Is WordPress Dead? What the 2026 Numbers Actually Say

No, WordPress isn’t dead. It still powers 39.2% of all websites, according to W3Techs’ WordPress usage figures (November 12, 2026). That’s more than every other content management system combined.

But it’s shrinking, and the drop sped up sharply in 2026. The company behind it has had a rough two years. And this month, I moved my own website off it.

Is WordPress Actually Dying?

WordPress isn’t dying, but it is declining. W3Techs shows its share of all websites falling from 43.6% in January 2025 to 39.2% in November 2026. It’s still the biggest platform by a wide margin. The change is that it’s stopped being the automatic choice for every new website.

Since January 2026 alone, WordPress has lost 3.8 points and sites with no detectable CMS have gained 3.7. Shopify picked up 0.4, and Wix didn’t move.

Date	WordPress	WordPress Change	No CMS	No CMS Change	Shopify	Shopify Change	Wix	Wix Change
Jan 2025	43.6%	Start	29.6%	Start	4.7%	Start	3.3%	Start
Apr 2025	43.5%	▼ -0.1	29.1%	▼ -0.5	4.8%	▲ +0.1	3.6%	▲ +0.3
Jul 2025	43.4%	▼ -0.1	28.8%	▼ -0.3	4.8%	No change	3.9%	▲ +0.3
Oct 2025	43.3%	▼ -0.1	28.6%	▼ -0.2	4.8%	No change	4.1%	▲ +0.2
Jan 2026	43.0%	▼ -0.3	28.6%	No change	5.0%	▲ +0.2	4.2%	▲ +0.1
Apr 2026	42.5%	▼ -0.5	28.9%	▲ +0.3	5.1%	▲ +0.1	4.3%	▲ +0.1
Jul 2026	41.5%	▼ -1.0	29.9%	▲ +1.0	5.2%	▲ +0.1	4.3%	No change
Oct 2026	40.2%	▼ -1.3	31.5%	▲ +1.6	5.4%	▲ +0.2	4.2%	▼ -0.1
Nov 12, 2026	39.2%	▼ -1.0	32.3%	▲ +0.8	5.4%	No change	4.2%	No change

No CMS means no detectable content management system. Change is in percentage points since the row above, and each date is the 1st of the month except November 12. Source: W3Techs’ quarterly CMS history, read November 12, 2026.

The website builders that advertise against WordPress have barely moved this year. Sites built without a CMS grew by almost exactly what WordPress lost. Pantheon co-founder Josh Koenig put the cause in two words on X: “It’s vibecoding.”

What Has WordPress Been Good For?

WordPress earned its spot. It’s free, it’s open source, you own your content, and there’s a plugin for almost anything. Millions of developers know it, so help is easy to find. And a business owner can log in and change a page without calling anyone, which is why I still build on it for clients who edit their own sites.

I built on WordPress for years, and so did most of the industry. It made it possible for a small business to have a real website without a custom build budget.

Those strengths are still real. Some of them now have cheaper or faster alternatives, though, and WordPress’s weaknesses have become harder to ignore.

Why Is WordPress Losing Ground?

Three things are pushing people away: AI has made it easy to build a website without a content management system, the organization behind WordPress has been through two years of public conflict, and plugins carry most of the platform’s security risk. None of these would sink WordPress on its own, but together they explain why more new sites skip it.

AI Made It Easy to Build Without a CMS

When someone asks an AI tool to build a website, it usually writes the site as code. It doesn’t install WordPress first. That’s the most likely reason the “no detectable CMS” share climbed from 28.6% to 32.3% this year. A small hand-built or AI-built site can be faster, cheaper to host, and has nothing to update.

SEO agency owner TJ Robertson said much the same in a July 2026 post. After 17 years of building WordPress sites, his agency has stopped building new ones, even though about half his clients still run on WordPress. His reason is that WordPress isn’t built for AI to edit directly.

The People Running WordPress Had a Rough Two Years

WordPress itself is open source, but its main project and plugin directory are closely tied to Matt Mullenweg and his company, Automattic. Since 2024, that relationship has produced a ban, a long-running lawsuit, a failed attempt to remove the CEO, and layoffs. If you want a stable platform, that history is worth knowing.

1. September 2024: WordPress.org blocked hosting company WP Engine from its resources, so WP Engine’s customers couldn’t install or update plugins and themes from their dashboards.
2. October 2024 onward: WP Engine sued Automattic and Mullenweg. The case is still going, with new allegations filed in February 2026.
3. September 2026: Automattic’s board put Mullenweg on leave. He retook control 33 hours later, and the directors, CFO and chief legal officer involved left.
4. October 2026: Automattic began layoffs.

The 2024 ban is the part that affects you. Your WordPress site runs on your own hosting, but its plugin and theme updates come from WordPress.org, so when WordPress.org cut off one host, that host’s customers lost access to them.

Plugins Are Where the Risk Lives

Plugins cause most WordPress security problems, not WordPress itself. Patchstack found 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, with 91% in plugins and only six in WordPress core. The more plugins your site runs, the more you have to keep updated.

The numbers come from Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security in 2026 report. It also found that 46% of vulnerabilities weren’t fixed by the time they were made public. Every plugin you add is one more thing that can break or be exploited.

What Did WordPress 7.0 Change?

WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”, released May 20, 2026, added a central place to connect AI services and a redesigned dashboard. Its release post calls it “laying the foundation for AI across the WordPress experience.” The project is still shipping major releases with new features, which a dead platform wouldn’t do.

What Does WordPress’s Co-Founder Say About It?

Matt Mullenweg has acknowledged the decline publicly, but he hasn’t said WordPress is finished. He blames the project’s own culture and a lack of investment from the companies that earn the most from it. If you’ve heard that “even the founder says WordPress is dying,” that’s not quite what he said.

In late April 2026, Mullenweg posted a long critique in a WordPress project channel. As quoted by Ben Werdmuller, he wrote: “We are not being killed by competition, I believe we have done this to ourselves.”

In June, someone replied to him on X with a W3Techs graph showing the drop. His response: “Yeah, it’s what I predicted if we didn’t increase R&D investment from those making the most money from WordPress, literally what I’ve been saying for years. Good news is the decline has woken people up and they’re doing it finally.”

Is WordPress Bad for SEO and AI Search?

No. Google and AI tools don’t rank or cite a site based on the platform it’s built on. What matters is whether your content is in the HTML the crawler receives, whether the page loads quickly, and whether the site is maintained. A standard WordPress site serves plain HTML, which is exactly what you want.

You’ll see posts claiming AI search skips WordPress sites. I haven’t found any evidence for that. Like the advice to add an llms.txt file, it’s a claim that doesn’t hold up.

Two things do cause problems:

• Heavy page builders and stacks of plugins can make pages slow and bloated. That comes from how a site is built, and it happens on other platforms too.
• Content that only appears after JavaScript runs can be invisible to some AI tools. Google can run JavaScript before indexing a page, but Anthropic’s documentation says its Claude web fetch tool “currently does not support websites dynamically rendered with JavaScript.”

This is where leaving WordPress can backfire. If you move for a site that builds its pages in the browser with JavaScript, you could end up harder for AI tools to read, not easier. Whatever you build on, make sure the words are in the page when it loads. That’s the first thing I check in an AI SEO engagement.

Why I Moved My Own Site Off WordPress

I rebuilt geoseo.digital without WordPress and launched it on November 8, 2026. I build and run it with AI tools, and every page is plain HTML. I had three reasons: to make the site easier to run, to make it more secure, and to test this way of working on my own business before I recommend it to anyone else.

Since the move:

• Changes are quicker. I describe a change to an AI coding tool, check the result on a preview link, and publish it. There’s no page builder in the way.
• There’s less to attack. With no plugins, no login page and no database, there’s nothing to patch on a Tuesday night.
• Every URL stayed the same. Each page kept its old address, so Google didn’t have to relearn the site.

It’s also an experiment. If you found this post through Google or an AI answer, it’s working.

The trade-off is that there’s no admin dashboard. If you’re not comfortable working with code or an AI tool, you couldn’t update this site yourself. That suits me, because I manage everything, but it wouldn’t suit most of my clients.

It’s too early to report results, since the site has been live for days, not months. I’ll update this post with real Search Console numbers once there’s enough data to mean something.

Should Your Business Leave WordPress?

Probably not right now, unless something’s already pushing you. If your WordPress site is fast, secure and looked after, there’s no urgent reason to move. The right time to consider it is when you’re due for a redesign or rebuild anyway, or when maintenance has become a constant headache.

Your situation	What I’d do
Your site works, it’s maintained, and you edit it often	Stay on WordPress
You run an online store on WooCommerce	Stay for now, or look at Shopify when you rebuild
Your site is slow and built with a heavy page builder	Rebuild it, on lean WordPress or something else
Nobody updates the plugins	Fix that now, or move to something with fewer moving parts
You have a small site you rarely change	Moving is worth considering at your next rebuild
You need to edit pages yourself without a developer	Stay on WordPress, ideally with a lean block theme

What If You Need to Edit Your Own Site?

Then WordPress is still one of the best options, as long as it’s built lean: a custom block theme instead of a heavy page builder, with only the plugins you actually need. You keep the editing dashboard without most of the bloat and update risk that gives WordPress its reputation.

That’s how I build WordPress sites for clients who need to make their own changes. For clients who’d rather send me edits, I build static sites like mine. You can see both options on my web design page.

What Are the Alternatives to WordPress?

The main alternatives are hosted builders like Wix and Squarespace, Shopify for online stores, Webflow for design-led sites, and static sites built with frameworks like Astro. Each trades something away. Hosted builders are easy but limit control. Static sites are fast and low maintenance but need someone technical to edit.

Option	Best for	The trade-off
Shopify	Online stores	Monthly fees and app costs add up
Wix or Squarespace	Owners building a site themselves	Less control, harder to move away from later
Webflow	Design-led marketing sites	Learning curve, and you’re tied to its hosting
Static site (for example Astro)	Small, fast sites someone else maintains	No dashboard for non-technical editing
Lean WordPress	Sites the owner edits often	Still needs plugin and core updates

How Do You Leave WordPress Without Losing Your Rankings?

Plan it carefully, because changing platforms is one of the easiest ways to lose rankings and leads. Google’s site move guide says to “expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move,” and new URLs can take a few weeks or more to replace the old ones in results.

What Can Go Wrong When You Leave WordPress?

The biggest risks are lost rankings from changed or broken URLs, SEO settings a plugin was quietly handling, broken tracking, and forms or bookings that stop working. Most of these don’t show up on launch day. You find out weeks later, when leads drop and nobody can say why.

These are the risks I check for on every move:

• Rankings and traffic drop. Pages that change address without a redirect lose the trust they’d built, and links from other sites to them turn into 404 errors.
• SEO settings go missing. Titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags and structured data that an SEO plugin like Yoast or Rank Math added automatically don’t come across on their own.
• Tracking breaks. If Google Analytics, conversion tracking or ad pixels aren’t rebuilt, you lose the numbers that show whether the move hurt you, and ad platforms optimize on bad data.
• Forms and bookings stop working. Contact forms, booking widgets and email notifications that ran on plugins have to be rebuilt and tested.
• Features disappear. Anything a plugin did, from reviews to galleries to online payments, needs a replacement.
• Email goes down. If you move your domain’s DNS without copying every record, your business email can stop arriving.
• It costs more than planned. Rebuilds uncover old pages, redirects and integrations nobody remembered, and each one adds time.

How Do You Move Without Losing Rankings?

Record where you stand before you start, keep every URL you can, redirect the rest, and test forms and tracking before launch. Then watch Search Console for at least a month. If most of your leads come from your website, plan the move with someone who has migrated sites before.

1. Record your baseline: rankings, Search Console clicks and impressions, and leads from the last few months, so you can tell if anything drops.
2. List every URL on the old site, including blog posts, PDFs and images that get traffic.
3. Keep the same URLs wherever you can. Where one has to change, set up a permanent (301) redirect from the old address to the new one.
4. Carry over titles, meta descriptions, headings and structured data, and keep page content in plain HTML.
5. Rebuild and test forms, bookings and tracking on a preview link before the new site goes live.
6. Copy every DNS record, including email, before you switch.
7. Submit your new sitemap in Google Search Console after launch.
8. Watch Search Console for at least four weeks for 404 errors and pages dropping out of the index, and fix them quickly.

The Takeaway

WordPress isn’t dead. It’s still the biggest platform on the web and still shipping major releases. But it’s no longer the default, the growth is in sites built without a CMS, and the organization behind it has given businesses reasons to be cautious.

If your site works, don’t move just because of a headline. If you’re rebuilding anyway, choose the platform that fits how you’ll actually run the site. And whatever you choose, keep your content in plain HTML, keep your URLs, and keep the site maintained.

FAQs About WordPress in 2026

Is WordPress still worth it for a small business in 2026?

Yes, if you need to edit your own pages or run a store on WooCommerce. WordPress is still the most widely used platform and easy to find help for. Build it lean, with a block theme and few plugins, and keep it updated. If you rarely change your site, a simpler static site may cost less to run.

Who owns WordPress?

Nobody owns the WordPress software. It’s open source, and anyone can use or change it. But co-founder Matt Mullenweg leads the project and runs WordPress.org, home of the plugin and theme directory that most sites update from. His company, Automattic, owns WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr, which is why its troubles ripple through the wider WordPress world.

What happens to my WordPress site if Automattic has problems?

Your site would keep running, because it lives on your own hosting, not Automattic’s. The bigger dependency is WordPress.org, where your plugin and theme updates come from. In 2024, WP Engine customers were blocked from installing and updating plugins and themes from their dashboards. A good host and a short plugin list reduce that risk.

Is WordPress safe to use?

WordPress core is generally safe. Patchstack found only six core vulnerabilities in 2025, all low priority. The risk comes from plugins and themes, which made up all but those six of the 11,334 found that year. Keep everything updated, remove plugins you don’t use, and choose a host that patches quickly.

What are people using instead of WordPress?

According to W3Techs, sites with no detectable CMS grew by almost exactly the share WordPress lost in 2026. Many are built by hand or with AI tools. Shopify grew slightly for online stores. Wix and Squarespace stayed flat. Webflow and static frameworks like Astro are common choices for marketing sites.

Not Sure What to Do With Your WordPress Site?

If you’re wondering whether to keep your site, fix it or rebuild it, I can take a look. My free audit checks how your site shows up on Google and in AI answers, and what’s holding it back. If a rebuild makes sense, I’ll tell you which platform fits how you run your business.

Already know you need a new site? Here’s how I approach web design for small businesses.