Why WordPress page builders are laying people off, and what the AI headline is hiding

July 1, 2026

Elementor is cutting roughly 30% of its workforce, about 100 people, and the reason on the record is the speed of technological disruption in the AI era. That follows Wix making its own cuts about a month earlier. Two of the biggest names in visual website building, trimming hard inside a few weeks of each other, both pointing at the same culprit.

I want to be careful here, because there are real people in this. The folks clearing out their desks aren't the ones who chose how the company would meet this moment. I have no interest in second-guessing them. My quarrel is with the explanation, not the workers, and I think the explanation deserves a harder look than it is getting.

Because when "AI" becomes the headline, it quietly does a job for everyone telling the story. It makes the change sound like weather. Something that rolled in from offshore, too fast and too strange to have planned for. And that is only part of what happened to the page builders.

The short version

Elementor and Wix cut staff and named AI as the cause.
For five years, WordPress core has been absorbing the theme-building work page builders used to sell, in the open, on a published roadmap.
The block editor now builds headers, footers, templates, and archives natively, with no extra plugin and no licence key.
The shift was readable years in advance, so the real question was always whether to adapt to it.

What WordPress core actually took

For the last five years, WordPress core has been absorbing the exact value page builders used to sell, and it did the absorbing in plain sight. The AI framing skips that part entirely.

The timeline of events leading to recent layoffs in the page builder industry. It begins with the limitations of older versions of WordPress and how page builders addressed those gaps, then shows how WordPress’s Full Site Editing closed that gap by integrating core features previously only available via plugins, ultimately diminishing the need for paid page builder licenses. — Five years of WordPress core releases, and the page-builder features each one made redundant.

The gap page builders filled

If you have been away from WordPress for a while, a quick bit of background. A page builder like Elementor existed because the old WordPress could lay out the inside of a page well enough, but it could not let you design the parts of the site that wrap around every page: your header and footer, and the template that decides how a blog post looks or how a category archive is arranged. To control those without writing PHP, you bought a builder, and a Pro licence on top of it for the theme-building tools. That was the gap, and it was a real gap. People paid for it gladly because the alternative was hiring a developer.

How core closed it

Then WordPress closed the gap itself. Full Site Editing matured, and WordPress 5.9 shipped it in January 2022. The Site Editor learned to build headers, footers, templates, and archives natively, inside the same screen where you edit a page, with no extra plugin and no licence key. The theme-building work that used to sit behind a Pro upgrade became part of the thing you already had.

Block themes came along as the default direction of the project, and they tend to be lighter and faster than the builder-heavy stacks that came before. That last part matters more than it sounds. Lighter, faster pages pass the Core Web Vitals, which Google says align with what its ranking systems reward, so the native path is cheaper and can also score better on the exact thing site owners are trying to win. The reason to keep paying for the builder got thinner with every release.

Nobody was surprised

None of this was a leak or a surprise. It shipped on a public roadmap, version after version, discussed in the open by anyone who wanted to follow along. If you read it, you could see the destination years before it arrived. The market was being reshaped in slow motion, and the page builders were not the only force doing the reshaping. AI is real. So is a core platform that spent half a decade walking up to your business model.

So you can blame AI for the cuts, or you can blame WordPress for changing the game. Both are the same move: pointing at the tool, when the harder thing was always the decision about whether to adapt to it.

The sawmill that nobody wanted

There is a much older version of this story, and it has nothing to do with software.

In 1593, a Dutchman named Cornelis Corneliszoon van Uitgeest bolted a crankshaft onto a windmill and built the first wind-powered sawmill. It cut timber about thirty times faster than men sawing planks by hand. Thirty times faster. That changes what a country can build.

Where the mills went

Sawing by hand was a craft, and the sawyers' jobs depended on it. A few miles north of Amsterdam, in the Zaan district, nobody had the authority to ban anything.

A few miles north, in the Zaan district, nobody had the authority to ban anything. So the Zaan simply said yes. By 1630 there were 83 sawmills north of Amsterdam, 53 of them in the Zaan, and it had become the workshop that helped power the Dutch Golden Age. The ships that turned a small country into a naval and trading superpower were cut there.

The sawing still got done and the ships still got built, and so did the fortunes, a few miles north of Amsterdam.

What to copy

That is the part nobody wants on a slide. The better bet is to treat AI and the new WordPress core the way the Zaan treated that crankshaft, as a way to multiply what your people can already do.

The change was readable in advance

The disruption did not blindside anyone who was paying attention. AI arrived roughly as promised, and so did the roadmap. It shipped in public, one release at a time, for anyone who cared to read it. The information needed to see this coming was free, dated, and sitting in plain view.

The information needed to see this coming was free, dated, and sitting in plain view.

I think that is the useful lesson buried under the layoff headlines, and it is worth taking even if you never build a website in your life. When a tool shows up that does part of your work much faster, the disruption isn't the surprise it gets reported as. Look for the roadmap first; in this case it was published, and the shift was slow enough to read. The hard part comes after: deciding what to do once you have read it, while the change is still a few releases away and easy to ignore.

A question for you

So I will leave you with a question, and it is one I have to answer for myself too.

When the sawmill showed up at the door, were we the Zaan or were we the sawyers?

I know which answer sits better with me, and I know it carries an uncomfortable implication for anyone who spent the last five years hoping the change would stop on its own. I would rather sit with that honestly than file it under "AI moved too fast." If you have watched this play out from inside the WordPress world, or from inside any trade where the machine arrived early and got argued about late, I would genuinely like to hear where you land.

Common questions about page builders and AI

Do I still need a page builder on WordPress? Not for the basics. The block editor now builds the headers, footers, templates, and archives that used to sit behind a Pro licence. If you are not sure whether to keep yours, I am happy to talk it through.

Should I move an existing site off a page builder? Only with a plan. A working site is worth more than a tidy stack, and a rushed move can break things that were fine. If the builder is slowing your pages down or costing you on licences, that is when a planned maintenance pass or a careful rescue starts to make sense.

Is AI really why these companies are cutting jobs? AI is part of it, and it is real. But the WordPress roadmap spent five years walking up to the same value these builders sold, out in the open. Blaming the tool is easier than talking about the decision to adapt to it or not.

References

Checked against web.dev's Core Web Vitals page and Google Search Central's Core Web Vitals page, on 2026-10-11.