The WordPress Decline is Real, and the Community Has Everything It Needs to Turn It Around

WordPress powers 42 percent of the Internet (nearly half the web) and right now, that number is moving in the wrong direction for the first time in over a decade. 

My Personal Anecdote (My WordPress Journey, and Why the History Matters)

When I launched LadyinTechverse in early 2025, I chose to build it on self-hosted WordPress over a DigitalOcean droplet with almost no server-side experience because I wanted to own every layer of what I was building, the code, the database, the content, and the direction, which is opposite of the easiest path. WordPress was not just a platform choice. It was a declaration that this digital home belongs to me, and that no SaaS vendor decision, pricing change, or product pivot could take it from me. 23 years after its first release, that founding principle is still the most compelling reason to stay. The GPL licence that underpins WordPress made all of that equally accessible to all of us, and that is why the foundation still exists. 

That personal decision did not happen in a vacuum. I was exposed to early WordPress development in the 2000s, when the web was in mid-transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, and the question of who could publish on the Internet was genuinely open for the first time. WordPress was released on 27 May 2003, forked from b2/cafelog by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, while Drupal had been available since 2000, and Joomla arrived in 2005. Together they offered something radical – free, flexible, and community-governed infrastructure for anyone who wanted to publish, build, or sell online without asking permission from a platform that owned their content. Built-in WYSIWYG text editing, SEO, upgraded HTML rendering, and a graphical user interface that required minimal coding arrived as a full content publishing package, covering images, files, pages, databases, and texts. Squarespace launched in the same year as WordPress in 2003, with Weebly following in 2006, opening the no-code templated end of the market to people with no knowledge of HTML or CSS at all. On the monetisation side, Google acquired Blogger in February 2003 and made it freely available to the world, pushing the entire concept of blogging into mainstream culture. Thereafter, Google AdSense launched publicly on 18 June 2003, handing bloggers without large platforms a genuine path to earning from their writing for the first time. The democratisation of publishing and the democratisation of monetisation arrived together in the same calendar year, and WordPress sat at the intersection of both. That is the historical context inside which this platform’s 23 years of relevance should be read and commemorated.

Six Months of Decline and the Release that Arrived to Boost

What the Numbers Say

WordPress has recorded six consecutive months of declining market share, dropping from 43.2 percent in December 2025 to 41.9 percent by May 2026. That 1.1 percentage point fall represents roughly four times the year-over-year decline rate measured between January 2025 and January 2026. W3Techs data is corroborated by HTTPArchive adoption metrics showing identical directional movement, which means this is not a measurement artefact. It is a real trend.

What makes it meaningful rather than just statistical data is that it is largely a WordPress-specific issue. Virtually all other major content management platforms are holding steady or growing in the same period. Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace are all gaining modest ground. Wix recorded 32.6 percent year-over-year growth. The market is not contracting. WordPress is losing share to competitors who have been sharpening their propositions against it for years.

What arrived at exactly this moment of scrutiny is worth noting carefully. WordPress 7.0, named Armstrong, launched on 20 May 2026 as the most structurally significant release since Gutenberg shipped in 2018. Native AI integration sits at the centre through the WP AI Client and Abilities API, a provider-agnostic framework connecting directly to OpenAI, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google Gemini without requiring a separate plugin for each integration. More than 400 enhancements and 486 bug fixes shipped across the editor, dashboard, and AI integration layers. How that AI layer connects to the broader shift in how content gets discovered is explored in the LITV analysis of how AI search is reshaping organic visibility.

A platform building that kind of infrastructure at the exact moment its numbers are being questioned is not winding down. It is recalibrating, and the difference between those two things matters enormously for how you make your next technology decision.

The Part Nobody Wants to Name Directly

Why the Governance Question Will Not Go Away

The market share decline is not only a technology story. It is a trust story, and honest analysis requires naming what actually happened rather than softening it into vague industry commentary.

Automattic’s valuation peaked near 7.5 billion dollars following a 2021 funding round. Since then, institutional investor BlackRock has marked down its stake by approximately 63 percent, with shares valued at 31.03 dollars as of March 2025 against an original purchase price of 85 dollars per share. Automattic laid off 16 percent of its global workforce in April 2025, roughly 281 employees across 90 countries. The legal dispute with WP Engine, triggered when CEO Matt Mullenweg blocked WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org, produced a disclosure that genuinely alarmed the developer community. Legal filings claimed that WordPress.org is Matt Mullenweg’s personal property rather than an asset held in trust by the WordPress Foundation.

For hundreds of thousands of businesses and developers who built their digital infrastructure on the assumption that WordPress is an open-source commons governed by a neutral foundation, that is not a minor clarification. It is the kind of governance uncertainty that makes enterprise architects nervous and individual developers quietly start evaluating their options. The question of why strategy and ownership clarity matter more than any individual tool sits underneath all of this.

I am writing this so as not to keep piling on about politics going on within the WordPress community itself. The full picture is having the only honest basket of eggs, and aside from the community (Business owners, enterprise users, developers, independent solo operators, professionals, hobbyists and students) deserves the full picture.

What 42 Percent Shared of the Internet Means

The Ownership Argument that SaaS Cannot Win

WordPress still holds 59.9 percent CMS market share among sites using a known content management system, and powers an estimated 472 to 595 million websites globally. The organisations running on it include Accenture, IBM, Samsung, Shell, JPMorgan Chase, and the United Nations, deploying it for blogs, career portals, enterprise content layers, and microsites at institutional scale. These are not casual or one-off technology decisions made by teams who had not considered the alternatives. They are deliberate choices made by people who understand exactly what they are buying.

The reason enterprises and solopreneurs alike keep choosing self-hosted WordPress comes down to something no SaaS website builder can replicate: full code ownership, full customisation depth, self-hosting capability, and the freedom to extend the platform in any direction without asking permission from a vendor’s product roadmap. WooCommerce processed an estimated 35 billion dollars in gross merchandise volume in 2025, making it the largest open-source eCommerce platform by transaction volume globally.

The SaaS builders gaining ground are genuinely capable tools for specific use cases. But they operate on a fundamentally different ownership model. You are renting space on someone else’s infrastructure, governed by someone else’s terms, constrained by what their feature decisions allow. The day that vendor changes pricing, deprecates an integration, or rewrites API access policy, your digital presence is at their discretion. Self-hosted WordPress is yours forever, like a diamond. The code. The database. The content architecture. The migration path. That ownership matters deeply to anyone building something intended to outlast any SaaS website platform or third-party vendor’s current strategic priorities, and the rise of vibe coding and low-code alternatives makes the ownership conversation more urgent rather than less.

What the Community Can Do Right Now

Keep Building on It

WordPress 7.0’s native AI Client with pre-registered connectors for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google introduces a standardised AI layer that the 70,000-plus plugin developers in the ecosystem will build on. The integrations extending the platform’s relevance into workflows that barely existed two years ago are coming, and they will arrive faster because the infrastructure is now standardised in core rather than fragmented across competing plugin approaches. Building on the platform right now is a direct vote for its continued momentum.

Pressure the Governance Conversation

The questions raised by the WP Engine dispute about WordPress.org’s ownership and the WordPress Foundation’s actual authority deserve continuous serious community attention. These should not be settled in a corporate lawsuit and quietly forgotten. The governance structures protecting the open-source commons belong to the community that depends on them, not to any single executive or company. Asking those questions loudly, consistently, and with specificity is the most useful thing a community member can do right now.

Invest in Performance

The average WordPress page loads in 3.4 seconds against the 2.5-second threshold Google recommends for Core Web Vitals. Modern alternatives like Next.js average 0.8 seconds, and that gap is cited as a migration reason by departing developers with increasing regularity. This is a real competitive vulnerability and it is a solvable one. Managed hosting, proper caching configuration, image optimisation, and the client-side media processing built into WordPress 7.0 collectively address the speed gap for teams willing to treat it as an implementation discipline problem rather than a platform limitation.

Contribute, Even in Small Ways

The open-source commons that makes WordPress available to a Malaysian developer building their first client site, a solopreneur in Singapore scaling a personal brand, and a Fortune 500 enterprise architecting a global content system is sustained by human contribution. WordCamp. GitHub contributions. Plugin reviews. Forum answers. Documentation improvements. Every person who participates in that ecosystem is casting a vote for its continued relevance, and those votes compound in ways that no marketing campaign can replicate.

My WordPress Story, and Why I Still Love WordPress

I run ladyintechverse.com on WordPress.org. The platform hosting my writing, my brand, my products, and more than a year of content I own completely – I can take anywhere if I ever need to. WPCode handles my custom scripts. A custom theme reflects my LITV brand system. My posts sit in a database I control on the hosting infrastructure I chose. That ownership matters to me as a founder building a long-term brand, and it will matter to you the day a SaaS platform you trusted decides to change its pricing model, deprecate the feature your workflow depends on, or simply decide that your use case no longer fits their product roadmap.

None of this means the data should be ignored, the governance questions should be left unanswered, or the performance gap should be accepted as a permanent condition. All three deserve serious attention from anyone who cares about where this platform goes next. Trust, once built through transparency and consistency, is the hardest thing in technology to rebuild when it fractures, and how brands sustain trust through genuine integrity rather than performance is the question sitting underneath this entire conversation.

Let’s keep the WP 🔥 alive.

– Fahiza s.