What happens to WordPress websites now?

Every year someone declares WordPress finished, and every year it powers a larger absolute number of websites than the year before. The predictions keep failing because they misidentify what WordPress is.

It is not a content management system competing on features. It is infrastructure with a labor market attached. There are millions of people who can be hired tomorrow to work on it, tens of thousands of plugins for whatever your business needs, and a hosting industry built around it. That is not something a better editing experience displaces.

But something is genuinely changing, and if your business runs on WordPress it is worth understanding precisely what.

What is actually pressuring it

The performance floor moved. Core Web Vitals made speed a ranking and conversion factor, and the typical WordPress installation (a theme, a page builder, and twenty-six plugins each loading its own stylesheet) starts from a difficult position. It is entirely possible to make WordPress fast. It is not what happens by default.

The security surface is a business risk, not a technical one. The vast majority of WordPress compromises are not core vulnerabilities. They are abandoned plugins. Every plugin is a dependency on a maintainer who may lose interest, and most sites have dozens. The industry's honest answer for years has been "keep everything updated", which assumes an attentive owner that most small businesses do not have.

The alternatives got genuinely good. Static site generators, headless CMSs, and modern site builders produce fast, secure, cheap-to-host sites without a database or a patching schedule.

AI changed the cost of building from scratch. The strongest historical argument for WordPress was that a custom site was expensive. When a competent developer with AI assistance can produce a bespoke marketing site in days, the "but it's free and there's a theme for it" argument weakens considerably.

What is not going to happen

WordPress is not going to collapse. Forty percent of the web does not migrate. Most of those sites will not be touched for years. The installed base is a fact of the internet now, like email.

Plugins are not going away. For an enormous class of business (a shop that needs WooCommerce, a firm that needs a booking system, a support desk running Awesome Support) the plugin ecosystem is the reason WordPress is the answer. Nothing else has that breadth.

The labor market is not going away either. You can hire a WordPress developer in any city on earth. Try that with your framework of choice.

Our actual prediction

The market splits, and it is already splitting.

WordPress keeps winning where the plugin ecosystem is the product. Commerce with unusual requirements, membership sites, bookings, LMS, support desks, anything where a plugin represents years of domain logic you would otherwise write. Here WordPress is not a compromise. It is the correct choice.

WordPress loses ground where the site is essentially a brochure. For a marketing site (ten to thirty pages, a blog, a contact form, some landing pages) a static or lightly-generated site is faster, safer, cheaper to host, and now no harder to build. This is the segment that quietly migrates over the next few years, and it is a large segment.

WordPress increasingly becomes a back end. Editors keep the admin they know; the front end is rendered by something else via the REST API. This gets more common, and it is a genuinely good arrangement when the editorial team is large.

WordPress will not die. It will stop being the default and become a choice: one that is right for a specific and still-enormous set of cases.

If you are sitting on a WordPress site right now

Do not panic-migrate. Do this instead.

1. Get an honest measurement. Speed, technical health, SEO, and whether AI answer engines can read your pages. Most WordPress sites we grade lose more to five plugins and unoptimized images than to the platform. Run our free grader and start from data.

2. Audit your plugin list against a hard question: for each one, what breaks if it disappears, and when was it last updated? Anything unmaintained is a scheduled incident. Anything you cannot justify is weight.

3. Decide which side of the split you are on. If a plugin is doing genuine business logic, stay and invest properly: good hosting, a caching strategy, a staging environment, a real update discipline. If your site is a brochure with a blog, get a migration quote and compare it against three years of maintenance, hosting, and the risk you are carrying.

4. Whatever you choose, get the content out of the theme. The most expensive migrations are the ones where the content only exists inside page-builder markup. Structured content survives platform changes. Builder output does not.

5. Stop treating "we're on WordPress" as a strategy or an apology. It is a hosting decision. Your traffic and conversion problems are almost certainly elsewhere.

Our position, stated plainly

We manage sites on both sides of this line. We build static marketing sites for clients who need speed and simplicity, and we work in WordPress for clients whose businesses genuinely live in the plugin ecosystem: to the point that we built our own connector so we can manage those sites, edit their templates, and control their plugins from our portal.

That is not fence-sitting. It reflects what the market actually looks like: a platform that stopped being universal without becoming irrelevant, and a lot of businesses who would benefit from an honest assessment of which case they are.

Start with the grader. If it turns up something you would rather someone owned, apply for partnership.