Is WordPress Losing Popularity?

Nowadays, businesses no longer question whether they need their own website. However, a new challenge has emerged: which platform should they choose to create it? A few years ago, WordPress dominated the market in terms of the number of new websites built on its foundation. But with the recent expansion of specialized features offered by newer platforms, fierce competition has arisen in this space. So, is WordPress no longer as relevant? Our article today explores this question in detail.

The Long History of WordPress Raises Concerns About Its Relevance

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) in the world, powering millions of websites. But how did this powerful platform come to be? Let's delve into its history.

It all began in 2001 with a project by French programmer Michel Valdrighi, who developed a blogging system called b2/cafelog. This system was written in PHP and utilized a MySQL database. Later, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little joined the project and made significant contributions to its development. In 2003, when Michel Valdrighi stepped away from the project, Matt Mullenweg took over, and the platform was renamed WordPress.

One of the key decisions that ensured WordPress’s success was its adoption of an open-source model. This allowed anyone to study, modify, and distribute the platform’s code. An active community of developers and users continuously contributed their expertise to enhance the platform, creating new themes, plugins, and expanding its capabilities. WordPress quickly gained popularity due to its user-friendly interface, flexibility, and the vast array of available templates and plugins.

Today, WordPress is used to create a variety of websites, ranging from simple blogs to complex online stores and corporate portals. The WordPress community remains highly active, offering user support and developing new tools. This ongoing evolution allows WordPress to adapt to new challenges and trends in web development.

In 2011, the community was introduced to a revolutionary new plugin: WooCommerce. This plugin enabled WordPress-based sites to function as full-fledged online stores.

However, if we examine the history of other groundbreaking software products, we often see that, over time, they lose their leading positions. This typically occurs due to their inability to overcome fundamental limitations that stem from their initial design approach. In other words, it can sometimes be easier to develop something new that fully meets the demands of today rather than to reform what already exists.

So, is WordPress destined to share the same fate?

Market Share and Growth

Balanced, up-to-date statistics are the best way to visualize the current situation. We used data from reputable services in the tech world:

• W3Techs: An online service that provides detailed information about the technologies used on websites. It acts as a "telescope" for analyzing the technological landscape of the internet, offering insights into the popularity of various CMS, programming languages, web servers, operating systems, and more.
• HubSpot: A leading software company offering a comprehensive suite of tools for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service, focusing on creating valuable content and experiences that attract and engage customers.

When it comes to WordPress, the success story is indeed impressive:

• Over 850 million websites worldwide are built on WordPress.
• From 2018 to 2024, the share of websites built on WordPress increased from 29% to over 43%.
• More than 95% of bloggers use WordPress for their own sites.
• Nearly 8 billion articles are published on WordPress each year.
• WooCommerce statistics reveal that more than 38% of online sales are facilitated through it.

Even in a market saturated with various web creation tools, WordPress continues to show steady growth, albeit not as rapid as during the technology’s early days.

So why do some users and experts express doubts about WordPress's future? Why do they predict its decline?

Challenges that WordPress Must Overcome to Remain Popular

Several key factors could potentially dethrone WordPress. Let’s take a closer look at them.

New Platforms Like Shopify and Squarespace Are Creating Effective Competition

Over two decades of market dominance have naturally led to the emergence of new products designed to meet the evolving needs of modern users. These include:

• Shopify: A popular e-commerce platform that helps businesses create and manage online stores. It offers everything needed to start and grow an online business.
• Squarespace: A platform renowned for creating beautiful and professional websites. It is known for its elegant templates and user-friendly interface.
• Wix: An online website-building platform that enables users to create professional websites without any programming knowledge. It offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, allowing easy customization of website design using ready-made templates or custom elements.
• Magento: A powerful open-source e-commerce platform that enables businesses to create scalable online stores with advanced features. Magento is especially popular among medium and large enterprises with complex e-commerce needs.
• PrestaShop: A free and open-source online storefront platform that allows businesses of all sizes to launch and manage online marketplaces. PrestaShop is known for its flexibility, modularity, and extensive customization options.

If you need a beautiful website with a focus on design, Squarespace can be an excellent choice. For creating a large online store, Shopify might be more logical. And if you require maximum flexibility and the ability to create any type of website, WordPress remains a universal solution.

However, if we look at Google Trends, WordPress still outpaces these platforms by a significant margin. While WordPress holds a market share of 43%, Shopify, for example, accounts for no more than 5% of websites worldwide.

In other words, WordPress is currently holding its own against the competition.

Alternative Technologies for Website Development

We are also witnessing the rise of entirely new approaches and technologies for website creation, such as:

• Static Website Generators: These tools allow the creation of websites where each file is a standard HTML, CSS, or JavaScript file. Unlike dynamic sites (like WordPress) that generate content on the fly with each user request, static sites are generated once and then hosted on a server. This makes them extremely fast, secure, and effective from an SEO perspective. Gatsby and Hugo are two of the most popular static site generators, each offering strengths suited to different types of projects. Static websites load much faster than dynamic ones, positively impacting SEO and user experience. Additionally, they do not require powerful servers and databases, which reduces hosting costs. Ready-made sites can be easily hosted anywhere, even on platforms like S3.
• Modern Content Management Systems (CMS): These systems differ from traditional CMS platforms like WordPress in that they are not tied to a specific template or design. This allows for the creation of content that can be displayed on any device or platform (website, mobile app, IoT device, etc.). These are often called headless CMSs, as they provide only the "brain" for content management without the "head" of a ready-made design. Popular headless CMSs include Strapi and Contentful. With a headless CMS, you gain a separation of front-end and back-end, enabling developers and marketers to work independently. They are suitable for complex web applications, mobile apps, websites with frequently changing content, and eCommerce platforms.

At first glance, it might seem that such competition, which addresses current challenges in much more efficient ways, would significantly impact WordPress’s popularity. However, implementing these new technologies requires specialized expertise, which often comes at a high cost. For small projects, which make up the majority of websites, it is more economically viable to use the nearly free WordPress platform.

Security Issues Are of Particular Importance in the Modern World

Website security is a crucial aspect of online success. It affects not only the safety of your data but also your business's reputation and user trust. Hacker attacks, viruses, and other threats can lead to data loss, financial setbacks, and even complete website failure.

As one of the most popular platforms for website creation, WordPress is a prime target for hackers. Recognizing this, its developers place a strong emphasis on security. Here are some of the key measures implemented to safeguard WordPress sites:

• Regular Updates: Frequent releases of new versions that address vulnerabilities.
• Strong Developer Community: A large network of developers dedicated to improving the security of the platform and its plugins.
• Plugin Repository: Rigorous checks before plugins are added to the official repository.
• Security Guidelines: A set of best practices for plugin and theme developers to help create secure products.
• Brute-force Protection: Mechanisms that make it difficult for attackers to guess passwords.

However, users must also play their part by using plugins and themes from trusted sources andly updating their websites. While this requires some effort, there are no viable alternatives. Even if you choose a different platform, the security best practices remain the same.

What About the Strong Advantages of WordPress That Make It Popular?

Despite the challenges, WordPress remains a powerful and flexible platform, capable of supporting a wide variety of websites. Its large community, updates, free licensing, and extensive customization options have made it one of the most popular CMSs in the world. WordPress is chosen for its combination of many key strengths:

• Wide Range of Features: From simple blogs to complex online stores, WordPress enables the creation of websites of any complexity.
• Thousands of Themes and Plugins: A vast selection of free and paid themes and plugins allows for site customization to meet any needs.
• Customization: The ability to deeply modify the code to achieve a unique and personalized site.
• Intuitive Interface: Even users with no web development experience can easily create and manage their websites.
• Visual Editor: A visual editor allows users to add content to pages without writing any code.
• Large Community: Forums and documentation provide answers to any questions. Millions of users and developers are available to assist with any issues.
• Detailed Documentation: The official documentation offers comprehensive information on all aspects of working with WordPress.
• Built-in SEO Tools: WordPress includes tools for optimizing websites for search engines.
• SEO Plugins: Additional plugins are available to further enhance SEO.
• Clean URL Structure: Facilitates better indexing of pages by search engines.
• Free License: WordPress is free to use.
• Open Source: This allows users to modify and extend the platform’s code to meet their needs.
• Built-in E-commerce Support: Special plugins enable the creation of fully functional online stores.
• Flexible Customization Options: Allows for the customization of stores for any products and payment methods.

Yes, the needs and demands of users are evolving. They seek new tools and approaches to achieve the best results, which inevitably draws some attention away from WordPress. But this doesn’t mean the platform will fade into obscurity. It still has immense potential and, more importantly, is poised to adapt to new challenges.

Conclusion

Everything has a beginning and an end. But as for WordPress, it will be with us for a long time, offering an exceptional experience for building your own website. Incredible ready-made WordPress themes from 8Theme will make this process much easier. In our catalog, you're sure to find something that suits your needs.