WordPress Market Share Statistics 2026

WordPress still runs more of the internet than every other content management system combined — by a wide margin. But the most-cited statistic about WordPress, its overall market share of all websites, has done something it hasn’t done in years: it’s gone down for six straight months. Understanding what that decline actually means, and where the lost ground went, tells a much more interesting story than the headline number alone.

The Current Numbers, Straight From the Source

The single most authoritative source for this statistic is W3Techs, which surveys the technology stack of the top 10 million websites on the internet and updates its figures daily. As of June 28, 2026, W3Techs reports that WordPress is used by 59.3% of all the websites whose content management system is known, which works out to 41.5% of all websites on the internet — including the ones running no CMS at all.

Six Months of Decline — A Genuinely Unusual Stretch

Here’s where the story gets more interesting than the raw percentage suggests. Independent analysis tracking the same W3Techs data found that WordPress fell from 43.2% in December 2025 to 41.9% by late May 2026 — a 1.3 percentage point drop over six consecutive months, more than double the pace of the 0.6 point year-over-year decline recorded between January 2025 and January 2026. That’s a meaningfully faster rate of erosion than WordPress has shown in recent memory, and it’s the first sustained, multi-month decline of this length the platform has experienced in years.

It’s worth being precise about scale here: a drop from 43.2% to 41.9% is a real trend, but it is not a collapse. WordPress still controls more of the web than the next nine competing platforms combined. The relevant question isn’t whether WordPress is “dying” — by every available measure it isn’t — it’s where that lost 1.3 points of share actually went.

Where the Share Actually Went: Nowhere

The category that grew the most during WordPress’s six-month decline isn’t a competing platform at all. It’s the segment W3Techs classifies simply as “None” — websites where no content management system can be detected whatsoever. That category grew from approximately 28.6% to 29.5% of the web over the exact window WordPress was losing ground, which is a larger movement than every tracked CMS competitor’s growth combined.

“None” in this context doesn’t mean a website with nothing on it. It means hand-coded HTML, output from modern frontend frameworks like Next.js or Astro, pages built by static-site generators, and — increasingly — sites assembled directly by AI tools that produce a finished page with no detectable CMS underneath at all. Hosting providers are leaning into this shift directly: SiteGround launched Coderick AI in late 2025, a chat-based builder that generates a working site or simple web app from a plain-language description and publishes it instantly on managed hosting — exactly the kind of tool the “None” category is built to capture. A landing page generated by a tool like Coderick, a portfolio site built with a static generator, or a headless WordPress installation whose frontend renders in a way the crawler can’t fingerprint as WordPress: all of these register as “None,” even in cases where a CMS is technically present somewhere in the stack.

This reframes the entire narrative. WordPress isn’t losing a head-to-head fight against a better CMS — none of its direct competitors are close to absorbing the share it’s lost. It’s losing the simplest, lowest-stakes slice of the web — one-page brochure sites, throwaway landing pages, quick portfolios — to tools that don’t require a CMS at all anymore. That’s a fundamentally different competitive pressure than anything WordPress faced from Joomla, Drupal, Wix, or Squarespace over the past decade.

Why a Huge Share of the Internet Can’t Become “None”

It’s worth being precise about exactly what kind of site the “None” category can and cannot absorb, because the technical ceiling here is real and well-documented. A static site, by definition, serves pre-built HTML files with no server-side processing and no database behind it — the same fixed content goes out to every visitor on every request. That architecture is genuinely excellent for what it was built for: resumes, portfolios, brochure sites, documentation, and landing pages that don’t change per visitor. It is structurally unsuited for an entire category of sites that depend on a database to function at all.

User logins, shopping carts, real-time inventory, personalized recommendations, membership content gated behind an account, comment sections that store and display user submissions, search functionality across a large catalog — every one of these requires server-side logic querying a database in real time, per visitor, per request. A static site has no database to query. Workarounds exist — Jamstack architecture bolts on third-party APIs and serverless functions to patch in forms, payments, or search — but at that point the “static” site has simply outsourced its dynamic functionality to someone else’s server rather than eliminating the need for one. An ecommerce store with real-time stock levels, a membership site with gated content, a SaaS dashboard showing a logged-in user’s own data: none of these can exist as a genuinely static site without fundamentally changing what they do.

What the Decline Doesn’t Capture: Platform Health Signals

Market share as a percentage of all websites is a useful number, but it’s a blunt instrument — it counts a static one-page portfolio the same way it counts a 10,000-page enterprise site, and it can’t see what’s happening inside the platform’s own ecosystem. At WordCamp US 2025, held in Portland, Oregon, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg reported two specific, concrete signals of platform momentum that don’t show up in the W3Techs percentage at all: traffic to WordPress.org is up, and the plugin review queue — the backlog of new plugin submissions waiting for approval — has been cut from a wait of months down to a matter of days.

The plugin ecosystem tells a similar story. The official WordPress.org directory held roughly 59,000 free plugins back in 2024, and that figure now sits between 60,000 and 65,000-plus as of 2026 — steady, ongoing growth, with new submissions still arriving daily even through the months WordPress’s overall market share was declining. Count the broader ecosystem too, including third-party marketplaces like CodeCanyon and independent developer storefronts, and the total climbs past 70,000, with some estimates running closer to 90,000 once every paid, free, and independently distributed plugin gets counted.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment. A platform that was genuinely losing relevance to the people actually building on it would typically show its ecosystem shrinking right alongside its market share — fewer new plugins, slower submissions, developers drifting elsewhere. WordPress isn’t showing that. The site-count number is down. The plugin count keeps climbing. Those two trends pulling in opposite directions is itself a meaningful signal, and it suggests the share WordPress has lost is concentrated almost entirely among the simplest sites — the ones that were never going to install a plugin in the first place.

Core development has kept pace with everything else. WordPress 7.0, code-named “Armstrong,” shipped on May 20, 2026 — active platform development continuing in parallel with the market-share dip, not paused because of it.

What This Actually Means If You Run a WordPress Site

For anyone running an actual business, store, or content operation on WordPress — as opposed to a single static landing page — this data is close to a non-event. The sites driving the “None” category’s growth are overwhelmingly simple, single-purpose pages that were never going to need WordPress’s editorial workflow, user roles, plugin ecosystem, or extensibility in the first place. A WooCommerce store, a multi-author publication, or a site that depends on a deep plugin ecosystem isn’t competing with a static AI-generated landing page for the same use case.

What the data does confirm is that WordPress’s lead over every named competitor — Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Joomla, Drupal — remains effectively unthreatened. A platform that’s nine times larger than its nearest individual rival, even while losing a percentage point of overall share to an entirely different category of website, is not a platform in any real danger of being displaced by a competing CMS. The pressure WordPress faces in 2026 is structural and aimed at the bottom of the market, not competitive and aimed at the middle or top of it.

Who knew the platform powering four in ten websites could lose a year’s worth of ground in six months — and the competitor taking it wasn’t a competitor at all, just the absence of needing one.