Is WordPress Losing Its Grip? What the Market Share Data Really Means for Your Website
TL;DR – Key Findings at a Glance
| Metric | Data Point |
| WordPress market share (May 2026) | 41.9% (down from 43.2% in Dec 2025) |
| 6-month drop | 1.3 percentage points |
| 5-quarter trend | Consecutive decline since January 2025 |
| Biggest gaining competitor | Wix (+0.6 points in same period) |
| Data source | W3Techs (industry standard tracker) |
| Biggest underlying causes | Automattic/WP Engine dispute, Core Web Vitals gaps, rising competition |
| Is WordPress dying? | No – but it is in its first sustained decline in over a decade |
Bottom line: WordPress still powers more websites than any other CMS on the planet. But for the first time in its history, it is losing market share – consistently, quarter after quarter, with the pace of decline now doubling. Every WordPress site owner, blogger, and developer needs to understand what is happening and why.
For most of the past decade, watching WordPress’s market share numbers was, as one technology journalist put it, like watching paint dry. The line sat around 43 percent and barely moved.
That changed.
New data from W3Techs – the web technology tracker most widely cited by hosting providers, developers, and Automattic itself – confirms that WordPress has experienced six consecutive months of market share decline between December 2025 and May 2026.
The platform dropped from 43.2% to 41.9% in that window alone.
That is a fall of 1.3 percentage points in six months – double the total decline recorded across all of 2025.
This is not a catastrophe. WordPress still powers roughly two-fifths of the entire web.
No other CMS comes close. But the direction of the data, the pace at which it is moving, and the broader context around it all tell a story worth understanding – especially if your website, business, or livelihood runs on WordPress.
This post breaks down the data, examines the causes, weighs what it means for existing WordPress users, and tells you what, if anything, you should actually do about it.
The Numbers: A Trend That Has Been Building for Years
The current conversation about WordPress market share tends to focus on the dramatic six-month decline. But the honest picture starts earlier.
Phase One: Plateau and Modest Decline (2022–2024)
W3Techs quarterly data shows WordPress market share holding steady at approximately 43.0% through most of 2022 and 2023, with a slight uptick to 43.2% in 2023.
Growth slowed through 2024 and the platform entered a period of what the HTTP Archive’s Web Almanac described at the time as “stabilisation” – a platform approaching maturity in its addressable market rather than active retreat.
Phase Two: Five Consecutive Quarters of Decline (2025)
In 2025, the numbers started moving in the wrong direction, consistently:
| Quarter | WordPress Market Share |
| Jan 2025 | 43.6% |
| Apr 2025 | 43.5% |
| Jul 2025 | 43.4% |
| Oct 2025 | 43.3% |
| Jan 2026 | 43.0% |
A total drop of 0.6 percentage points across five consecutive quarters. Small enough that many in the industry dismissed it as statistical noise.
It was not noise – it was the beginning of a trend.
Phase Three: The Pace Doubles (December 2025 – May 2026)
Beginning in December 2025, the pace of decline accelerated sharply:
| Month | WordPress Market Share |
| Dec 2025 | 43.20% |
| Jan 2026 | 43.00% |
| Feb 2026 | 42.80% |
| Mar 2026 | 42.70% |
| Apr 2026 | 42.50% |
| May 2026 | 41.90% |
A 1.3 percentage point drop in six months.
To put that in context: that is more than double the decline recorded across the entire year of 2025.
And critically, it is not a spike – it is a consistent monthly downward trend, not a single bad month with a recovery.
It Is a WordPress Problem, Not a CMS Industry Problem
The most important framing detail in this data is context: this is not an industry-wide trend. Content management systems overall are not declining in usage.
Here is how the competing platforms moved during the same May 2025 to May 2026 window, per W3Techs data:
Platforms Gaining Market Share
| Platform | Change |
| Wix | +0.6 points |
| Shopify | +0.4 points |
| Squarespace | +0.2 points |
| Webflow | +0.1 points |
Stable Platforms
| Platform | Change |
| Duda | No change |
Declining Platforms
| Platform | Change |
| WordPress | -1.6 points |
| Joomla | -0.3 points |
| Drupal | -0.1 points |
WordPress’s decline of 1.6 points in this period is dramatically larger than any other platform’s movement in either direction.
Joomla’s 0.3-point drop is the next-closest – roughly one-fifth of WordPress’s loss.
This is not the web moving away from CMSs. This is the web moving away specifically from WordPress.
Real-world usage data from the HTTP Archive’s Adoption metric confirms what W3Techs shows.
Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace all recorded modest increases in unique website deployments. Meanwhile, the Astro web framework – a newer, developer-focused alternative – grew from 4.59 million monthly downloads in January 2026 to 9.24 million by April 2026.
That is exponential growth in a single quarter, a signal that developer sentiment at the technical edge of the market is moving decisively toward newer tooling.
Why Is This Happening? The 4 Causes
Several factors converge to explain the current decline. None of them alone would be sufficient.
Together, they created the conditions for WordPress’s first sustained market share drop in over a decade.
1. The Automattic vs. WP Engine Dispute
In late 2024, a very public conflict erupted between Automattic – the company founded by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg that stewards much of the WordPress.org infrastructure – and WP Engine, one of the largest WordPress hosting providers in the world.
The dispute escalated rapidly.
WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024, alleging attempted extortion, abuse of power, and interference with business operations.
A federal judge granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in December 2024. As of mid-2026, the lawsuit remains active.
The fallout extended beyond the courts. Mullenweg offered Automattic employees who disagreed with his position a buyout of $30,000 or six months’ salary.
Approximately 159 people – about 8.4% of the company – accepted and left. In April 2025, Automattic laid off another 16% of its workforce, including over 100 people from the WooCommerce team.
The company’s annual Grand Meetup retreat was cancelled. BlackRock marked down its Automattic valuation from $85 per share (2021) to $27.74 – a 63.5% decline.
During this period, Automattic also paused its contributions to WordPress Core development for four months before reversing that decision in June 2025.
The governance implications of all of this were significant.
For two decades, WordPress’s strength was partly its open-source community trust – the sense that no single company could use the platform’s infrastructure as leverage in a commercial dispute.
That trust was damaged.
Developers who had built careers and businesses on WordPress stability began asking a reasonable question: what if it happens again?
There is no direct evidence that website owners migrated away from WordPress specifically because of this dispute.
The W3Techs data shows correlation, not causation.
But the timing of the acceleration in market share decline – beginning in December 2025, shortly after the dispute’s most intense period – is difficult to separate from its broader context.
2. Core Web Vitals Performance Gap
WordPress has a persistent and documented performance problem relative to its competitors.
Wix, which was long dismissed in professional web development circles as a toy platform with poor performance, has closed that gap entirely – and in some metrics surpassed WordPress.
According to HTTP Archive data on Core Web Vitals (the Google performance metrics that directly influence search rankings), WordPress consistently ranks last or near-last among major CMS platforms in real-world performance scores.
This is not a theoretical gap. It affects every WordPress site owner’s ability to rank in Google search, and it reflects the cumulative cost of WordPress’s plugin-heavy architecture, which places the burden of optimization entirely on the site owner.
For the average small business or blogger building a new site in 2026, a hosted platform like Wix or Squarespace – which delivers good Core Web Vitals by default with zero optimization effort.
It has become a genuinely rational alternative to the WordPress ecosystem, which requires a caching plugin, an image optimization plugin, and careful configuration to achieve comparable performance.
3. Security Vulnerability Volume
Patchstack’s 2025 annual vulnerability report documented 11,334 new security vulnerabilities discovered in the WordPress ecosystem – a 42% increase from the previous year.
Critically, approximately 96% of those vulnerabilities originated from plugins and themes rather than WordPress Core itself.
This statistic does not mean WordPress Core is insecure. But it does mean that the plugin ecosystem – WordPress’s greatest strength and the source of most of its flexibility – is also its greatest ongoing security liability.
For enterprise decision-makers and agencies evaluating platform choices, a 42% year-over-year increase in disclosed vulnerabilities is a number that appears in procurement discussions.
4. Rising Competition from Hosted Platforms and New Frameworks
The competitive landscape for WordPress in 2026 is meaningfully different from what it was five years ago. Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow have all made substantial investments in their platforms. They are no longer obviously inferior to WordPress for common use cases.
For bloggers and content creators – historically WordPress’s core constituency – Squarespace and Wix now offer comparable writing and content management experiences without the maintenance overhead of a self-hosted WordPress install (plugin updates, security monitoring, backup management, hosting configuration).
At the developer end of the market, frameworks like Astro, Next.js, and other headless or static-site approaches offer performance characteristics and developer experience that WordPress’s PHP-based architecture cannot match.
The exponential growth in Astro downloads through early 2026 suggests that developer attention at the frontier is shifting.
What WordPress Has Going For It: The Case for Staying
This is not a one-sided story. WordPress retains significant structural advantages that make its long-term decline far from certain.
Scale and inertia: Over 40% of the web runs on WordPress. The plugin ecosystem has over 59,000 free plugins. T
ens of thousands of themes exist. The developer and freelance talent pool is enormous.
Migrating away from WordPress has real costs in time, money, and content transition work that the market share numbers do not capture.
WordPress 7.0: Released in May 2026, WordPress 7.0 marks the completion of Gutenberg Phase 3 – the most significant update since the Block Editor launched in 2018.
It delivers full site editing capabilities, a substantially improved block editor experience, and performance improvements that close the Core Web Vitals gap in default installations.
The platform is not standing still.
WooCommerce’s dominance: WooCommerce powers approximately 25 to 30% of all online stores.
For eCommerce, the combination of WooCommerce and its plugin ecosystem remains unmatched in flexibility and total cost of ownership compared to Shopify at equivalent complexity.
Shopify’s market share gains are real, but they are primarily coming from the lower end of the market – simple stores that do not need WooCommerce’s depth.
Open-source permanence: WordPress is released under the GPL license. No company can kill it.
Even in a scenario where Automattic ceased to exist, the code would persist, fork, and continue. The software itself is structurally protected in a way that no SaaS platform can be.
Development momentum returning: After the turbulence of 2024 to 2025, Automattic confirmed in mid-2025 that it had fully re-engaged with WordPress Core development.
The WP Engine litigation continues, but the active contributor ecosystem is recovering.
Several major themes and plugin developers who paused development activity during the height of the dispute have resumed.
What Should WordPress Users Actually Do?
The declining market share numbers are worth understanding but not worth panicking over. Here is a practical framework for different types of WordPress users.
➡️ If you run a WordPress blog or content site: Nothing requires immediate action. WordPress remains the best platform for content-rich, SEO-focused publishing. The plugin ecosystem is unmatched.
The Core Web Vitals gap is real but solvable with proper configuration – the plugins and guidance in this ecosystem exist precisely for this purpose.
Install a good caching plugin, optimize your images, and your site will perform competitively.
➡️ If you run a WooCommerce store: WooCommerce’s competitive position is stronger than WordPress’s general CMS position.
The depth and flexibility of the eCommerce ecosystem is not replicated elsewhere at comparable cost.
Shopify may be gaining market share at the entry level, but for stores with complex product configurations, custom pricing, and specific operational needs, WooCommerce remains the more capable platform.
➡️ If you are building a new site and choosing a platform: The case for WordPress remains strong for content-heavy sites, blogs, and complex eCommerce.
The case for considering alternatives is also legitimate – particularly for simpler use cases where a hosted platform’s default performance, security management, and ease of use offer genuine advantages.
This is a real trade-off, not a clear winner.
➡️ If you are a developer building on WordPress: The ecosystem remains commercially viable at scale. The WooCommerce team is recovering from the 2025 layoffs. WordPress 7.0 delivers meaningful improvements.
The Automattic situation warrants monitoring, but the platform itself – the code, the community, the plugin marketplace – is not in crisis.
The Honest Assessment
WordPress is not dying. It powers 41.9% of the internet. No other CMS is remotely close.
Declaring it dead is as wrong as pretending nothing significant is happening.
What is true is that WordPress is in its first sustained market share decline in over a decade, the pace of that decline is accelerating.
The causes for it are – governance uncertainty, performance gaps, rising competition, and an ecosystem-wide security challenge – are not going to resolve themselves without deliberate effort.
The next 12 months will be instructive. WordPress 7.0 is now live. The WP Engine litigation will eventually resolve. Automattic has recommitted to Core development.
Whether these developments reverse the market share trend or whether the trajectory of decline continues will tell us a great deal about the platform’s long-term direction.
For now, the right response for most WordPress users is informed attention – not panic, not dismissal, but an honest acknowledgment that the most dominant CMS in the history of the web is navigating its most challenging period in years.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is WordPress market share actually declining?
Yes. According to W3Techs data, WordPress dropped from 43.2% in December 2025 to 41.9% by May 2026 – six consecutive months of decline, extending a trend of five consecutive quarterly declines through 2025.
Q: Which platforms are gaining market share while WordPress declines?
Wix gained 0.6 points, Shopify gained 0.4 points, Squarespace gained 0.2 points, and Webflow gained 0.1 points in the same May 2025 to May 2026 window.
Duda remained stable. The decline is specific to WordPress – it is not an industry-wide contraction.
Q: Did the Automattic vs. WP Engine dispute cause the decline?
The data shows correlation but not proven causation.
The acceleration in WordPress’s market share decline coincides closely with the timeline of the Automattic–WP Engine dispute, but other factors – rising competition, Core Web Vitals performance gaps, security vulnerabilities – were developing independently.
Most analysts cite all of these as contributing factors.
Q: Does WordPress’s market share decline affect my existing site?
Not directly.
Market share data does not affect the functionality of your existing WordPress installation.
The decline is relevant context for platform decisions, not a reason to migrate immediately.
Q: Should I leave WordPress for another platform?
For most existing WordPress users, the answer is no – the migration cost and disruption outweigh the benefits for a healthy, functioning site.
For new site decisions, the answer depends on your use case. WordPress remains the strongest option for complex content sites and eCommerce.
For simpler sites where default performance and reduced maintenance overhead matter, hosted alternatives deserve honest consideration.
Q: Is WordPress still the market leader?
Yes, by a very wide margin. WordPress powers over 40% of the web and holds over 60% of the CMS market share.
No other platform is close. The current decline is meaningful as a trend signal, not as an indication that WordPress’s dominance is ending imminently.
Final Thoughts
The WordPress market share numbers are telling a story that the WordPress community would rather not hear, but cannot afford to ignore.
Six consecutive months of decline, a pace doubling year-over-year, competitors gaining ground, and structural challenges in governance, performance, and security – these are not trivial data points.
They are also not the end of WordPress.
What they are is a signal: the era of effortless WordPress dominance – where the platform grew automatically simply by virtue of being the default choice – may be over.
The next chapter requires active stewardship, product improvement, community repair, and honest confrontation of the gaps that competitors are exploiting.
The good news is that all of those things are happening. WordPress 7.0 is a significant step forward. Automattic is back at the Core development table. The plugin ecosystem is vast and actively maintained. The platform has survived turbulent periods before.
Whether this moment becomes a turning point or the beginning of a longer structural decline depends on choices being made right now – by Automattic, by the open-source community, and by the millions of developers and site owners who have built their digital lives on WordPress.
That is a story worth watching closely.
