Is WordPress Dying

WordPress has left its competitors far behind in the pack of CMS vendors. Since the birth of WordPress in 2003, WordPress has been improving its design, features, and performance for developers and site owners. However, the question – Is WordPress dying needs more clarification.

In this article, we will address details about WordPress’s future.

People who plan to use WordPress in a future project – ask this question. Also, people who doubt WordPress custom flexibilities might have such concerns.

Is WordPress Dying?

From 2012 to 2014, WordPress sites sharply declined – triggering people asking Is WordPress Dying.

The bottom line is that WordPress is not dying, although it has gone through temporary downfalls.

Let’s address why people started asking, “Is WordPress dying”?

For example – according to reports in 2022, WordPress’s market share decreased, and the number of installs decreased for the past few years. Also, around 2014, Google Trends’ data showed that people were not searching for WordPress on search engines.

Compared to WordPress initial days, more WordPress competitors emerged in the market, such as Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace. People started using Wix as a web-based site builder, Shopify for e-commerce portals, and Squarespace for content publishing.

Similarly, in 2021, Sucuri scans detected over 90% of WordPress sites with hacking, malware, and intruding incidents. Thus, people started doubting WordPress’ future for security reasons.

In the same manner, WordPress didn’t include a page builder until the arrival of the Gutenberg Block Editor in November 2018. With a simple text editor like the Classic editor, users couldn’t publish pages with custom designs, layouts, and formatting differences in WordPress.

There were other reasons – too.

In 2021, WordPress only released two updates—although it had planned three. WordPress, an open-source platform powered by hundreds of contributors, may also face a reduced update frequency.

What’s next?

The above records help you understand – why people started thinking WordPress is dying; however, WordPress will not vanish.

Let’s consider and address factors that make WordPress a go-to CMS for the coming decade.

Although Google Trends went down for WordPress, people searched queries for WordPress apps, technologies, and third-party integration. For example, Google Trends’ data went down for the word “WordPress” but rose for WooCommerce, a plugin for creating WordPress-powered e-stores.

WordPress usage stats

Over 35% of sites on the Internet are powered by WordPress. Currently, WordPress is leading in numbers – the pack of CMS competitors on the Internet. Its feature-rich interface, support for plugins, API, open source status, and market share appeal to various users – from developers to simple users looking to create a site with a point-and-click user interface.

With the release of the Gutenberg editor, WordPress has stepped into a page-building experience for users. Although Gutenberg provides a primary interface, it gives a page-building experience for basic users involving block elements, such as paragraphs, images, table of contents, and formatting styles. In this case, WordPress contributors know emerging challenges and constantly improve WordPress for diverse needs. Having that clarified, more features have arrived in WordPress, including full-site editing, support for Rest API, and more.

Moreover – the Gutenberg editor helps users create and edit content pages with blocks. Like a page-building experience with a 3^rd party app, such as Divi Builder, Gutenberg allows users to perform basic page-building without learning – how page-building or coding works in WordPress. You can call Gutenberg the native page builder of WordPress.

WordPress is leading the pack of Open-Source content management systems for content publishers. The site you create with WordPress represents full authority, control, and management ease with the self-hosting feature—that’s power for users.

Let’s address details about WordPress security.

WordPress security

We have addressed stats about WordPress hacking incidents at scale in the past. WordPress is a powerful, secure platform that supports plugins, scripts, and third-party app integrations.

Hacking incidents occur more often due to users’ negligence in using security benchmarks. For example, an unattended WordPress site is more vulnerable than a managed site. This involves managing themes and plugins in the dashboard, such as updating them on time. Once you take care of such routines, you can keep your WordPress site more secure. Read this detailed write-up for more information on security concerns with WordPress plugins.

Let’s address other facts about WordPress future

WordPress powers many real-world industries. If you stop WordPress today, more enterprises will vanish. However, it’s impossible for most Internet companies—such as PaaS, SaaS, automation tools, email marketing apps, and file conversion software—to quit and switch to various CM systems.

Moreover, thousands of developers, premium themes and scripts, plugins, and support services depend on WordPress infrastructure. With a simple rule of more popularity, market share, and future value – WordPress will not die and can survive for the coming decades, we believe at least.

So – does anyone still use WordPress?

According to recent stats for 2023, WordPress is undoubtedly powering more than 455 million sites today.

Here is a list of supporting factors favoring the WordPress bright future as a CMS.

• More than 60,000 plugins are free on the WordPress Plugins Directory, showing that many WordPress developers contribute freely to the WordPress community.
• WordPress has a global market share of 64.3% – according to the stats published on Codeinwp.
• More people are searching for WordPress-related technologies on Google. According to stats from SEO tools, more than 2.7 times, people search for the word “WordPress” on Google every month.
• Out of 100K top websites on the Internet, more than 36K sites are using WordPress as their CMS. If WordPress were going to vanish, the world’s best companies wouldn’t have built their systems on WordPress.
• In the WordPress official plugins directory – there are hundreds of plugins for WordPress technologies. For example, the WordPress directory alone holds 980 plugins for WooCommerce – one of the plugins for online WordPress stores.
• Above all, WordPress has official resources for beginners and advanced users, such as WordPress Forums for beginners and Developers Portal for advanced users who aim to learn how WordPress coding works.

Note: The facts outlined above – clearly show the future of WordPress users, technologies, and businesses running with WordPress CMS. The answer to the question “Is WordPress dying?” is a clear understanding for those who doubt WordPress’s future.

Wrapping up

So – Is WordPress dying? The short answer is – No.

What caused people to doubt WordPress’s future?

The temporary decline in installs in the past, the reduced number of update frequencies, security concerns, and market share caused users to try out other CMS, such as Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify.

Back in 2012 to 2014 – although WordPress growth declined, the rate of WordPress growth rose exponentially after a dive. This proved that WordPress’s downfall was a temporary decline.

If you want to know more about WordPress, read more articles on our Blog or contact us for more information on WordPress support services, performance improvements, or fixing one-time issues in WordPress.