Updated: 9 May 2026 for clarity
There’s an awful lot of denial inside the WordPress developer community at the moment.
Any time anyone raises the topic of WordPress being old, lagging behind, that AI or another platform might be coming to impact developers livelihoods, there is a chorus of; “WP is too big to fail”, “you clearly aren’t working with the right clients”, “I don’t have the same problems or experiences so you must be doing it wrong” or “it’s served me well all these years, it will continue to be there for me”.
Here is my hot take:
I think these are the sentiments of people that either:
A: have their head firmly buried in the sand because it’s not something they really want to think about
B: haven’t properly used tools outside the WordPress ecosystem recently to truely appreciate what they are capable of. When I say “properly” I mean actually built client sites using other modern options, not just played around a bit or dismissed it because it’s unfamiliar.
C. Have a bee in their bonnet about open source and market share being some magical defence against competition of any kind. Or have fixed on marketshare verses single competitors, not the market as a whole shifting to new directions
WordPress is getting very long in the tooth. Efforts are being made to improve it but compared to the broader market they are glacial. Many people have tried to contribute meaningful patches to improve various aspects only to find their tickets languishing in WordPress purgatory. New competitors are emerging and existing competitors are improving all the time.
Key members of the community are expressing their views on the state of the platform and it’s not flattering. https://joost.blog/wordpress-refactor-not-redecorate/
WordPress is so big, so flexible a platform that it’s trying to cater to everyone. It’s harder to consider it best in class for many those use cases as time passes. So much effort has been poured into Gutenberg and competing with Wix and Shopify that the rest of core has suffered a slow stagnation.
There are other, objectively better platforms that solve some of the many pain points experienced by the majority of WordPress’s different audience types. Here are some examples:
Shopify is easier to use for most shop owners managing their own stores than Woocommerce on a day to day basis
Squarespace is easier for most low skilled users/business owners to get going on than WordPress without a designer/developer
Statamic, Craft or Astro are better for modern development workflows than WordPress
Raisely.com is a better donations platform than GiveWP
Name me an audience and I’d wager I can name you a tool that’s more modern and easier to use, especially for end users. Obviously, no tools are perfect and you can build a list of pros and cons for everything. But, the blanket "they don’t have 60,000+ plugins so I’m going to ignore them” stance of a lot of WordPress commentary on the broader web dev ecosystem is predicated on a market share argument. While it’s true that WP still powers over 40% of the web, it completely ignores all of WordPress’s many rough edges and failings compared to the competition. We’re all driving cars and buying online now rather than riding the horse to the shops…
And then there’s AI vibe coding. You can have legitimate “AI slop” complaints about it until you’re blue in the face. I know we do. However, the reality is that it’s coming for a portion of the market near you! AI just works better with almost all the modern platforms than it does with WordPress. End users aren’t aware of the tradeoffs and see a quick win. Modern well documented code with version control is bread and butter to an LLM. Also the fact that AI reaches first for tools like Astro by default will influence an entire new generation of web devs away from WordPress (assuming the profession survives the onslaught of AI in some form).
WordPress developers responding to anyone who has stepped away from WordPress and sing the praises of their chosen tool are always saying “tool X is no Wordress killer”. They are probably right but they are missing the point. It won’t be one single monolithic replacement that “kills it”. AI, Shopify, Astro, Statamic, Craft, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, vibe coding, Emdash or some other tool that doesn’t even exist yet. They’ll all play their part. Slapping an AI layer on decades old code and making the admin a slightly prettier shade of blue (WP v7) isn’t going to stop the tide from rising and leaving the archaic creaky code that underpins WP way behind. The barrier to entry for better solutions has been substantially lowered in the last 18 months with coding assistants and it’s accelerating daily.
Denial is stifling development of the platform
This level of denial is a major problem for the ecosystem. I see it everywhere from Facebook groups to the responses of project leadership to critical commentary or new competitors. I feel like the denial is obscuring the real underlying issues with the platform and preventing any real change.
The project prioritises things that make no sense if you’ve really deeply studied the other options available to any of WordPress’s various niches needs. It’s firmly focused on the issues of 5-10 years ago while more agile tools grow and evolve into the future. But, that’s ok apparently, because the project has market share. The problem with that is marketshare is an outcome not a feature.
WordPress is not going anywhere tomorrow. However, market share has started declining (down 1.3% year over year, according to W3 tech). I’ve visualised that below with some simplistic linear trends
The problem with market share as a sign of platform health is that it is a lagging indicator. WordPress already lost mindshare with whole sections of the client base and the developer base. Increasingly, new sites won’t be built on it. More existing WP sites will be rebuilt in different tools other than WordPress as time goes on. The small dip will become a flood.
The industry is changing so fast at the moment and I don't know if even in a perfect world whether WordPress is agile enough or has the right technical underpinnings to stay ahead of what's coming. But, the pervasive denial that anything could possibly be an existential threat to the platform given the size of the install base and previous success is just foolish and shortsighted.
I really wish WordPress was something better, more modern and evolving faster than it is. We’ve got over 100 WordPress sites under management that could really do with a better user experience, admin loading speed and feature set than they get from the core platform currently. They are not all going to be rebuilt overnight, we’ll be looking after some of them for years to come.
However, stepping outside the ecosystem and building new client sites in other tooling we’ve observed realities we can’t unsee:
Clients amazingly positive reactions to the editing experience on their new sites compared to WP
Our maintenance time halving on those sites
Our server CPU and memory usage being about 1/3 of equivalent WordPress installs
Our development experiences improving out of sight
These experiences have laid it bare for me. WordPress is slipping into complacency. Unless there’s a massive turn around from leadership it risks fading into irrelevance.
It’s like the old quote about going bankrupt, the death of a platform happens slowly at first then all at once.
Plan accordingly.
