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The past year was quite rich inside The WordPress ecosystemmarked by debates and disputes that have prompted some to question the platform’s long-term viability and consider exploring alternative solutions.
However, when you dive deeper into these concerns, they pale in comparison to the enduring strength of WordPress as a product and its unparalleled versatility in the CMS space.
The market share was maintained
The first version of WordPress was released on May 27, 2003. Its unique architecture, combined with open source, has seen a surge in popularity – it now dominates (as of December 2024) 43.7% of CMS market share.
This growth has also been steady despite the emergence of other CMSs, including Shopify, Wix and Squarespace. But none of them are open source.
It’s not “Just another” CMS
The unique architecture of WordPress that allows the plugin and theme extensibilitycombined with the power of open source, means it can expand far beyond the blogging platform it originally was.
This means that themes can be built for end users without necessarily having to understand HTML or CSS, and plugins created by third-party developers that could extend and scale the underlying platform in limitless ways.
I’ve built so much with WordPress over the years, including forums, message boards, education and training portals, e-commerce sites, communities, comparison engines, and scaled themes.
Our clients have ranged from people running small side hustles and running startups to managing hundreds of installations on a custom-built server to scaling sites for different global regions and building custom APIs using WordPress to scale activities.
No other CMS provides this flexibility – with all alternatives doing so only at great cost and technical debt.
Extensibility [Mostly] No Limits
Although I have been involved in building many things with WordPress, the concept third-party plugins it paved the way for reliable extensibility within the CMS.
The emergence of free and premium plugins in the WordPress ecosystem has created its own niche, with more There are 59,000 free plugins available within the official directory – and that doesn’t include the thousands of plugins available outside of the repo.
When I discovered WordPress in 2009, I realized that it was more than just a blogging platform – and more importantly, it was the most cooperative of the best SEO standards. I published my first of many plugins in the October 2010.
In 2013, I co-founded an agency with WordPress development as one of the core offerings where we worked on thousands of WordPress sites. Whenever we received a query or proposed something to build, WordPress was always the CMS that provided the best solution.
It’s also so easy to get started with WordPress and I advise anyone who wants to expand their knowledge to do so through experimentation (I talked about it on BrightonSEO a few months ago)
A truly passionate community
Another reason I loved WordPress was when I discovered that the massive community support helped the CMS thrive.
As well as SEO communitythe WordPress community is extremely interesting and supportive, not only to help solve problems and help develop the CMS as a whole, but there is also a lot of support for people’s professional and personal development.
Beyond the extensive resources that WordPress provides through its documentation and forums, the WordPress community thrives throughout the year through its own WordCamp gatherings around the world and participates in other communities, including WordPress chat and PostStatus. There are also a number of podcast series you can follow, including Make a Woo, WP Product Talkand WP buildings.
This community is extremely supportive and resilient to change, which in turn helps develop the WordPress core, which has been instrumental in shaping the future of creating, producing and improving websites.
The community is also giving back in ways I haven’t seen in other verticals.
You own your website and data
You’d think this would be obvious, but it’s not. Remember, WordPress is open source. Not only does this mean that the core product is completely free and supported by the community, as mentioned above, but it’s also your property.
Now to compare this to Shopify, Wix and Squarespace – these other CMS platforms own your site!
While people may believe that there are inherent risks with WordPress, I would ask you what would happen to your website if, for example, Shopify went out of business tomorrow.
The answer is simple – your site would cease to exist. What then? If WordPress stopped development forever starting today, you’d still be in the same position and still have your website, content, and data—all of it. What do other CMSs offer?
As another layer of freedom and risk mitigation, choosing to use WordPress as a CMS is also independent of where you choose to host it.
If for any reason you want to migrate your website from one host to another you have the freedom to do so, whereas closed source platforms not only own the website you build with them, but also the server that hosts it.
Are Recent WP ‘Discords’ a Risk for WordPress?
TLDR – no. The situation does not affect the functionality of WordPress as a CMS. WordPress remains a stable, reliable and widely used platform, with no indication that its long-term viability is in jeopardy. The CMS itself is unaffected and continues to thrive. If you want to read more about the current debates and controversies affecting WP leadership, you can read articles such as this and this to gain more insight.
Other options?
Still skeptical about WordPress? OK, what are your other options?
While others CMS platforms can be a good alternative to a “standard informational site” or a site that has no customization requirements at all in terms of common out-of-the-box functionality (which eventually happens to any site that starts to scale in any way), you have to making very informed decisions about whether it’s actually worth it – and what the problem is that you believe you’re solving.
Some questions I would ask myself:
- Is the CMS open source? If not, what do I own?
- Is there a strong form of community and support?
- Does it work well with the third-party connections and APIs you intend to use?
- Can you scale the page the way you want?
- Can you really control the front end output?
- Does it follow SEO best practices?
If any of the above answers are “no”, 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 WordPress would do.
A few months ago I decided to research a few open source CMSs to see if another platform could compete with WordPress and its capabilities. Unsurprisingly, nothing came close.
TL; DR
WordPress is here to stay and is still the CMS I would advise in 99% of cases.
It is secure, supported, robust, future-proof and open source.
While other CMS platforms may offer some solutions for smaller or simpler sites, I have yet to be truly convinced that they pose a significant risk to their future or their role in the future of websites.
More resources:
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