Elementor, a popular website builder plugin that is active on more than five million websites, has acquired Strattic, a static and headless WordPress hosting company. Strattic will continue operating as “Strattic by Elementor” and the team will remain as its own unit within the company.

Elementor founders Yoni Luksenberg and Ariel Klikstein met Strattic founder and CEO Miriam Schwab 10 years ago when they attended a WordCamp she organized in Jerusalem. The following year Elementor sponsored the WordCamp she organized the in Tel Aviv. In 2020, Elementor raised $15M its first round of funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, after passing four million users.

Schwab founded Strattic in 2018 as the first WordPress hosting company to streamline the creation of static files managed via a headless install.

“Very early on it became clear to us at Strattic that we had better make sure we support Elementor in the static versions of our sites,” Schwab said. “More and more users were coming to us with sites built on Elementor, which was a strong indication of the plugin’s growing adoption and popularity. We prioritized supporting it in general, including rolling out support for their forms, and most recently adding a Strattic publish button from the Elementor editor.”

Over the past year, Elementor has been working to capture the market for the entire website creation process by offering hosting alongside its commercial website builder. Earlier this year, the company launched a Google Cloud-based website hosting service that includes Elementor Pro for $99/year. Elementor will promote the new static hosting service alongside its existing cloud service.

“I can’t speak exactly to what Elementor’s strategy is in terms of Strattic vis a vis their cloud offering, but Strattic will be a parallel offering, at least for the foreseeable future,” Schwab said.

Elementor has often been criticized for making WordPress sites sluggish so it’s easy to see the appeal that static hosting brings. Having more customers on Strattic might lessen the urgency of fixing Elementor’s well-documented speed issues.

“This acquisition will allow us to leverage Strattic’s technology to build static websites, helping to solve stability, speed, and security issues in the dynamic sites space,” Elementor founder Yoni Luksenberg said.

“With static hosting, users can deploy their dynamic WordPress websites as static HTML/CSS replicas to global CDN networks, which drastically improves the performance of their sites and eliminates potential security vulnerabilities and site breakdowns during updates. With a dramatically reduced attack surface, WordPress vulnerabilities become irrelevant as security is no longer a defensive endeavor.”

Elementor users who sign on for Strattic’s static hosting approach will have a more stable and secure experience, as the plugin and related third-party add-ons are frequently patching critical vulnerabilities.

Strattic and Elementor customers can expect deeper integration across these products in the future.

“We already have great support for Elementor on our static sites, but of course there’s always room for improvement so we will be working with Elementor’s team to make the integration even better,” Schwab said. She also confirmed there are no pricing changes on the horizon for Strattic customers.

“Right now everything will stay pretty much the same for Strattic users. We hope they’ll soon start to feel the benefit of us joining Elementor in terms of faster release cycles of amazing new features that will make the product even better.”