WP Lookout is no longer available as of August 1st, 2022.
The information on this page is likely out of date. Read the announcement.
WP Lookout is shutting down
First, the basics: WP Lookout will shut down all services, tracking and update notifications after August 1, 2022. Any active monthly subscriptions will no longer renew, effective immediately, and any active annual subscriptions will be issued a pro-rated refund to reflect unused services. All account data will be deleted when the service is shut down and the application will be completely unavailable.
I offer my gratitude to everyone who has tried, used, supported, promoted or otherwise been involved with WP Lookout. It’s been fun!
Now, on to your possible questions:
Do I need to do anything?
No action is required on the part of WP Lookout users. When the service shuts down, your account will be permanently deleted. If you use our plugin on any of your WordPress sites, you may want to deactivate it at your convenience to prevent unnecessary network activity. See more about this below.
Why is WP Lookout shutting down?
After two years of building and maintaining WP Lookout, I’ve decided that it no longer provides enough value to enough people to justify the ongoing time and expense involved. While I’ve had some great feedback from a few loyal users and received encouragement to continue expanding what WP Lookout is and does, it hasn’t found a sustainable place in the ecosystem of WordPress site and update management. Between the growing maturity of automatic updates (yay!), the development of supporting features like rollbacks, agencies and hosts continuing to develop and maintain their own custom update/monitoring tooling, and my own decision to limit the time I’ve invested in new features and marketing, WP Lookout has largely remained a niche tool for a few specific use cases.
Should I be sad about this?
No, I don’t think so! I’m not sad. I’ve learned a lot in building and launching this service, I’ve had some meaningful conversations within the WordPress community about how people manage their WordPress theme and plugin updates, and I’ve felt honored to provide a largely free service that was useful to hundreds of users and websites in this time.
Can I export my account data before it’s deleted?
Since the only data we really maintain in your account beyond your name and email address is the list of plugins and themes you’ve been tracking and your notification destinations, and since theme and plugin update history information is already publicly available elsewhere, I’m not planning to build a new set of tools to export this information. If you have a need I haven’t anticipated or further questions about this, please use the support chat to send a note.
Can I delete my own account now?
Yes. While logged into your account, visit “Profile” and then look for the “Account Management” section where you’ll find a “Delete Account” button. After confirming that you want to delete your account, your account will be immediately deactivated, all of your trackers, sites, notification destinations and other account data will be removed.
After the shutdown, what will happen on sites where the WP Lookout plugin is installed?
The plugin occasionally attempts to send information about the themes and plugins installed on your site back to WP Lookout via our API. It does this in the background on a schedule, and so once the WP Lookout API is unavailable, it will just start to silently fail without affecting any other functionality on your site. I recommend deactivating and deleting the plugin from your sites as soon as you are finished using your WP Lookout account, or after August 1, 2022, whichever comes first.
What should I do if I’ve installed the Slack integration?
After you’re finished using your WP Lookout account, you can delete your Slack instance as a WP Lookout notification destination, and/or follow Slack’s instructions for removing installed Slack integrations from your Slack instance. But even if you don’t do this, nothing else will be sent to your Slack instance after WP Lookout shuts down.
I still have questions, what do I do?
Please drop me a note using the support chat while logged in to your account, or by using the contact form.
What will you do now?
I’m fortunate to be busy with a variety of other pursuits including graduate studies, consulting, local community building, startup investing, side projects, parenting and more. You can follow along at ChrisHardie.com.
Thank you.
Chris Hardie
Founder, WP Lookout