizations.
“Joining forces with Elementor means that we can take Strattic to the next level and work together to leverage our amazing experience with growth and put Strattic in the hand of millions of users that need it, to get the most out of their WordPress sites,” said Schwab.
Strattic will become a “product unit within Elementor, it will keep its brand and its name — Strattic by Elementor,” Luksenberg (Elementor’s co-founder) told The Times of Israel.
Schwab will serve as Head of Strattic, a title she called “to the point.”
With Elementor, web creators “can easily build out new page layouts and designs and get content out there faster. With Strattic, developers and DevOps professionals can focus on their main responsibilities and stop worrying about the WordPress infrastructure of the company’s website and all that entails,” Schwab wrote in her post.
The acquisition follows Elementor’s launch of a new product, Elementor Cloud Website, that combines the website building aspect the company is known for, with a hosting solution, to provide a unified service.
Elementor said it will leverage Strattic’s “static rendering technology to expand its hosting capabilities and focus on offering solutions to challenges faced by millions of WordPress users.”
“The idea that we can take WordPress sites — which make up the majority of sites all over the world, the internet equals WordPress — and [combine] it with top-notch technology like Strattic’s …allows us to create beautiful websites, winning websites, and also fast, sustainable, secure and stable,” Luksenberg said.
“This is what the WordPress ecosystem needs right now — to improve the stability of websites,” he added.
Elementor powers over 11 million websites, Luksenberg said. Based in Ramat Gan, the company has raised about $15 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
