The WordPress plugin market shifted. What the evidence can and cannot say about AI

WordPress is the corner of this industry I understand most, and the plugin and page-builder market has changed a great deal in the past couple of years. It is tempting to treat that as the clearest example of AI disruption. After reading what the companies said and what the data shows, I think it is a mixed example, and the mix is worth laying out.

What Elementor said

According to Globes on 29 June 2026, Elementor was laying off about 100 employees, 30 percent of its workforce. Cofounder and CEO Yoni Luksenberg said the company "underestimated the speed of technological disruption and its impact on the old model." He described a "reset" toward a leaner, flatter organization focused on its core product and community. The article says the company pointed to a rapid shift in how websites are built and used, with AI agents becoming builders and users alongside people. Globes tied the wider upheaval to AI coding tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.

That is a real claim and it deserves to be taken seriously. If a person can describe a site to a coding assistant and get working code, a visual builder's central promise, that you do not need a developer, faces a competitor it did not plan for.

What WordPress core did

In July I wrote about a second explanation in Why WordPress page builders are laying people off, and what the AI headline is hiding. For five years WordPress core has been absorbing what page builders used to sell, in public, on a published roadmap. The block editor now handles headers, footers, templates and archives without an extra plugin or licence key. That argument rests on a timeline anyone can check, and it predates the current wave of coding assistants.

The two explanations do not compete. A builder squeezed from one side by free core features and from the other by AI-assisted custom work has less room to move than a builder squeezed from one side only. Elementor's own phrase, "the old model," could describe either.

What the market share says, and does not say

As of 29 October 2026, W3Techs reports WordPress at 39.5 percent of all websites and 58.3 percent of websites whose content management system it can identify. The page shows its history as a chart, and the text gives no year-over-year figure, so I cannot tell you from that page how much WordPress has gained or lost. Several secondary blogs put a mid-2025 peak at about 43.6 percent, which would imply a fall of roughly four points. I could not confirm that against W3Techs itself, so I treat it as unverified.

Even if the decline is real, a share of websites is a poor stand-in for the plugin economy. Sites with no detectable content management system, hand-written sites and hosted builders all move that number. It tells you something about where new sites are being created. It says nothing about what happens to the revenue of a company that sells a paid plugin to existing sites.

That is also why I cannot say how much of the shift was AI as a percentage. Elementor has not published how much of its pressure came from core and how much from AI tools, and the market-share series cannot separate them. Anyone who gives you a split is guessing.

Where this fits in the larger question

If the WordPress example shows anything, it is that a company can be in real trouble from AI and still not be an instance of "AI is replacing the workers." Elementor's workers were not replaced by an Elementor model. I think the company lost some of its pricing power in a market and cut the cost it could control, though Elementor has not said so. That is the same shape as the pattern in AI is in the budget more than in the headcount: AI changes the economics around the job before it changes the job, and the layoff announcement names AI because that is accurate for the market and imprecise for the role.

For people working in this space, the question I would ask is which part of your value comes from a feature that core can ship for free, and which part comes from judgment about one client's site. The second is harder to automate, and a buyer can understand it in a sentence.

How this was made. AI tools did the source reading and checking for this piece, and AI reviewers argued against the draft before it went out. The question is mine, and so is the decision to publish it.

Common questions

Why did Elementor lay off 30 percent of its staff? Globes reported on 29 June 2026 that CEO Yoni Luksenberg said the company "underestimated the speed of technological disruption and its impact on the old model," and cited a rapid shift in how websites are built and used, with AI agents becoming builders alongside people.

How many websites use WordPress? W3Techs reports 39.5 percent of all websites and 58.3 percent of websites with a known content management system, as of 29 October 2026.

References

• Globes. (2026, 29 June). Elementor layoffs. https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-1001547303 (Number, percentage, Luksenberg quotations and the reference to AI coding tools read from the article. It does not say the layoffs changed Elementor's WordPress products. The "reset" wording and "lean, flat and agile" phrase are paraphrased from it.)
• W3Techs. Usage statistics of WordPress. https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress (39.5 percent and 58.3 percent read from the page, dated 29 October 2026. The historical chart is an image and was not readable. The 43.6 percent peak is from secondary blogs and is not confirmed.)
• Ross, C. (2026, July). Why WordPress page builders are laying people off, and what the AI headline is hiding. https://thisismyurl.com/blog/page-builders-layoffs-wordpress-core/ (Referenced for the WordPress core timeline.)

Checked against the sources above, as listed, on 2026-10-29.