There’s an awful lot of denial inside the WordPress community at the moment.
Any time anyone raises the topic of AI or another platform coming to impact developers livelihood’s there is a chorus of “WP is too big to fail”, “you clearly aren’t working with the right clients” 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 have their head firmly buried in the sand because it’s not something they really want to think about or they haven’t properly used tools (built client sites using other modern options) outside the ecosystem recently.
There are other, objectively better platforms for the majority of WordPress’s different audience types. And AI vibe coding, which you can have some valid “AI slop” complaints about until you’re blue in the face is coming for a portion of the market near you!
WordPress is not going anywhere tomorrow but market share has started declining (down 1.3% year over year) and that’s a lagging indicator. It’s lost the mindshare and new sites won’t be built on it increasingly.
It also won’t be one single monolithic replacement that “kills it”. AI, Shopify, Astro, Statamic, Craft, Wix, vibe coding, emdash or some other tool that doesn’t even exist yet. They’ll all take their part. Slapping an AI layer on decades old code 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 18months and it’s accelerating.
It’s like the old quote about going bankrupt it happens slowly at first then all at once.
Plan accordingly.
