WordPress has a newcomer problem

Is WordPress outdated in 2026?

I'll say it so there's no confusion about where I stand. I hate the fucking thing. Not the brand, I don't hate WordPress as a brand, just the platform itself. It's old and dated, we don't drive cars that old, and it came out in 2003, long before my iPhone 1.

I did use it, a few years ago, and what I found is how clunky it is, how nothing is just "easy", and how mistakes got made all the time, so I gave up. I'll be honest, my lifestyle changed too, so I didn't need it. I still touch it from time to time, but not directly. I use my AI to do it through my browser, and it's ok, but slow and restrictive, because of the plugins and dated themes. I assume it's got better, and I know you can connect AI to it now, but it's not as clean as custom code. Now I code everything with AI. It's fast, it's effective, it's better design, and it's better for AI. Just look at the website you're on now. I can add helpful content faster than it used to take me to research a new topic, approve it and rewrite it, and the final execution takes minutes.

Is WordPress losing market share in 2026?

WordPress still runs about four in every ten websites, so let's be fair, it's the giant. But it has slid every single month this year, from 43% of all websites on 1 January to 39.5% now, according to W3Techs, which tracks this. And the bit that made me sit up is where it went. Not to Wix, not to Shopify, they barely moved. It went to websites with no system behind them at all, which rose from 28.6% to 32.2% over the same months, the first time that number has gone up in more than a decade. Sites built straight from code. Sites like this one.

Are fewer people starting new WordPress sites?

I don't care about the people already on it. People are creatures of habit, moving a site is a chore, and they'll stay for years. The new user is gold, and the new user isn't turning up. The questions a beginner types into Google are disappearing. In America, "does WordPress cost money" is down 85% in a year, "why WordPress" and "is WordPress easy to use" are both down by around half, and searches for WordPress hosting, which is what you look for when you're about to start one, are down 70%. Here in Bulgaria, more people now search for Claude Code than for WordPress, and they have since the first half of this year. And when people do wonder about WordPress now, they ask AI: "is WordPress still worth it" went from about 20 questions a month to several hundred. It's not so much that WordPress searches are falling, it's just less in the conversation.

What is the downside of using WordPress?

This is the reality. It was designed many years ago as a blog site, then it added lots of plugins to function as a website, and now, who knows. And the plugins are where the trouble lives. 11,334 new WordPress security holes were found in 2025, 91% of them in plugins, and this summer even WordPress itself needed an emergency fix. It also runs on an old programming language called PHP, and the AI tools building today's new websites don't write it. PHP's share of websites has dropped from 75% to 69% in under two years. Nobody ran away from PHP, most business owners have never heard of it. The machines just don't speak it.

Do you still need a CMS, or should a website be custom-built?

Don't build it yourself. Let someone who lives in this world do it. It's not expensive like it was, and you focus on what you do best, your business. That goes for any CMS, a content management system, the dashboard you log into to update your own site. We don't live in that world anymore. Why would you want a website you update yourself, for a client that doesn't click unless they have to? Yes, make it look cool for when they do, I do, but make it so it can be spoken about in AI search. Be the answer. Websites have a new objective now, in November 2026, and it won't stay still in 2027.

I would never use WordPress for me or for a client. If that's what you want, it's not us, but it's cool, you're spoiled for choice of agencies who will happily do it for you.

Is WordPress dying, or still the king of the castle?

My call: gone, or they invest heavily in R&D, which will be a challenge, because they have far too many current sites that need to keep working. I'm sure they talk about this all the time, I hope they do. It's still the market leader and runs about four in ten websites, but is it the king of the castle for much longer? Time will tell.