Spend ten minutes on LinkedIn and you will find someone declaring WordPress finished, someone else defending it, and the same market share chart being waved around by both of them.
Let me answer it quickly, because the answer is dull. No, WordPress is not dying. It still powers 41.9% of all websites in 2026, which is more than every other content management system put together in most counts. It is not going anywhere for a very long time.
It is also true that the direction has turned. WordPress peaked at 43.6% in mid-2025 and has posted six straight months of decline, from 43.20% in December 2025 down to 41.90% by late May 2026. That 1.3 point drop in six months is double the decline of the entire previous year.
The clearest signal is in new builds. Among newly built sites, WordPress went from 51% two years ago to 43% in the first quarter of 2026. New builds matter more than the total, because that is where somebody is actually making a fresh decision. Everything else is inertia.
So both camps are a little bit right, which is exactly why the argument goes nowhere. Whether WordPress is dying or merely flattening tells you nothing about what you should do with your own business.
The question worth asking is what you can build now that you could not build two years ago. That one has a real answer, and it changes what a small business website is capable of being.
WordPress won for good reasons
WordPress made publishing possible for people who could not write code. Plugins meant you could add almost any feature without hiring a developer. Themes meant a professional looking site in an afternoon. For digital marketers especially, it was the tool that let you build something decent without waiting on engineering.
I spent years building and working on WordPress sites in the digital marketing world. Broken plugins, page builder subscriptions, security patches, endless small maintenance jobs. We accepted all of it as the cost of having a website, and we were right to, because for people who were not developers there was no better option.
Nothing that follows is an argument that WordPress was a mistake. It earned twenty years at the centre of the web.
The plugin trade, and what it actually costs
The plugin model is what made WordPress powerful, and it is also where the bill comes due.
Patchstack documented 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, up 42% from the year before. 91% of them were in plugins. WordPress core itself had two.
The volume is relentless. More than 250 plugin vulnerabilities are disclosed every week, roughly 36 a day, and 43% of those can be exploited without any login at all. Nearly half had no patch available from the developer when they were made public, and the median time from disclosure to mass exploitation is five hours. The average production site runs 20 to 30 plugins, and 78% of sites hacked in 2025 had at least one running an outdated version.
Sometimes diligence does not save you either. In April 2026, more than 25 plugins were pulled from the WordPress.org repository in a single day after a supply chain attack, and sites were compromised through automatic updates from sources they had been told to trust.
None of that makes WordPress unsafe. It describes a trade. You get features quickly and cheaply, and in exchange you inherit dozens of pieces of code you do not own, do not maintain, and cannot see inside. Any one of them can break, get abandoned, or get taken over. For two decades that was a sensible deal, because the alternative was paying a developer a lot of money and waiting months.
That alternative is what changed.
Page builders still make sense for plenty of businesses
We are not going to tell you page builders are obsolete, and anyone who has run a marketing team knows why.
Plenty of businesses have non-technical people who need to get into the site and change things. A marketer swapping a headline. An office manager updating hours. A part time content person publishing on a Tuesday. Those people need something familiar with guardrails around it, and page builders do that job well.
If that describes your situation and your site is working, leave it alone. That is an honest answer and it is often the right one.
This article is about a different situation. It is about businesses that want to build something a competitor cannot copy. For them, the guardrails are the problem.
A good looking website is not what sets you apart anymore
The other thing that changed is that a clean, professional website stopped being hard to get.
The AI powered website builder market was worth about 2.87 billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to reach 3.41 billion in 2026, on its way to 14.78 billion by 2035. More than 90% of web designers now report using AI tools, and 73% of small businesses were using or planning to use AI for website design and content by the end of 2025.
Anyone can prompt their way to a site that looks good. Anyone can hire an agency to build links, publish content at scale, and tune page speed. All of that is still necessary. None of it separates you, because the business down the road has the same access to it that you do.
What goes away when you build custom
Start with the easy part.
No plugin bloat. No mystery breakage when an update lands. No stack of monthly subscriptions for a page editor, a form tool, a booking tool, a gallery, and whatever else accumulated over the years. No waiting on a third party developer to decide whether they will support the feature your business needs.
You own what you paid for. That is worth something, and it is still the smallest reason to do it.
You can build technology that matches exactly how your business runs
Inside a plugin, you build what the plugin allows. You describe how your business works, and then you go find the closest available option and bend the business to fit it. Close enough becomes the standard, and everyone stops noticing.
Custom removes that step.
If your pricing depends on five variables and a rule about rush jobs, the quote tool handles five variables and the rush rule, and the customer gets a real number instead of a callback. If you carry four thousand products and customers cannot tell them apart, the finder asks the three questions your best salesperson asks and lands them on the right one. If your product has options that interact, the configurator knows which combinations are actually possible. If a job runs over weeks, the customer can see where it stands and approve the next step without phoning you.
None of that is close to how your business runs. It is how your business runs. A competitor cannot copy it by buying the same plugin you did, because there is no plugin.
But what about the dashboard?
This is the objection I hear most once somebody is otherwise sold, and it is a fair one. WordPress gives you a login, a menu down the side, and everything filed into tabs. Your team knows where things live. Giving that up feels like a real cost.
You do not have to give it up.
When I built StickMeta, I built its admin dashboard from scratch. Every view is what I need it to be. The tools match how I actually work rather than how a generic content system assumed I would work. Nothing is buried three menus deep because a plugin author decided that is where it goes. It ended up easier to use than WordPress, not harder, because it was built for one workflow instead of every possible workflow at once.
That part surprises people. A custom admin is not a downgrade. It is usually an upgrade, because a generic dashboard has to serve a blogger, a store, and a magazine at the same time, and yours only has to serve you.
No, the average business owner is not going to build that for themselves. They do not have to. That is what people like me are for, and once the rest of the tool exists, it is not much extra work.
And if a fully custom admin is further than you want to go, there is a middle option. Headless content systems like Sanity give your team a clean editing interface out of the box, while the site itself gets built however you want on top of it. Your people still log in somewhere familiar to change content. You just stop inheriting everything else that came bundled with it.
Every individual thing WordPress packaged together now has an alternative that does that one job properly. Editing, hosting, forms, commerce, search, all of it. The alternatives come with room to move, which means your technology can grow and change alongside the business instead of quietly deciding what the business is allowed to do.
You can test an idea in days instead of months
The last change is speed, and it compounds.
Because the distance between an idea and something live is so much shorter, you can build something small, put it in front of real customers, watch what they actually do, and change it. Then do it again. That loop used to take months, which meant most businesses got one guess and had to live with it. Now it can take days, which means you get to be wrong cheaply and improve quickly.
A business testing ideas against real customer behaviour every few weeks pulls away from one that cannot. Not in a single leap, but steadily, and the gap widens.
What actually separates you now
Everyone can produce a good looking site. Everyone can run the same marketing playbook. What is left is the experience your technology gives a customer, paired with a clear position on who you serve and why they should choose you. Neither of those comes out of a theme.
Which raises the question of what your website is actually for. A small business site should be earning its keep. Bringing in work, answering the questions that stall a sale, taking the jobs that currently eat your week and handling them without you. Most sites are online business cards instead, and settling for that made sense when building anything more cost a fortune and took six months.
So the argument about whether WordPress is dying was never the useful one. WordPress is fine. It will be fine for years. The change worth paying attention to is that the ceiling moved, and the thing that used to be out of reach for a small business is sitting right there now.
If you want a second opinion on whether that applies to you, we run a free diagnostic. Sometimes the answer is that your current site is fine and your money belongs somewhere else. We will tell you that too.
