Every few years, someone declares WordPress finished.
Shopify exploded, and WordPress was finished.
Webflow gained momentum, and WordPress was finished.
AI website builders arrived, and WordPress was finished.
The headline never changes. What changes is what actually happens next.
This report looks at the real data from 2024 through 2026 to answer a simpler question: did WordPress die, or did it just stop trying to be everything to everyone?
The Story We All Remember
For most of WordPress’s history, the “dying” narrative followed a predictable script. A hosted competitor would post strong growth numbers, a design-forward builder would win over agencies chasing clean output, or a new AI tool would generate a passable website in minutes. Commentators would frame each moment as the beginning of the end for open source publishing.
None of them were entirely wrong about the competitive pressure. They were wrong about what it meant.
WordPress was never going to out-market Shopify’s checkout experience or out-design Webflow’s visual editor by copying them feature for feature. What it had instead was distribution: a plugin economy, a hosting ecosystem, and a decade of accumulated content that no competitor could replicate overnight.
That distribution advantage is exactly what the dying headlines kept underestimating.
What Actually Happened: 2024 to 2026
Strip away the opinion pieces and a few concrete events shaped this period more than any single competitor did:
- September 2024: The WordPress Foundation and Automattic entered a public dispute with hosting provider WP Engine over trademark licensing, which temporarily cut off plugin and theme repository access for millions of hosted sites.
- Through 2025: Automattic scaled back its sponsored contributions to WordPress core, shifting more maintenance weight onto volunteer contributors and third-party agencies. Plugin submissions to the WordPress.org directory still grew sharply that same year.
- April 2026: WordPress 7.0 launched at WordCamp Asia, centered on real-time collaborative editing, a Command Palette, faster client-side media processing, responsive per-device editing controls, and a unified AI framework. Version 7 crossed roughly half of all WordPress installs by mid-year.
- August 2026: WordPress 7.1 followed at WordCamp US in Phoenix, alongside a community hackathon and a stated “push for simplicity” for the editing experience.
At the same time, an internal community survey found a majority of contributors felt worse about the state of the project than the year before, even as most agreed on the same core priorities going forward.
None of this looks like a platform quietly fading away.
It looks like a mature project going through a genuinely difficult governance period while its underlying technology kept shipping. Those are two different stories, and conflating them is where most of the “dying” coverage went wrong.
The Market Share Reality Check
Ask five different sources what percentage of the web runs on WordPress and you will get five different numbers, mostly because they are measuring different things. W3Techs counts subdomains as a single site and covers a broad survey of the web. HTTP Archive counts origins separately and only detects sites its crawler can fingerprint. Both are valid. Neither tells the whole story alone.
| Metric | 2022 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| W3Techs: share of all websites | ~43% | ~41-42% |
| W3Techs: share of known CMS market | ~65% | ~59-60% |
| W3Techs: share among top 10,000 highest-traffic sites | ~58% | ~58% (steady) |
| HTTP Archive: share of measurable web | ~35.8% | ~33% |
The direction is consistent across every methodology: a gradual, single-digit percentage decline from a 2022 peak, not a collapse. WordPress lost ground mainly to hosted, all-in-one builders like Wix and Shopify among smaller and newer sites, while holding its position almost unchallenged among the web’s highest-traffic destinations, the sites with the most engineering resources and the most to lose from a platform migration.
Growth vs. Maturity: Reframing the Numbers
A platform that grows from 21 percent to over 40 percent of the web in a decade, as WordPress did, cannot keep growing at that rate forever. Eventually it runs out of new websites to capture and starts competing for a fixed pool of existing ones.
That is not a crisis. That is what every mature technology category looks like, from smartphones to cloud hosting.
The more useful question is not “is WordPress still growing,” it is “who is still choosing WordPress, and why.” The answer, consistently, is builders who need the flexibility of open source, ownership of their code and data, and access to a plugin ecosystem no hosted platform can match. That includes the fastest-growing segment inside the WordPress economy itself: WooCommerce-powered marketplaces.
The Friction Nobody Predicted
The biggest threat to WordPress between 2024 and 2026 was not a competitor’s product launch. It was internal.
The WP Engine trademark dispute, reduced core contributions from Automattic, and a leadership communication style that a 2026 community survey described as leaving most contributors feeling worse about the project, all did more reputational damage than any AI website builder.
WordPress’s governance model is genuinely open source, which means this kind of public disagreement is visible in a way a closed platform’s internal politics never would be.
That transparency is a feature of the ecosystem, even when the content it surfaces is uncomfortable.
AI’s Role: Threat or Tool?
The AI website builder category grew fast, and it is still growing. Small business adoption of generative AI tools more than doubled between 2023 and 2026, and the global AI website builder market grew significantly year over year through 2026, on its way to a much larger projected size by the early 2030s.
Most of that growth came from first-time website owners who had never paid for a professional web presence before. AI builders did not pull existing WordPress sites away from the platform. They mostly created a new, previously non-existent tier of the market: people who would not have built a website at all a few years earlier.
Inside WordPress itself, the response to AI was not resistance, it was absorption. Gutenberg adoption climbed past 60 percent of active sites, up from well under half just a few years earlier, and WordPress 7.0’s unified AI framework replaced a fragmented mess of individually bolted-on AI plugins with shared, coordinated capabilities, kept deliberately opt-in and plugin-based rather than switched on automatically. WordPress 7.1 built on that foundation a few months later with a stated focus on simplifying the editing experience rather than adding new surface area.
The platform did not compete with AI generation, it built AI generation into the block editor itself. For agencies and marketplace builders, that meant faster layout work without giving up the ownership and extensibility that made WordPress the choice in the first place.
What the Ecosystem Is Saying
Yoast founder Joost de Valk has been one of the more consistent voices tracking WordPress’s numbers directly from web crawl data rather than opinion. His repeated conclusion across several 2026 posts: WordPress is not disappearing, but it has to keep pace with modern web performance standards to hold the ground it still has.
Matt Mullenweg himself has been unusually candid about the project’s internal friction in 2026, describing a release culture that had drifted toward mediocrity and attributing much of it to WordPress’s own decision-making process rather than to outside competition.
Whatever one makes of the delivery, the underlying admission matters: the people closest to WordPress see its challenges as fixable and self-inflicted, not existential.
So Did WordPress Actually Decline?
By the numbers, yes, modestly. By relevance, no.
WordPress lost a few points of overall market share to hosted builders while holding its lead among the sites that matter most for serious businesses: the highest-traffic, highest-complexity, highest-revenue corner of the web.
The bigger story of 2024 to 2026 was not competition from outside. It was WordPress working through its own growing pains while WooCommerce, the ecosystem’s commerce engine, kept building the infrastructure that marketplace founders actually depend on.
The Commerce Layer
WordPress vs. Shopify, Wix, and Webflow: The Real Comparison
Each competitor took a different slice of the market, and none of them replaced WordPress outright.
| Platform | What It Won On | Target Buyer / Segment |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | Managed simplicity: no server to maintain, an integrated payment stack, and a checkout experience purpose-built for conversion | Larger, funded brands that can afford platform fees for reduced technical overhead. Pulled ahead of WooCommerce among the top 1 million highest-traffic ecommerce sites (~29% vs. ~18%) by 2026 |
| Wix / Squarespace | Approachability: the fastest-growing major CMS through 2025 and 2026, expanding well into the double digits year over year | Solo creators and small local businesses that wanted a site live in an afternoon with no ongoing maintenance |
| Webflow | Design control: pixel-level precision without hand-coding, for a narrower, more design-literate segment | Agencies and startups in marketing and software that valued visual precision over extensibility, without challenging WordPress or WooCommerce on raw scale |
None of these platforms won on flexibility, ownership, or plugin depth, and that gap is exactly where WordPress and WooCommerce held their ground.
Why WooCommerce Still Dominates Open-Source Commerce
The store-count numbers vary by data source and methodology, which makes any single figure easy to misread. What is consistent across every major tracker is the shape of the story:
| Metric | WooCommerce | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| Live stores (approx.) | 4.1-4.7 million (largest by count) | Not directly comparable, different counting method |
| Share of measurable web (HTTP Archive, ecommerce platforms) | Leads the entire measurable web | Trails WooCommerce here |
| Share of top 1 million highest-traffic ecommerce sites | ~18% | ~29% (leads at this tier) |
| Core strength | Small and mid-sized merchants seeking ownership and customization | Larger, funded brands seeking managed simplicity |
That split matters more than the headline number.
WooCommerce’s strength was never about winning the biggest brands, it was about being the default choice for the enormous long tail of small and mid-sized merchants who want to own their platform, avoid recurring transaction fees, and build exactly the storefront their business needs rather than the one a SaaS vendor decided to offer. Over 60 percent of WooCommerce users run small, focused stores, which is precisely the segment least served by high-fee, one-size-fits-all hosted platforms.
What Marketplace Founders Should Learn From This
The lesson from 2024 to 2026 is not “pick WooCommerce because it is bigger.” It is that the commerce platform decision increasingly comes down to what kind of business you are building, not which platform has the biggest press cycle.
A single-brand store selling one type of product at moderate volume genuinely might be better served by Shopify’s managed simplicity. A multi-vendor marketplace, a B2B wholesale operation, a booking or rental platform, or any business that needs deep customization of listings, commissions, or vendor roles runs into Shopify’s platform limits fast, and that is exactly the gap WooCommerce’s plugin ecosystem was built to fill.
This is also where the “WordPress is dying” narrative missed something structural: marketplace and multi-vendor use cases were one of the fastest-growing segments inside WooCommerce through this period, precisely because no hosted SaaS competitor offers the same depth of control over vendor management, commission structures, and marketplace-specific workflows without expensive custom development.
The Future of Open-Source Commerce
Two trends will define the next phase.
First, headless and composable commerce architectures, which decouple the storefront front end from the backend commerce engine, are growing fast, with market projections putting global spending on headless commerce infrastructure on a path toward tens of billions of dollars by the early 2030s. WooCommerce’s API-first architecture positions it well here, since founders can keep WooCommerce as the commerce backend while building a custom or headless front end without losing plugin compatibility.
Second, AI-native store management, from automated product listings to AI-assisted customer support, is becoming table stakes rather than a differentiator, and open-source platforms that let developers build directly into the backend will adapt faster than closed SaaS platforms bound by a single vendor’s product roadmap.
Where MultiVendorX Fits Naturally
This is exactly the environment MultiVendorX was built for. As WooCommerce commerce has matured from single-store simplicity into a genuine platform for complex marketplace models, the tooling gap has shifted from “can I sell products on WordPress” to “can I run a full multi-vendor operation with the commission structures, vendor onboarding, shared listings, and store management my business model actually needs.”
MultiVendorX’s positioning as a Marketplace Operating System reflects that shift directly: rather than one plugin bolted onto WooCommerce, it functions as the operational layer that turns a WooCommerce store into a B2B marketplace, a service marketplace, a booking or rental platform, or a franchise network, without forcing founders onto a closed, one-size-fits-all SaaS platform.
As WooCommerce’s own ecosystem matures around marketplace and multi-vendor use cases, that is the layer marketplace founders increasingly need, and it is why the open-source route, not the hosted-SaaS route, remains the stronger long-term foundation for building a marketplace business.
Where This Goes Next
Future Predictions for 2028-2030
Three shifts look most likely to define the next phase of the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem.
First, headless and composable architectures move from a niche technical preference to a mainstream default for larger stores. As global spending on headless commerce infrastructure climbs toward the tens of billions by 2030, expect more WooCommerce stores to run with a decoupled front end while keeping WooCommerce as the commerce and inventory backend, particularly for marketplace and multi-channel businesses that need consistent commerce logic across web, mobile, and emerging surfaces.
Second, AI shifts from a bolt-on feature to core infrastructure. WordPress 7’s unified AI framework is an early version of what will likely become a much deeper integration: AI-assisted store setup, automated vendor onboarding, AI-generated product listings, and predictive marketplace analytics built directly into the platform rather than sold as third-party add-ons.
Third, expect continued market bifurcation rather than consolidation. Shopify keeps winning funded, single-brand ecommerce at scale. Wix and Squarespace keep winning solo creators and small local businesses. WordPress and WooCommerce keep winning everything that needs genuine customization: marketplaces, B2B platforms, service and booking businesses, and any operation whose commerce logic does not fit neatly into a SaaS vendor’s fixed feature set.
The overall CMS market share numbers will likely keep drifting slowly in the SaaS builders’ favor at the low end, while WordPress’s position among complex, high-value commerce use cases stays effectively unchallenged.
Decision Framework: Should You Still Build on WordPress?
The right platform choice depends on what kind of business you’re building.
Build on WordPress and WooCommerce
- Your business needs deep customization of the buying or selling experience.
- You are running or planning a multi-vendor marketplace, B2B wholesale operation, booking platform, or franchise network.
- Platform ownership and avoiding recurring per-transaction fees matters to your margins.
- You expect to need capabilities a generic SaaS platform does not offer out of the box.
Consider a Hosted Alternative Like Shopify
- You are running a single-brand store with a fairly standard buy-now checkout flow.
- You have no in-house technical resource and want infrastructure fully managed for you.
- Speed to launch matters more than long-term customization depth.
Consider Wix, Squarespace, or Webflow
- Your site is primarily content or brand-driven rather than transactional.
- You are a solo creator or very small business with simple needs.
- Visual design control matters more than backend extensibility.
For most marketplace founders specifically, the calculus has not meaningfully changed in the last three years: the moment a business model involves multiple sellers, commission logic, or vendor-specific workflows, WooCommerce plus a purpose-built marketplace layer remains the most flexible and cost-effective foundation available.
Key Takeaways
- WordPress declined modestly in overall web share but held its position among the web’s most valuable, highest-traffic sites.
- The real disruption of 2024 to 2026 was internal governance conflict, not external competition.
- AI absorbed into WordPress core rather than replacing it, and mostly expanded the market rather than converting existing users.
- WooCommerce remains the largest ecommerce platform by store count and continues to lead among small and mid-sized merchants who value ownership and customization.
- Marketplace and multi-vendor use cases were among the fastest-growing segments in the WooCommerce ecosystem through this period, positioning tools like MultiVendorX’s Marketplace Operating System as the natural next layer for founders building complex commerce businesses on open source infrastructure.
Is WordPress actually losing market share?
Yes, modestly, by every major measurement method, down roughly one to three percentage points of overall web share since its 2022 peak. It remains the dominant CMS by a wide margin and holds its strongest position among the highest-traffic, most complex websites.
Is WooCommerce still relevant for new stores in 2027?
Yes. WooCommerce remains the largest ecommerce platform on the web by store count and leads Shopify in overall detection share across the full measurable web, even as Shopify leads specifically among the largest, highest-traffic stores.
Did AI website builders replace WordPress?
No. AI builder adoption grew mainly among first-time website owners who had not previously built or paid for a site, expanding the overall market rather than converting existing WordPress users.
What caused the biggest disruption to WordPress between 2024 and 2026?
Internal governance conflict, primarily the WP Engine trademark dispute and reduced core contributions from Automattic, caused more reputational and community disruption than any competing platform’s product launch.
Is WordPress a good foundation for a marketplace business in 2027?
Yes, particularly for multi-vendor, B2B, booking, rental, franchise, or service marketplace models that need commission logic, vendor management, or listing customization beyond what hosted SaaS platforms typically support.
