I Called It. Here’s What Actually Happened with the StellarWP Liquid Web Transition.

This is an update to my April 2026 post, StellarWP is Becoming Liquid Web: What It Means for You and Your Favorite WordPress Plugins. I planned to revisit this at the six-month mark. The rollout forced my hand a lot sooner than that.

Back in April, I wrote about the StellarWP Liquid Web transition before it fully happened. I said I was cautiously optimistic. I said I was watching. I said “on paper” and “in practice” are two different things.

Well. Here we are.

The official transition went live around May 12, 2026. Within days, the WordPress community was on fire. The Reddit threads were ugly. And I, as a paying customer of Kadence, LearnDash, and Restrict Content Pro, was sitting in my own WordPress dashboard trying to figure out what had happened to my license keys.

I'm not writing this because I enjoy being right about bad things. I'm writing it because my readers trusted me enough to ask my opinion on these tools, and that trust means I owe you the full picture. Especially now.

Let's get into it.

What I Said in April (Um…Like Literally Three Weeks Ago)

In the original post, I laid out what was changing: four flagship products staying, a handful of smaller tools being folded in, a few being retired entirely, new tiered pricing, and a promise that existing customers would be grandfathered.

I also said I was watching four specific things. Let's review:

• Whether grandfathered pricing holds through the next restructuring cycle
• Whether the development pace stays consistent
• Whether features that got folded in lose their identity
• Whether support holds up

I said I wouldn't update my recommendations until I saw how it played out in practice.

It has now played out in practice. 👀

What Actually Happened with the StellarWP Liquid Web Transition

The consolidation went live without warning to most customers. No email arrived before the plugins updated. No heads-up that familiar portals were about to redirect to a new location. For many users, the first sign that anything had changed was a broken dashboard in their own WordPress admin, an unfamiliar Liquid Web menu item that appeared out of nowhere, and license key fields that suddenly did nothing when clicked.

The branded domains that had anchored these products for years, givewp.com, learndash.com, theeventscalendar.com, solidwp.com, and kadencewp.com, all redirected to landing pages on liquidweb.com. Changelogs returned errors. Documentation redirected to the wrong products. People who had paid hundreds of dollars for lifetime licenses couldn't access their downloads or API keys. In some cases, customers found out something had changed, not because Liquid Web told them, but because their own clients called to ask what happened to their websites.

A Liquid Web menu item was also pushed into the WordPress admin sidebar via a plugin update, showing up on every site running the affected plugins, including the free versions, regardless of whether the site owner had any relationship with Liquid Web hosting. Agency owners reported that their clients thought their sites had been compromised. One user described the “unlicensed” label that appeared in the new dashboard as making it look like they'd installed sketchy plugin versions. That's not a minor UX issue. That's a trust problem with real business consequences for the agencies and freelancers managing those sites, who now have to explain something they hadn't been told about either.

Liquid Web eventually reversed course on the forced dashboard UI and made it opt-in, after the backlash was loud enough that they had no choice.

This is what “cautiously optimistic” looks like when it runs into reality. 💥

My Personal Experience as a Customer (So Far)

I have active subscriptions to Kadence, LearnDash, and Restrict Content Pro. Here's exactly what happened to me.

The plugins have been updated. A Liquid Web dashboard appeared in my WordPress admin panel without my permission. When I clicked on my license keys, nothing happened. So I clicked what looked like an upgrade prompt, which took me to Liquid Web's new portal, a portal I had never seen before and had no idea existed.

I never received an email telling me a new account had been created, that my portal had changed, or that I needed to do anything before this happened. The first email I got from “The Liquid Web Team” was the announcement email, sent May 12 at 7:08 AM. By that point, my license keys were already broken, and I had already figured out what was going on by myself.

To get into the new portal, I had to use the password reset flow as a de facto account-creation process because no onboarding email ever arrived. The “Reset your password” and “Sign in to Liquid Web” emails sitting in my inbox from 6:41 and 6:42 AM on May 14 aren't a normal login sequence. They're me discovering a portal I didn't know existed and figuring out how to get into it on my own.

The announcement email, when it did arrive, greeted me as “Jill.”

That is my legal first name. It exists in billing records. I go by Elizabeth professionally and told them as much. The only way that name appeared in my email salutation is if someone mapped the wrong data field during the migration. It's a small thing. It's also a perfect illustration of the larger thing: they rushed this rollout without QA'ing the basics. And before anyone asks, yes, they sent the follow-up damage control email three days later. It also said, “Hello, Jill.”

They fixed the broken portal access. They did not fix the name.

That follow-up email, sent May 15, was a status update on what was still broken three days after launch: Express plan downloads unavailable, password reset emails not sending reliably, Shop Kit not being applied correctly to plans. It also included this line:

“We aim to resolve most issues by the end of the week. Please understand that this is an aim and not a guarantee.”

That is a company hedging on whether it can fix its own launch within a week of launching it.

On the same day, the affiliate team sent me an email asking me to write content about the consolidation for a chance to win a SnackMagic box, with double commissions through June 15 if I started driving traffic to the new products immediately.

I will let that sit there for a moment. 💸

What “Grandfathered” Actually Looks Like in the Wild (For Now)

My subscriptions now appear in the Liquid Web portal, labeled Legacy, in yellow. That word is designed to feel like borrowed time, and it is doing exactly that job. This is what the StellarWP Liquid Web transition actually looks like from inside a paying customer's account.

Here's the financial reality I'm sitting with. My current annual spend across these three products:

• Kadence: $219/year
• LearnDash: $189/year
• Restrict Content Pro: $149/year
• Total: $557/year

To get equivalent functionality under the new structure, I'd need at minimum the Elite Kadence plan at $499/year. That's because Kadence Conversions, the pop-up and slide-in tools I use for lead generation, are now locked behind the Elite tier. They were not Elite-only features before. They're also the tools that help you get people to actually do something on your site: join your list, grab a resource, take the next step. Moving them up the pricing ladder is a meaningful change, not a reorganization.

LearnDash is the same story. ProPanel, the reporting dashboard that shows you actual student progress, course completion rates, and quiz results, is no longer available at the Essentials tier. It's Pro-only now, which starts at $399/year. That means to get back to what I already have, I'd need LearnDash Pro at $399/year, not Essentials. Add that to Kadence Elite, and I'm looking at $898/year for the same functionality I have now. That's $341 more per year, assuming nothing else changes between now and my next renewal.

To be clear: my legacy pricing is still active. As long as I never let a subscription lapse and never need to change plans, I'm technically protected. But the official FAQ and my support ticket response both confirmed the same thing: if a subscription lapses, you'll need to purchase a new plan to reinstate access. The grandfathering is conditional. Miss a renewal for any reason, and you're buying in at the new prices.

And here's where it gets genuinely alarming. When I logged into the portal while writing this post, I could finally see my renewal dates and amounts. Kadence Full Bundle renews October 5, 2026, for $219/year. LearnDash renews on November 30, 2026, for $189/year. Both are set to auto-renew. Good, right?

Except the payment method on both subscriptions says “Not on file.”

Let that sink in. Auto-renew is on. There is nothing to charge. When those renewal dates hit, the system will attempt to bill a non-existent card, fail, and my legacy pricing protection will be gone. I would have had no idea this was the situation if I hadn't logged in specifically to document this post. No email warning me. No alert in the dashboard. Nothing. They migrated my account data but did not migrate my payment information, and they did not tell me.

If you are a legacy customer, stop reading this right now and go check your portal. Log in to software.liquidweb.com, click each subscription, and verify that your payment method is on file for each subscription. This is not a hypothetical risk. This is what I found in my own account today.

Grandfathered is only as durable as your next renewal. And your next renewal only processes if they actually have a way to charge you. 📋

There's also a practical issue I haven't been able to fully resolve: my Restrict Content Pro license was purchased under a different email address than the one for my other subscriptions. The “unified portal” that was supposed to make everything simpler assumes that your entire purchase history lives under one email address. Mine doesn't. To access that license in the new system, I'd need to create a second Liquid Web account. That's not unified. That's a data migration that didn't account for how real customers actually buy things. And I'd be willing to bet I'm not the only one in that situation.

What I'm Updating in My Recommendations

In the original post, I said I wouldn't update my recommendations until I saw how this played out in practice. Here's where I land.

Before I get into the individual tools, I want to say something that I think is getting lost in all the noise around the StellarWP Liquid Web transition right now: the tools themselves are not broken. The plugins are still working. The features are still there for existing customers. What's broken is the communication, the migration, and the trust. Those are real problems worth naming. But they're different problems than “the software stopped working and you need to get out now,” and I'd rather you make a calm decision than a panicked one.

If you're an existing customer of any of these tools, don't touch anything you don't have to right now.

Don't upgrade. Don't let anything lapse. Don't click the “switch to a unified license” prompt in the portal. Your legacy pricing is the only thing protecting you from the new price structure, and it only holds as long as your subscription stays active. That's not paranoia. That's what their own FAQ and support team confirmed in writing.

Kadence

The free version and legacy paid plans are still functional. But I can't recommend Kadence as a confident first choice for someone starting fresh today. The transition was handled badly enough that trust is a real issue, and trust matters when you're building a business on a tool. If you're evaluating alternatives, the names coming up most consistently right now are GeneratePress, Blocksy, and Neve. I haven't done a full comparison yet, and I'm not going to send you somewhere before I can stand behind it.

LearnDash

Still technically solid as a product. Still showing up as Legacy in my portal. Still watching. I looked at LifterLMS, the most commonly cited alternative, and I'm going to be straight with you: I wasn't sold. The pricing page is genuinely confusing. I couldn't easily tell what I'd be gaining versus what I already have, and a $10,000 lifetime license option aimed at small business owners is a choice I have questions about. I've also used LifterLMS as a student and couldn't tell if what I experienced was the platform itself or just a poorly built course on top of it. The honest answer is: I'm not ready to send you there yet. Stay put and keep your subscription active.

Restrict Content Pro

No longer a standalone product. It's been absorbed into Kadence Memberships. If you're an existing RCP customer, your plan is technically still active under legacy terms, but the product you bought no longer exists as a separate offering. MemberPress always comes up as the alternative, so I looked into why people recommend it. The short version: it's not that people love MemberPress, it's that the other options are often worse. MemberPress has been doing its own version of the pricing shuffle, quietly raising prices, stripping back what's included at the entry tier, adding transaction fees to the base plan, and locking integrations like Zapier and certain payment gateways behind higher tiers. It works. It's stable. But “recommended because everything else is worse” is not the same as “recommended because it's great,” and I won't pretend otherwise. I'm not ready to swap a known quantity for an uncertain one while I'm still figuring out what I actually have left with RCP.

GiveWP and The Events Calendar

I don't use either personally, so I'm not the right person to send you to an alternative right now. What I can tell you is that if you're actively using either of these for a client site or your own business, document everything, keep your subscription current, and watch the product roadmap closely for any signs that development is slowing.

Here's the bottom line: switching costs are real.

Migrating membership data, course content, or site design is not a weekend project. Don't let the chaos of this rollout push you into a decision you'll regret just because staying put feels uncomfortable. The rollout was a mess. The tools still work. Those are two separate facts, and it's worth holding them separately before you do anything drastic.

When I have a recommendation I can actually stand behind, I'll say so. That's the standard I've always held myself to here, and this situation isn't changing it.

The Part I Actually Want to Say, So I'll Say It

This situation has clarified something I want to name directly.

I have financial relationships with several of these products. I'm an affiliate. That's disclosed in the original post and in this post. Being an affiliate has never meant I only say nice things, and it's not going to start meaning that now. I can genuinely like a tool and still call out a botched rollout. I can recommend something and still tell you when the company behind it is making decisions that concern me. That's always been the deal here, and if you've been reading this site for any length of time, you already know that.

The affiliate team asked me to write content about the consolidation and submit it for a content contest. This is the content. It's just not what they had in mind. 🦄

I'm keeping my existing subscriptions active for now because switching costs are real and the tools are still working. What I'm not doing is softening my assessment to protect a commission. That's the line I've always drawn, and I'm drawing it here.

The VP of Product at Nexcess has said publicly to check back in one to two years, and you'll see thriving software. Maybe. I genuinely hope so. But “check back in a year” is not a standard of evidence. It's a request for patience from a company that just burned through a significant amount of goodwill in a single week.

If things stabilize, the development pace holds, the grandfathered pricing holds through the next renewal cycle, and the tools keep doing what they're supposed to do, I'll update this again. That's the standard I'm holding them to, and you can hold me to the same one.

In the meantime, take a screenshot of your plan details. Save every email they send you. Know exactly what you were promised and when.

You've seen how fast “it's not a forced migration” can start to feel like one. 👀

And if you're an existing customer of any of these products and you've had your own experience with this transition, drop it in the comments. The more data points we have, the better decisions we can all make. 💬

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