In Roger Montti’s Search Engine Journal article “WordPress Market Share Declines For Six Months In A Row,” he looks at recent data showing that WordPress’s market share has been dropping, while other website platforms are staying steady or growing.
Using data from W3Techs and the HTTP Archive, Montti reports that WordPress’s market share dropped for six months in a row, from 43.2% in December 2025 to 41.9% by late May 2026. He points out that this continues a gradual decline seen in 2025, suggesting the drop is speeding up instead of being a brief dip.
Montti compares WordPress’s results to other big website platforms. In the same time frame, Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, and Webflow kept their market share steady or saw small increases, while Duda stayed about the same. The report also points out that Astro has grown quickly, with more downloads in recent months, showing that more developers are interested in static site generators and new web development tools.
The article looks at several reasons why WordPress might be losing ground. Montti mentions Katie Keith from Barn2 Plugins, who has said that more competition, security worries, usability problems, and continued criticism of the Gutenberg editor could be slowing WordPress’s growth.
Montti also points out that the decline happened after a well-known dispute between WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine. He shows that the drop in market share came after these events, but says this is just a correlation and not clear proof that the conflict caused the decline.
The report also talks about performance. Montti notes that in recent Core Web Vitals comparisons, WordPress has often ranked lower than some of its competitors in real-world performance. Meanwhile, frameworks like Astro are gaining popularity because they are lightweight and more developers are starting to use them.
Even though WordPress’s market share is down, Montti does not think the decline is permanent. He believes WordPress could bounce back after the release of WordPress 7.0, which added a built-in AI framework for future AI-powered plugins, themes, and workflows. Because WordPress has a large developer community and is widely used by businesses, he says it still has a good chance to recover as AI features improve.
Overall, Montti sees WordPress’s market share drop as something to watch, not a sign that the platform is about to fail. He also points out that competition is growing from both traditional website builders and new development frameworks.