Is this the end of the WordPress era?

For most of the last two decades the WordPress story only went one way: up. That changed in 2026. According to W3Techs, the tracker most of the industry quotes, WordPress powered 43.2% of all websites in December 2025 and 41.9% by late May 2026. Search Engine Journal counted six consecutive months of decline, a drop of 1.3 percentage points in half a year, which is double the loss for the whole of 2025. On the day this article was written, W3Techs shows 40.7% of all websites and 58.9% of sites with a known CMS.

So the decline is real. Whether it is the end of an era depends on what you think WordPress was for.

Where the share went

The first thing to notice is where the lost share did not go. Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are growing, but not fast enough to account for the WordPress drop on their own. The category that grew most strongly in the same period is "no detectable CMS". That bucket holds static sites, headless front ends, and the wave of sites generated by AI builders that output plain HTML or a JavaScript framework rather than a recognisable platform.

That points to a specific kind of loss. The simplest sites, the five-page brochure that used to land on a free WordPress theme, can now be produced in a browser in fifteen minutes by an AI builder, with hosting bundled and no updates to run. WordPress is not losing the sites that need it. It is losing the sites that never needed it.

The self-inflicted part

Search Engine Journal's analysis lists the usual suspects: competition from all-in-one builders, weak Core Web Vitals scores, security upkeep, and lingering dislike of the Gutenberg editor. But it also draws a line on the chart. The acceleration lines up with the dispute between Automattic's Matt Mullenweg and the host WP Engine, which began in late 2024 and included blocking WP Engine customers from receiving updates through WordPress.org.

By mid-2026 that fight has gone quiet without being settled. WP Engine's lawsuit is in discovery in a federal court in California; a judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in December 2025, and motions to dismiss were argued in June 2026. The Blog Herald's assessment is the one that matters for anyone choosing a platform: the structural problem is unchanged. WordPress.org is run as one person's project, Automattic holds the trademark, and the open-source licence guarantees access to the code but not to the update infrastructure the ecosystem depends on. Agencies noticed. Some of the "no detectable CMS" growth is agencies deciding they do not want a client's site to depend on a governance dispute.

What is not ending

Four in ten websites is not a platform in retreat. It is a platform whose growth stopped. The reasons WordPress won still hold for the middle of the market: a client who needs a blog, a booking flow, a members' area, a multilingual site, and a marketing team that can edit pages without a developer. No AI builder currently offers that combination with the same depth of plugins, and no headless stack offers it to a non-technical editor at all.

My own client work reflects that. The Spade Security Services site runs on WordPress because it needs 27 long-form articles, a local SEO structure across Placer County cities, an accessibility layer, and an AI chatbot built on the WordPress REST API. Those are exactly the requirements that push a site past what a builder can do, and WordPress handled them.

How to read the trend if you are choosing a platform

1. If the site is a brochure with no editorial workflow, an AI builder or a static site is now the sensible default. WordPress adds maintenance you will not use.
2. If the site is a content operation, WordPress remains the strongest choice, but treat it as a system to maintain: updates, backups, and a host you trust independently of the WordPress.org dispute.
3. If you are betting on the platform for years, watch governance, not market share. The share figures move slowly. A single decision about who may use the update servers moved the industry in a week.

The WordPress era is not ending. The era in which WordPress was the answer to every website question is. That is a smaller claim, and it is the one the data supports.

Sources

• WordPress Market Share Declines For Six Months In A Row, Search Engine Journal, 28 May 2026
• Usage statistics and market share of WordPress, W3Techs, retrieved 9 September 2026
• The people arguing about WordPress went quiet in 2026 and the problems that caused the argument are still there, The Blog Herald, 14 June 2026
• Automattic planned to target 10 competitors with royalty fees, WP Engine claims in new filing, TechCrunch, 12 February 2026