Has WordPress peaked?

For twenty years WordPress has been the default Content Management System (CMS). In fact it powers ~43% of the web. It built agencies, careers and billion-dollar businesses, and for many organizations it remains a strong, well-supported choice today. But on April 1st, 2026, Cloudflare launched its open-source CMS alternative and called it the "spiritual successor to WordPress." Cloudflare has a history of launching real products on April Fools' Day. This one, aimed squarely at the web's most dominant CMS, feels particularly deliberate.

The dispute that exposed WordPress’s biggest flaw

The cracks started showing publicly in September 2024, when WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg called WP Engine "a cancer to WordPress" and demanded the hosting company pay 8% of its revenue — roughly $32 million annually — for the right to use the trademarked WordPress name. When WP Engine refused, Mullenweg banned them from WordPress.org, forked their Advanced Custom Fields plugin, and launched what Mullenweg allegedly described as a "scorched earth” campaign in private text messages. 

The lawsuit exposed more than a business dispute. It showed that WordPress wasn’t community-driven. One person owned the domain, controlled the plugin repository and was willing to target well established hosts (that compete with his own hosting platform) as he saw fit.

The fallout was swift. Prominent contributors were banned for raising concerns or walked out, over 8% of the Automattic workforce resigned in disagreement and negative press was covered by major developer platforms like TechCrunch, Hacker News and the Fireship YouTube channel (racking up a million views).

The platform was already starting to show its age

The lawsuit may have accelerated a decline that had already started. WordPress's share among CMS platforms peaked in 2022 and has slowly fallen each year since, while SaaS-based CMSs have slowly, but steadily, gained ground.

The story isn't about market share percentages, but how new projects are being built. Increasingly, modern developers aren't reaching for WordPress.

The reasons are structural. PHP, the language WordPress runs on, has become a specialist language, while JavaScript has grown into the dominant programming language for web, mobile, serverless and AI tooling alike. JavaScript developers significantly outnumber PHP developers, the gap widens every year and JavaScript can just do more things.

WordPress has also failed to solve foundational gaps. It still lacks native SEO tools and a structured content model — gaps that third-party plugins like Yoast and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) have filled for many years. Where investments have been made to evolve the platform, the reception has been mixed. The seizure of ACF during the lawsuit made the risk of these core external dependencies clear: the plugins your business relies on can be taken down overnight unilaterally.

Then there's scale. WordPress infrastructure requires significant engineering effort to handle heavy traffic loads for dynamic pages. Modern serverless platforms handle that automatically, at a scale WordPress simply wasn't originally built for. No managed WordPress hosting solution fixes the underlying concurrency ceiling that is baked into WordPress’s underlying PHP architecture.

A challenger built for 2026

Enter EmDash. Launched yesterday by Cloudflare, it's an open-source CMS written in TypeScript, built on the Astro web framework and designed to run on serverless infrastructure. It’s natively compatible with AI tooling and built for the modern tech era. Plugins are sandboxed, meaning a rogue or compromised plugin can't take down your site, a persistent concern with WordPress’s plugin architecture. As a team that uses Astro daily and specializes in both WordPress and decoupled architectures, we’re pretty excited to take a closer look.

Whether EmDash itself finds broad adoption remains to be seen — it’s likely a long-shot. The list of technically superior CMSs is ever-growing, but ecosystem momentum is notoriously hard to build. EmDash’s arrival isn't the point. What matters is what it represents: a well-resourced, credible organization looked at WordPress in 2026 and decided the ecosystem's problems were worth solving from the ground up.

That instinct was validated the same day by Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, former WordPress Head of Marketing and one of the more vocal critics of Mullenweg during the dispute. De Valk called EmDash "the first CMS designed from the ground up for how we work in 2026." Whether or not EmDash is a platform that ultimately succeeds, his verdict on WordPress is unambiguous.

When the person who built the plugin that fills one of WordPress's biggest gaps publicly endorses starting over, you know there are unresolvable underpinnings.

The logo says it all

EmDash's logo is an "m" — struck through.

An em dash (—) is a punctuation mark that signals a break. A pivot. A before and after. It’s also unmistakably AI. Whether it's a deliberate nod to Matt Mullenweg or elegant coincidence, the symbolism is hard to ignore. The platform isn't just positioning itself as a technical upgrade. It's positioning itself as a response to WordPress's biggest problem — one no plugin can fix.

WordPress isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Legacy is sticky, and ~43% of the web doesn't migrate overnight. But for organizations making platform decisions, the question is never about the past but instead what you'd build on when you’re starting fresh.

The measure of a platform's health and value isn't how much of the web it already owns. It's whether the people who know it best are still recommending it for new work.

EmDash may not be the answer, but the fact that the question is being asked — loudly, publicly and by big players — is a clear sign of where we are.

So should we stop using WordPress?

There's an important difference between a new platform built on exciting modern tech and an established platform waning in relevance from tech advancements. WordPress remains mature, well-documented and widely supported, with a deep ecosystem of developers and agencies (like us) who know it well. For many projects, it remains a very reasonable and solid choice.

At Alloy, roughly half of our web work today is built on WordPress, and we stand firmly behind that work. But we've also spent the last six years building decoupled architectures, most recently with headless CMSs Storyblok and Strapi. In the last six months alone, we've layered AI into both approaches, cutting development times in half across WordPress and decoupled builds alike, so we’re still investing in both.

The honest answer to "should we use WordPress?" is the same as it's always been: it depends. What's changed is that alternatives deserve a growingly notable place in the conversation. Our job is knowing the landscape well enough to recommend the right fit, and not defaulting to any single solution.

If you're starting a new web project and are wondering what path makes sense, we'd love to talk it through.