Should You Still Use WordPress?

2024 has been an interesting year within the WordPress ecosystem, one could argue it was the most eventful yet. September saw the beginning of a dispute between Automattic/WordPress/Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which has had ripple effects not only within the community as a whole but also reached a point where people outside the ecosystem are doubting the sustainability of WordPress in the longer term and considering migrating to another CMS.

When this happens, some may think about exploring alternative solutions in case there’s a larger risk to the platform itself. But if you ask further questions about this risk, they don’t come close to outweighing the platform’s strength as a product.

My clients, “normal” business owners, aren’t as invested in the CMS as I am. Should they be worried about their site being powered by WordPress? Spoiler alert: WordPress isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to thrive and remain the most versatile CMS available for years. But why?

Market share is sustained

The first version of WordPress was released on May 27, 2003. Its unique architecture, combined with it being open source, saw a surge in popularity, now dominating (as of December 2024) 43.7% of the CMS market share (although I’d consider Joost de Valk’s market share report of 35.45% to be more accurate). This growth has also been steady despite the emergence of other CMSs including Shopify, Wix and Squarespace. But none of these are open-source.

Not “just another” CMS

WordPress’ unique architecture, which allows plugin and theme extendibility, combined with the power of open-source, means it can scale far beyond the blogging platform it was originally. This means themes could be built for end-users without them having to necessarily understand HTML or CSS and plugins made by third-party developers that could extend and scale the core platform in limitless ways.

Over the years, I’ve built so much with WordPress, including forums, job boards, educational and learning-based portals, ecommerce sites, communities, comparison engines, and scaled themes. Our clients have ranged from people performing small side hustles and launching startups to managing hundreds of installs on a custom-built server for scaling sites for different global regions and building custom APIs using WordPress to scale activity. No other CMS provides this flexibility, with these alternatives only doing so with a huge cost and technical debt.

Extendibility [mostly] without limits

While I’ve been involved in building many things with WordPress, the concept of third-party plugins paved the way for trusted extendability within the CMS. The emergence of free and premium plugins in the WordPress ecosystem has created its own niche, with over 59,000 free plugins available within the official directory, and this does not include the thousands of plugins available away from the repo.

When I discovered WordPress in 2009, I realised it wasn’t just a blogging platform, and, more importantly, it was the most cooperative to SEO best standards (of course, adding Yoast into the equation). I published my first of numerous plugins in October 2010. In 2013, I co-founded an agency with WordPress development as one of its core offerings where we have worked on thousands of WordPress sites. Whenever we received an enquiry or pitched for anything to build, WordPress was always the CMS that provided the best solution.

It’s also so easy to get started with WordPress, and advise anyone who wants to extend their knowledge to do so through experimentation (I talked about it at BrightonSEO a couple of months ago)

A truly passionate community

Another reason I loved WordPress was when I discovered that the community’s massive support helped the CMS progress. Like the SEO community, the WordPress community is extremely engaging and supportive, not just to help solve issues and help develop the CMS overall but also there’s a lot of support for people’s professional and personal development.

Away from the extensive resources that WordPress provides through its documentation and forums, the WordPress community thrives all year round through its WordCamp meetups worldwide and participates in other communities, including WordPress chat and PostStatus. There are also numerous podcast series to follow, including Do the Woo, WP Product Talk and WP Builds.

This community is extremely supportive and resilient to changes, which in turn helps the development of WordPress core, which has been instrumental in shaping the future of website creation, production, and improvement.

The community also gives back in ways I haven’t seen in other verticals.

You own your own site and data

You’d think this would be obvious, but it isn’t. Remember, WordPress is open source. Not only does this mean that the core product is completely free and supported by the community, as already mentioned, but it is also your property. To now compare this to Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace, these other CMS platforms own your site!

While people may believe there are inherent risks with WordPress, I’d ask you what would happen to your site if, for example, Shopify were to close business tomorrow. The answer is simple: your site would cease to exist. Then what? If WordPress were to stop development forever from today, you’d still be in the same position and still have your website, content, and data, all of it. What do the other CMSs offer?

As another layer of freedom and risk mitigation, the choice of using WordPress as a CMS is also independent of where you choose to host it. If for whatever reason you want to migrate your site from one host to another you have the freedom to do so whereas closed source platforms not only own the website you produce with them, but also the server where it resides.

Does the Automattic and WP Engine dispute present a risk?

TLDR: no. This is a legal dispute over trademark usage between two companies. Whatever your thoughts or opinions of the dispute, it doesn’t change the fact that WordPress as a CMS is completely safe to use, and isn’t going anywhere. While the issues may seem polarising for some, the impact on the CMS itself will not be damaged in the long term whereby you should be asking yourself whether to switch to another CMS. You don’t.

The dispute and the CMS are separate. Treat them as such.

Other options?

Still sceptical about WordPress? OK, what are your other options? While other CMS platforms can perhaps be a good alternative to a “standard informational site”, or a site that has no customisation requirements at all from the normal out-of-the-box functionality (which eventually happens for every site that starts to scale in any way), you have to make very informed decisions about whether it’s actually worth it, and what the problem is that you believe you’re solving. Some questions I’d ask myself:

• Is the CMS open source? If not, what do I own?
• Is there a strong form of community and support?
• Does it play nicely with third-party connections and APIs you intend to use?
• Can you scale the site in the way you want?
• Can you truly control output on the front end?
• Does it adhere to SEO best practices?

If any of the answers above are a “no” then you need to understand the risks of those issues before considering any migration, as you may find that the risks of the alternative outweigh anything that WordPress would.

A couple of months ago, I decided to research several open-source CMSs to see if any other platform could compete with WordPress and its capabilities. Unsurprisingly, nothing came close.

TLDR

WordPress is here to stay and is still the CMS I’d advise in 99% of cases. It’s safe, supported, robust, future-proof, and open source. Whilst other CMS platforms can offer some solutions to smaller or simpler sites, I am yet to be truly convinced that they pose any considerable risk to their future or their role in the future of websites.