CloudFlare recently released their annual report for various different data points for Internet technologies, traffic and trends. The whole report is a fascinating read on the state of the Internet today, but one particular section that stood out to me – pointed out by WordPress creator Matt Mullenwag – is their website technologies section analyzing what content management platforms are being used by the top 5,000 domains in the world.
In my ten plus years running this business, I occasionally hear variations of the same claim:
“WordPress is bad!”
“WordPress is dying!”
“WordPress is irrelevant!”
There are various reasons for why people make this claim (which I’ll get to), but the problem is the claim of WordPress dying is total nonsense and a complete fiction, and the hard numbers prove it.
CloudFlare’s own chart notes that WordPress powers a whopping 47% – nearly half – of the top 5,000 domains in the world. The closest follow up, Adobe Experience Manager, doesn’t even come close, powering 16% of the same domains. Most interestingly is something Matt pointed out: With fellow open-source alternative Drupal taking 4.7% of the top domains, that means open source technology effectively powers a majority of the largest websites on Earth.
For anyone who cares about an open, collaborative Internet, this is a huge deal and something worth applauding.
I can already hear the backup argument people tend to default to: “Well, okay, WordPress runs a lot of top domains, that doesn’t mean it’s dominant on the Internet overall or at the ground level! Right?”
Well, hypothetical devil’s advocate, I’m glad you asked! W3Techs extensively tracks usage statistics of Internet techs and trends and the numbers don’t lie when it comes to CMS usage.
As of right now, WordPress powers a whopping 43% of all websites. The closest competitor, Shopify? 5%. That means WordPress has nearly ten times the market share that its closest competitor as a web platform does.
What about Wix and Squarespace, whose advertisements you can’t get away from and who tend to aggressively sponsor YouTubers? In a living testament that advertising blitzes don’t equate to overall market share or popular usage, Wix clocks in at 4.2% with Squarespace coming in at 2.4% respectively.
To be completely clear, a platform being used to operate 5% or even 2.4% of websites on the entire Internet is a remarkable achievement, but in terms of how they’re “overtaking” WordPress? That barely qualifies as a rounding error, especially in the case of Squarespace.
So what’s going on with the claim that WordPress is “dying?”
Simply put, the people who see WordPress as somehow irrelevant are confusing vibes with actual infrastructure and technology. People who make this claim are usually a combination of SaaS founders and investors trying to push proprietary competitors to WordPress, no-code web “designers” who use Wix and Squarespace without having ever touched WordPress in their lives, people who personally dislike PHP as a language or people with an axe to grind against Automattic or Matt Mullenwag.
Before this starts sounding like a sponsored post, there are many legitimate issues to have with WordPress and perfectly acceptable reasons to not use it. You may indeed hate PHP as a language. WordPress may not be appropriate for your project. You may prefer the user interface of Squarespace or Wix. All of that is perfectly fine, but you would sound far smarter just saying you don’t like WordPress rather than making the demonstrably untrue claim that it’s “not where it used to be” or just outright “dying.”
Throughout 2025 in particular there was some speculation in particular that the still ongoing legal dispute between Automattic and WPEngine would be the “end” of WordPress. Ultimately the situation has been noise that barely echoed outside of web developer subreddits. I can say from personal experience that nobody outside of these fields asked about it or even read about it. To the other 99% of the population it was business as usual and will continue to be. Internal ecosystem disputes don’t change the underlying math and infrastructures survives because it’s bigger than any one company.
WordPress hasn’t just already won; it won years ago, right under a lot of peoples’ noses. The fact is that unless there’s some sort of extraordinary tectonic shift, WordPress is the default standard for web publishing online and the numbers make that undeniable regardless of how many brand deals Squarespace cuts with YouTubers.