Short answer: WordPress isn’t dying — it still runs about 41.9% of all websites — but for the first time in years its share is slowly shrinking, and the project is tangled in a public legal fight between its co-founder’s company, Automattic, and the hosting firm WP Engine. None of this will break your site tomorrow. The thing actually worth acting on isn’t the drama or the percentage; it’s lock-in — making sure that whatever platform and host you’re on, you can always pick up your site and leave. We build and host on any stack precisely so you’re never trapped in one.
The numbers: WordPress is shrinking for the first time
WordPress still dominates. As of 8 June 2026 it powers 41.9% of all websites and holds 59.4% of the CMS market, according to W3Techs, the reference source for this data. But the direction has flipped. Over the past year its CMS-market share slipped from 61.2% to 59.4% — down 1.8 points — while the challengers each gained:
| Platform | CMS share, Jun 2025 | CMS share, Jun 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 61.2% | 59.4% ↓ |
| Shopify | 6.7% | 7.4% ↑ |
| Wix | 5.3% | 6.1% ↑ |
| Squarespace | 3.5% | 3.5% → |
A 1.8-point dip is not a collapse — WordPress is still bigger than every other CMS combined. But after a decade of only ever growing, the line finally turned down. That’s the real story: not “WordPress is over,” but “the default is no longer automatic.”
What’s actually going on behind the scenes
The decline overlaps with an ugly public fight. In September 2024, Automattic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg publicly called the hosting company WP Engine “a cancer to WordPress,” arguing it profits from the open-source project without contributing enough back.
It got concrete fast. Automattic’s own published term sheet asked WP Engine for a seven-year trademark licence costing 8% of its gross revenue every month — or the equivalent 8% contributed as employee time on WordPress core, or a mix of the two. When WP Engine refused, Mullenweg cut it off from WordPress.org, blocking the plugin and theme updates that keep sites patched — until a court granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction in December 2024 ordering access restored. (TechCrunch has the full timeline.)
The case is still running. In a February 2026 filing, WP Engine alleged that Mullenweg intended to charge royalties to 10 different hosting companies for using the WordPress trademark, and that he tried to pressure Stripe into dropping WP Engine as a customer — allegations Automattic disputes. You don’t need to follow every motion. The takeaway is simpler: the commercial layer underneath the world’s most popular CMS is contested, and the people who run large parts of it are at war.
Why a slow decline still matters to you
Here’s the honest version: if your site runs on WordPress, none of this is an emergency. WordPress is open-source; nobody can switch it off, and a 1.8-point market move changes nothing about how your site runs today.
What it does is expose a risk that was always there and is easy to ignore while a platform is growing: you are standing on one ecosystem, governed by one foundation and one dominant company that increasingly wants to monetise it. While that ecosystem is calm and expanding, the risk is invisible. When its share turns down and its leadership is in court, it’s worth asking a question you should be able to answer either way: if I had to leave, could I?
The real risk isn’t WordPress — it’s lock-in
For most small businesses the danger was never the CMS itself. It’s lock-in — the small decisions that quietly make leaving expensive:
- Managed-WordPress hosts that fence you in. Some block the plugins they don’t like, run a proprietary caching layer that doesn’t travel, and make a clean export awkward — so moving means a rebuild, not a copy.
- Plugin and dependency sprawl. The more host-specific or abandoned plugins you lean on, the harder the site is to lift somewhere else.
- Who actually controls the domain and DNS. If your host or agency holds the registrar login, they hold the exit.
None of these is WordPress’s fault. They’re choices — and you can make the other choice.
How to stay un-locked-in
You don’t have to leave WordPress. You just want to be able to. A short checklist:
- Own your domain and DNS yourself — registrar account in your name, not your agency’s.
- Keep portable backups you can download — a full database and files export, not just a host-internal snapshot.
- Avoid host-only features that can’t move with you (proprietary caching, page builders that lock your content into their format).
- Pick a host you can leave — one that hands over a standard export without a fight and supports more than one stack.
- Write the stack down — CMS and version, plugins, PHP version, where the backups live.
If you can tick those, the WordPress drama is just news. If you can’t, that’s the part to fix — independent of who wins in court.
The calm version
WordPress isn’t the problem, and it isn’t going away — it’s still the default for a reason. The lesson from a shrinking share and a courtroom fight is narrower and more useful: don’t let any single vendor own your exit.
That’s how we run things. We build and host on whatever fits — WordPress, Astro, Next.js, plain PHP or Node — on EU servers, billed by one EU company, with your domain in your name and an export you can take anywhere. On WordPress? Great — we’ll keep it patched and portable. If one day it makes sense to move, nothing stops you. See our managed hosting, or how we adopt sites other people built.