17 June 2026
In English only
In 2003, building a website was still a job for specialists. Even a simple company site demanded technical skill, time and a real budget. That year, two developers, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, forked the abandoned b2/cafelog blogging platform and released WordPress: an open-source publishing tool that anyone could install and run.
It changed the web permanently. Ease of use, thousands of themes and plugins, and a large open-source community turned WordPress into the most widely used Content Management System in the world. Today it powers hundreds of millions of sites, from personal blogs and small-business pages to online stores, newspapers and government portals. For more than twenty years, it has helped democratise publishing.
Now a second shift is under way. Artificial intelligence is changing not only how websites are built, but how software itself is written. Work that once took days or weeks can be done in hours with AI coding tools. So the question arrives on its own: will WordPress disappear?
Probably not. But the reasons for choosing it are changing.
From b2/cafelog to the world's CMS
The goal was simple: an open-source platform anyone could install and use. Twenty years later, WordPress is the default CMS of the web, and its success rests on a few durable pillars:
- Open source and free.
- One-click installation on most hosting providers.
- A vast ecosystem of themes and plugins.
- An administration interface familiar to non-technical users.
- A worldwide community of developers and contributors.
The rise of the plugin economy
WordPress quickly grew from a blogging engine into a full application platform. Thousands of companies built real businesses on premium themes, plugins and page builders. Products like Divi, Elementor, WPBakery and WooCommerce let agencies ship sites fast without writing everything from scratch. The ecosystem generated billions in revenue and put WordPress within reach of millions of businesses.
That success came with a cost.
When simplicity becomes complexity
A typical WordPress site today stacks a premium theme, a child theme, a page builder, a long list of plugins, custom snippets and third-party integrations. For experienced developers, that often adds up to unnecessary complexity.
The deepest architectural problem is the coupling between content and presentation. Many visual builders store layouts as proprietary data or shortcodes, so the content becomes dependent on the builder itself. Removing or replacing that builder years later turns into a painful migration.
Performance is the other cost. Animations, JavaScript libraries and CSS frameworks are frequently loaded in full when only a fraction is used, inflating page weight and maintenance.
Security: better than its reputation
WordPress is often blamed for being insecure. In practice, the core has become remarkably stable and hard to break. Most successful attacks do not target the core at all. They target:
- outdated plugins,
- abandoned extensions,
- pirated premium plugins,
- weak passwords,
- poorly maintained hosting.
Automatic updates, professional security plugins and better hosting have changed the picture. The real challenge is no longer WordPress itself, but keeping a plugin ecosystem healthy over time.
AI changes the economics of development
For years, WordPress was chosen because it was the fastest and cheapest way to build a custom site. AI moves that line. An experienced developer working with AI can now produce a complete application far faster than before. A modern stack (React or even plain JavaScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL or MySQL) can be built in a fraction of the time it used to take.
AI coding agents can generate features, refactor code, write database migrations and tests, review changes, fix bugs, improve accessibility and optimise performance. The cost of bespoke development drops sharply.
The new challenge: too many plugins
AI also lowers the barrier to writing WordPress plugins, which is good for innovation. But version 1.0 is only the start. Long-term value depends on maintenance, security updates, compatibility with future WordPress releases, documentation, user support and continuous testing.
AI can write the code. It cannot promise that a plugin will still be maintained in five or ten years. As thousands of AI-generated plugins appear, trust becomes worth more than code. Developers and companies with a proven record of maintenance and security keep the advantage.
Will AI replace WordPress?
Probably not. WordPress has an enormous installed base, a mature editorial interface and millions of users already trained on it. None of that vanishes overnight.
But the calculation shifts. Many projects that once used WordPress simply because it was the fastest option can now be built as lightweight custom applications with far less effort. That may slowly reduce its share of new bespoke work, while it stays dominant for content-heavy sites: blogs, magazines, editorial platforms.
The role of the developer
AI is not replacing experienced developers. It is changing what they are for. The value moves toward designing sound architecture, making good technical decisions, securing systems, reviewing AI-generated code and maintaining software over many years.
Writing code is getting easier. Engineering judgment is getting more valuable.
Choosing the right tool
WordPress reshaped the web by democratising publishing. AI is now democratising software development itself. The next decade is unlikely to be a contest of WordPress against AI. It will be about choosing the right tool for the right project. Sometimes that is still WordPress. Sometimes it is a lightweight React or Node.js application. Sometimes it is simply HTML, CSS and JavaScript written with the help of AI.
The future belongs less to a single technology than to the people who understand architecture, security, performance and long-term maintenance, and who treat AI as something to work with rather than against.