WordPress: the open-source CMS for building a website, a blog or an online store

More than twenty years after its debut, WordPress is still a giant of website building, but no longer necessarily the default choice for a simple site. It does remain unrivaled for anyone who wants to stay in control of their site: the software is free and open, and its ecosystem has no equivalent, since whatever the need, there is a theme, a plugin and a contractor who can handle it. That popularity has a very practical, often underestimated advantage: the day you switch agencies or hosts, you leave with your site, and you can easily find someone to take it over.

A self-installed WordPress site has to be updated, backed up and monitored, or it becomes an easy target: vulnerabilities usually come from a neglected plugin or theme. Piling on plugins also ends up weighing the site down and causing conflicts when updates roll out. The tool isn’t as simple as it looks, then, and a beginner who just wants a clean page in an afternoon will feel more at home with an all-in-one website builder.

WordPress.com partly solves that problem by taking care of the technical side, but you need to read carefully what each plan includes. The free version, with its .wordpress.com address and ads, is mostly for trying things out; plugins only come with a paid subscription, and commission-free online selling requires the most expensive plans. It is also wise to keep an eye on automatic renewals and the short refund windows, and to know that support goes through a chatbot first.

Its dominance may be nearing its end. According to W3Techs, the share of websites built with WordPress rose from 35.4% in January 2020 to 43.6% in January 2025, before falling back to 39.5% in November 2026. It is still by far the leading CMS, used by 58.2% of sites whose CMS is known, again according to W3Techs. But the way websites get built is changing: you can now ask ChatGPT or Claude to write the code for an entire site, and AI-assisted builders like Lovable, Bolt or v0 create and publish a website or an app from a simple description. Nothing proves that WordPress’s decline comes from there, and these tools produce code, not an admin dashboard: once the site is generated, you still have to host it, maintain it and edit the code to change a line of text. For a landing page that rarely changes, they are enough; as soon as someone needs to publish regularly, a CMS still makes perfect sense.

In the end, WordPress deserves its reputation: it is the most versatile tool for publishing on the web, provided you are willing to look after it, or to pay someone, a hosting provider or a contractor, to do it for you.