Why “just use WordPress” is still good advice

Let’s start with the number WordPress fans would rather skip. After peaking at around 43.6% of the web in early 2025, WordPress’s market share has slipped to roughly 41.5%, and the decline ran for six straight months into 2026. Its parent ecosystem spent two years in a very public legal war that is still unsettled. If you wanted to write “WordPress is dying,” this was your year.

And yet: 41.5% of the entire web is roughly nine times the share of Shopify, its nearest rival, and more than Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace combined, twice over. Around 38 million live sites run on it. The share it lost this year mostly went to “no detectable CMS” at all, likely AI-generated static sites, rather than to any competitor a small business would actually choose. WordPress is having its worst press in a decade while remaining, for most people building a serious site, the least risky decision available.

That gap between reputation and reality is the whole argument. “Just use WordPress” is underrated for a specific, fixable reason: it’s boring, and the incentives of web-development discourse punish boring.

The innovation token argument

A decade ago, an Etsy principal engineer named Dan McKinley wrote an essay called Choose Boring Technology that quietly became one of the most-cited pieces of engineering wisdom on the internet. His idea: every team gets a limited number of “innovation tokens” to spend on genuinely new technology. Spend them on what makes your business different. For everything else, choose boring, because boring technology’s great virtue is that its failure modes are known. New tech fails in ways you can’t predict. Old tech fails in ways with a Stack Overflow answer.

WordPress is 23 years old. It is the most boring choice in web development, in exactly McKinley’s sense: every possible way it can break has already broken for someone else, been documented, and been fixed. If you’re a small business, your innovation token belongs in your product, not your website stack.

Compare the fashionable alternative. In the State of JS 2025 survey, Next.js dominates usage while bleeding satisfaction, with the survey’s own write-up noting it’s “losing satisfaction at the exact same time” it gains ground, and one six-year production user summarizing: “the Next complexity has gotten absurd.” Cost estimates for headless builds start around ten thousand dollars and climb fast, before the developer retainer you’ll need forever, because nobody but a developer can operate the result. That stack is a fine spend of an innovation token, if your website is your product. For everyone else it’s renting complexity.

The honest cons, because they’re the point

An article like this earns nothing by hiding WordPress’s problems, so here they are, and notice the shape of each one.

• Security. The ecosystem logged 11,334 new vulnerabilities in 2025, up 42%, per security vendor Patchstack. The detail that matters: 91% were in plugins, 9% in themes, and exactly six, all low priority, in WordPress core. Bonus myth-kill from the same report: paid plugins were worse than free ones, accounting for a disproportionate share of exploited flaws. So the known failure mode is the plugin buffet, and the known fix is discipline: fewer plugins, from maintained sources, updated promptly, on a host that takes patching seriously.
• Performance. The “slow WordPress” stereotype has a real basis, historically trailing the walled-garden builders on Core Web Vitals, and a real cause: cheap hosting, bloated page builders, and 40-plugin stacks, not the core software. Meanwhile, the core team has been grinding the baseline down; WordPress 6.9’s own field data shows block themes rendering a third faster than the previous release. Known failure mode, known fix: a block theme, restraint, decent hosting.
• The drama. The Automattic-versus-WP Engine lawsuit grinds on. Here’s what two years of it did to actual WordPress site owners: approximately nothing. The software is GPL-licensed, forkable, and the courts have so far protected ecosystem access. The governance deserves criticism; the day-to-day product kept shipping.

Every con on the list follows McKinley’s pattern. These are documented failure modes with documented mitigations, which is precisely the property the shiny alternatives can’t offer yet.

The exit door is the feature

Here’s the argument that gets less airtime than security or speed and matters more than both: portability.

Wix does not let you export your site; pages and design stay put, forever. Squarespace offers a partial export that leaves chunks behind. A custom headless build exports nothing without the developer who created it. WordPress hands you the entire thing, database and files, movable to any host on earth in an afternoon.

“Just use WordPress” is really “keep your exit door open.” It’s why the platform drama above is survivable, why hosting price hikes are negotiating positions instead of hostage situations, and why a WordPress site built in 2010 can still be updated in 2026 while sites on abandoned frameworks face rewrites. You will make bad decisions about your website over the next decade; everyone does. Portability makes bad decisions reversible.

When WordPress is the wrong answer

• WordPress may be a great solution for many websites, but it isn’t right for every application. Here are a few places where you might not want to use it:
  
  You probably wouldn’t want to use WordPress for a pure online store. Most of WordPress’s lost share went to Shopify for a reason.
• Don’t use it for a true web application. That’s what the frameworks are for.
• For landing pages and other small websites that will never grow (and especially if updates fill you with dread), a website builder is legitimately the smarter start.

WordPress earns its keep when you want content, growth, and ownership at the same time: the seven boring reasons haven’t changed in a decade. The setup objection, in particular, has quietly expired. Managed WordPress hosting turned “install and maintain a LAMP stack” into “click the button,” and the ecosystem now has an official AI team and AI-assisted authoring tools of its own. The unfashionable platform is aging forward, not backward.

Unfashionable is the discount

Nobody ever got a conference talk for shipping a WordPress site. That’s part of why it’s so easy to underrate. The people who write and talk most about web development are professionally rewarded for novelty, while the platform that quietly does the job generates far less excitement. So WordPress’s reputation can drift downward even as the software itself keeps improving.

That doesn’t mean WordPress is the best technology for every project. It means that for many websites, it remains a practical, capable, and well-understood choice. Its ecosystem is enormous, its problems are familiar, and there is usually a straightforward path to fixing them.

In an industry that reinvents itself every eighteen months, choosing technology whose strengths, limitations, and failure modes are already well understood isn’t settling. For a lot of websites, that’s exactly the point.