No. WordPress is not dead in 2026. I still build on it, and the sites I built on it in 2007 still load this morning, which is a more useful answer than anything I could argue for.
The part worth your time is that the question keeps coming back, every couple of years, wearing a different cause of death each time.
That answer is free, though, and free answers are worth roughly what you pay for them. The part worth your time is that the question keeps coming back, every couple of years, wearing a different cause of death each time. Somebody names the killer, the killer is real enough to take seriously, and then a few years go by and WordPress is still here while the killer is a browser tab nobody opens any more.
So the honest way to answer the question is to go back and mark my own homework. In January 2012 I wrote a short, worried post asking whether WordPress would be dead by the end of the year. That post is long retired, so there is nothing for me to link you to, but I remember exactly why I wrote it, and walking the fourteen years since is how the one-word answer at the top gets earned.
The short version:
- No, WordPress is not dead in 2026, and the sites I built on it in 2007 still load this morning.
- The “WordPress is dead” question comes back every couple of years wearing a different cause of death, and the platform outlasts each one.
- What keeps it alive is the unglamorous part: you own your data, the ecosystem is decades deep, old sites keep working, and the GPL means no single company can close the door.
- When someone pitches you a migration, ask whether the replacement hands you ownership, an ecosystem, backward compatibility, and your whole archive on the way out, then listen for which one they skip.
What I wrote in 2012
The reason was two bills sitting in front of the U.S. Congress, SOPA and PROTECT IP, and the part that frightened working WordPress developers sat past the headline-grabbing “copyright holders can take down websites” clause. It was the next paragraph in, the one almost nobody talked about, which said copyright holders could also order the takedown of any tool they believed was facilitating infringement.
Read that carefully. If a user posted infringing content to a WordPress site, the publishing software itself could be ordered offline. The platform, the software every site was built on.
The piece I wrote was short and a bit alarmed. I ended on a question because I genuinely did not know whether the platform I was already building my income around would survive the year. Fourteen years later, the question is worth revisiting, not because the threat I named came true, but because of all the threats I didn’t name that did.
Where 2012-me got it right
The threat was real. SOPA and PROTECT IP were serious bills with serious sponsors, and the only reason they died was the January 18 blackout, when Wikipedia and Reddit and a few thousand smaller sites went dark for a day. I remember refreshing the news that morning, watching the bills lose co-sponsors by the hour. Without that protest, the legislative path was wide open. The Senate hearing schedule was set. People who tell you the bills were never going to pass weren’t paying attention in January 2012.
The deeper thing I got right was the fragility of an open-source ecosystem against legislative action. A platform like WordPress can be regulated out of existence in the country that hosts most of its contributors, with no hack or competitor required. That risk is still live fourteen years on. It has just stayed quieter than the ones that actually showed up.
What 2012-me got wrong
I was looking in the wrong direction. What actually came for WordPress over the next fourteen years arrived from the market and the technology, and years later from inside the project itself. SOPA died in late January 2012; by the end of that year, the question on every WordPress developer’s lips had shifted from “will Congress kill us” to “is Squarespace® going to eat our small-business work.”
That’s the pattern I want to walk through, because once I started writing this retrospective I realized something I hadn’t named clearly before: every couple of years, somebody confidently announces WordPress is dead, and every time the cause of death is different. The 2012 cause was different from the 2016 cause was different from the 2024 cause. And every time, the same few unglamorous things keep the platform alive.
How every “WordPress killer” actually died
2013–2014: “WordPress is just for blogs.” Squarespace and Wix® made their first real run at the small-business site market. They were beautiful, easy, and they shipped templates that didn’t look like a 2009 WordPress theme. A lot of the work I’d been quoting for $3,000–$5,000 started getting compared to about $16 a month at the time. I lost some pitches. I won others by explaining what happens when you want to leave. Most of those clients are still on WordPress today. Some of the ones who chose Squarespace are too; they came back when they needed something the template couldn’t do.
2015–2016: “WordPress can’t do real apps.” Ghost™ had launched back in 2013, but this was the window where the argument peaked: the publishing-pure alternative, a clean, Node-based, “just blogging” CMS that openly positioned itself as everything WordPress had stopped being. At the same time, Jekyll and Hugo were eating the developer mindshare for personal sites. The framing was that WordPress had gotten heavy and slow, and that PHP was the past tense of the web. Some of that critique was fair. WordPress in 2016 had real performance problems and a database layer that did not love being asked to do clever things. Ghost was good, and it still didn’t replace WordPress. “Just blogging” turned out to be a smaller market than people thought, and the publications that needed more than blogging needed an ecosystem Ghost was never going to build alone.
2018: Gutenberg. This one was internal, and it was bad. When the block editor shipped in 5.0, a meaningful chunk of the WordPress developer community thought it would kill the platform from the inside. I had clients on the phone asking why their editor had changed without warning. I had agency friends seriously discussing forks. I’ll be honest: I didn’t love the rollout either. The communication was poor, the timing was rushed, and the React-based architecture felt like a betrayal of the simplicity that had made WordPress the thing it was. ClassicPress™ forked. A lot of people predicted that 2019 would be the year the wheels came off.
They didn’t. The block editor got better. The community absorbed the change the way it had absorbed every previous change, which is to say imperfectly and over years, and the platform was bigger at the end of 2020 than at the start of 2018. The developers who’d sworn off WordPress mostly came back, because the work was still there and the alternatives still didn’t have an ecosystem.
2019–2021: “Headless is the future.” The REST API plus a Next.js™ or Gatsby™ front end became the “serious developers don’t use WordPress for the front end any more” argument. Decoupled CMS think pieces multiplied. I built a few headless WordPress sites in this window and learned something useful: the headless setup is genuinely better for a small set of sites with real performance or polyglot-front-end requirements, and genuinely worse for everyone else, because you’ve just doubled the surface area you have to maintain. Most clients don’t need that surface area. The ones who do are happy to pay for it. Headless settled in as one more thing you can do with WordPress.
2021–2022: Webflow® and Framer®. The pitch was that WordPress belonged to developers who didn’t care about design and the visual web belonged to a new generation of tools, and honestly, the designers I respect most do use Webflow, it’s a real tool doing real work, it just doesn’t sit underneath a publication with a hundred contributors and twenty years of archived content, and it doesn’t hand you a portable database you can carry away with you.
2023–2024: Artificial intelligence (AI) site builders. Wix ADI, Squarespace Fluid Engine, Framer AI, Notion® AI, Vercel® v0, Bolt™. “Describe what you want, ship a site.” WordPress was framed as antique by comparison. I built some test sites in each of these tools to see what they did well. The answer was: starting points. They’re excellent starting points. They are not yet the answer for a site that needs to be maintained for ten years by a team of three with a complicated editorial workflow and four custom post types. They might get there. Ask me again in two years and I may well be writing the other half of this paragraph, which is a sentence I would not have written about any of the earlier entries on this list, and that is worth saying out loud.
2024–2025: the internal year. The WP Engine® and Automattic® dispute was the closest the platform came to actually fracturing in the time I’ve been on it. I’m not going to relitigate the personalities here, because the personalities aren’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that the platform’s commercial host war, the trademark conflict, the .org/.com schism, contributors leaving Automattic, and a year of community discourse that felt genuinely awful to be inside of, did not actually stop the underlying thing from working. Sites kept publishing. Plugins kept updating. Behind all of it, the GPL held the door open so no single party could close it. Whatever you think of the principals in that dispute, the platform was bigger than any of them. That, in retrospect, is the most reassuring thing about the year.
| When | The cause of death | The challenger | What actually happened |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | Legislation will end it | SOPA, PROTECT IP | Bills died after the January 18 blackout. The risk never went away, it just went quiet. |
| 2013–2014 | “WordPress is just for blogs” | Squarespace ®, Wix ® | Won on templates and price. Most of those clients are still on WordPress; some came back. |
| 2015–2016 | “It can’t do real apps” | Ghost ™, Jekyll, Hugo | Good tools, smaller market. Publications needed an ecosystem none of them could build alone. |
| 2018 | Gutenberg kills it from inside | The block editor, ClassicPress ™ | The editor got better. The platform was bigger at the end of 2020 than at the start of 2018. |
| 2019–2021 | “Headless is the future” | REST API with Next.js ™, Gatsby ™ | Better for a few sites, worse for most. Settled in as one more thing WordPress can do. |
| 2021–2022 | “The visual web moved on” | Webflow ®, Framer ® | Real tools doing real work. They do not sit under twenty years of archive or hand you a portable database. |
| 2023–2024 | “Describe it and ship it” | Wix ADI, Fluid Engine, Framer AI, Vercel ® v0, Bolt ™ | Excellent starting points. Not yet a site three people maintain for ten years. |
| 2024–2025 | The internal year | The WP Engine ® and Automattic ® dispute | Sites kept publishing and plugins kept updating. The GPL held the door open. |
Why the platform keeps surviving
If you lay the “WordPress killer” moments next to each other, the pattern is hard to miss. Each one targets a different surface: small business, blogging, the editor itself, the front end, design, AI generation, internal governance. And each one runs into the same handful of things WordPress has that the killer doesn’t.
Ownership is the one clients only feel on the day it matters. WordPress is the only major CMS where the data on your site is genuinely yours. Self-hosted, open file system, open database, exportable in standard formats, importable into anything else that speaks SQL. Every SaaS competitor (and I mean every one) owns the platform; you rent your presence on it. If Squarespace decides tomorrow that your account is closed, your archive is gone. If WP Engine decides tomorrow that your account is closed, you SFTP the files and the database to another host by lunchtime. That difference looks small until the day it isn’t.
Ownership is the one clients only feel on the day it matters.
Then there is the ecosystem. Roughly sixty thousand plugins sit on the .org repository, and behind those plugins is a working economy of independent developers who’ve built their careers on the platform. That economy is the moat nobody else has been able to rebuild. An ecosystem takes a decade to grow, plus a critical mass of people who depend on the platform for their income, which is why money on its own has never produced one. WordPress has had that for fifteen years now. The newer entrants, even the well-funded ones, keep discovering that the editor is the easy part, and that everything around it is the decade of work.
Backward compatibility is the quiet one. Sites I built in 2007 still load. Plugins from 2012 still work, mostly. I restore old furniture when I get shop time, and the reason a hundred-year-old dresser is worth forty hours of stripping and sanding is that it comes apart: the joinery is visible and the parts separate, so you can take it back to bare wood and put a fresh finish on it without destroying anything underneath. The glued-and-stapled particleboard piece from six years ago goes to the curb instead, because there is nothing in there to work with. WordPress is built like the dresser. Core’s commitment to not breaking existing sites is unusual in the wider software industry, where major versions routinely require rewrites, and for a publication or an institution that needs the site to last more than three or four years, that compatibility ethos is load-bearing. It is the reason a university or a newspaper can commit to WordPress and not have to rebuild the whole stack at the next major release. The competitors who ship faster do so partly by being willing to break things. WordPress made the opposite bet back in 2003, and every year a 2007 site still loads is interest paid on that bet.
The GPL only shows its value in a crisis, which is exactly when you want it. If Automattic ever truly went off the rails (and reasonable people disagree about how close 2024 came to that), the community could fork the platform tomorrow. ClassicPress already did once. The license guarantees that the underlying software survives any specific governance crisis. No proprietary CMS offers that. It is the structural reason the 2024–2025 dispute, as ugly as it got, was never actually existential.
The reason I’d put at the top is the boring one. The actual job of running a publication is unglamorous. It is mostly prose, taxonomy, redirects, user roles, editorial review, and the long tail of small editorial decisions that make a site readable five years after launch. Every WordPress killer chases the glamorous parts (visual editing, real-time collaboration, AI generation) and discovers somewhere around month eighteen that the unglamorous parts are the actual product. WordPress has been doing those unglamorous parts since 2003, and it has gotten them remarkably right.
Why I’m still building on it
I want to be honest about what I wish were different. Block themes are still rougher than they should be after this many years of work. The full-site editing experience is better than it was, but it’s not yet the thing I want to hand to a non-technical editor without sitting beside them for an hour. The plugin ecosystem’s strength is also its weakness; security and quality vary wildly, and the burden of curation falls on whoever’s building the site. I’d like to see the platform get more serious about a curated, audited tier of recommended plugins. That’s a real critique, and I’d rather say it out loud than pretend the platform is finished.
But after nineteen years building on this platform, through every “WordPress is dead” cycle I’ve named above, the case for staying has only gotten clearer. When a client asks me what they should build their site on in 2026, the answer is still WordPress for the same reasons it was the answer in 2007. The data is theirs. The platform survives its own crises. The ecosystem is deep enough to do almost any reasonable thing they’ll want to do in the next ten years. And on the day they want to leave, they can take the whole archive with them.
2012-me was worried about the wrong thing, but he was right to be worried. The platform has been threatened repeatedly, by causes nobody predicted, and it has come through each one a little bigger and a little harder to kill. The next “WordPress is dead” piece will arrive within eighteen months, and the threat in it will probably be real, because the threat usually is. The question I hold those pieces to is a plain one: does the named replacement hand you ownership, an ecosystem, backward compatibility, and your whole archive on the way out? Ask it out loud the next time somebody pitches you a migration, and listen for which of the four they skip.
The most recent round of that story is what the page-builder layoffs actually mean, which is the same pattern wearing this year’s clothes. That’s why I’m still here. If you’d like to talk about a site that needs to last, you can find what I do on the services page.
Common questions about WordPress in 2026
Is WordPress still worth it in 2026? Yes. When a client asks me what to build on, the answer is still WordPress, for the same reasons it was in 2007: the data is theirs, the ecosystem runs deep, and old sites keep working. If you have a site that needs to last, here is how I keep sites healthy year after year.
What is replacing WordPress? Nothing has, yet. Squarespace, Wix, Ghost, headless setups, Webflow, and the newer AI site builders each took their run and each settled in as a good tool for a narrower job. They make excellent starting points, but none of them hands you ownership, a decade-deep ecosystem, and your whole archive on the way out.
I want off my current platform. Can I move to WordPress? Usually, yes, and the fact that your content is portable is the whole point. If your site is stuck somewhere you want out of, that is exactly the kind of move I help with on the rescue side. WordPress also keeps moving, so it is worth knowing what changed in WordPress 7 before you plan a migration.
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