Six Months of Decline
WordPress market share stood at 43.20% of all websites in December 2025, according to W3Techs. By May 27, 2026, it had fallen to 41.90%. That is a 1.3 percentage point drop in six months — double the decline rate for the entire year of 2025. The pace of decline quickened beginning in December 2025 and has maintained that velocity through every month since.
WordPress still powers roughly 59.4% of all websites running a known CMS, and its nearest rival Shopify accounts for around 5.2% of all websites. But the framing of 'CMS market share' obscures the real story. WordPress is not losing to Shopify or Wix or Squarespace. It is losing to the absence of a CMS entirely.
The Replacement Is Not a CMS
The fastest-growing segment in W3Techs' data is sites with no detectable CMS at all. Static generators (Hugo, Eleventy, Astro), frontend frameworks (Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit), and AI-built sites that serve pre-rendered HTML or API-driven interfaces have no CMS signature for W3Techs to detect. They appear as 'no CMS' — and that category is growing while WordPress shrinks.
This aligns with WebPulse's scan data. Among the Tranco top 10,000 websites, Next.js has overtaken WordPress. The pattern is consistent: as sites move upmarket in traffic and sophistication, they migrate away from monolithic CMS platforms toward composable architectures. The CMS-free segment is not a gap in detection. It is the future of the web.
Why Now
Three factors accelerated the decline beginning in December 2025. First, only 36% of WordPress mobile sites pass Core Web Vitals — Google's page experience benchmarks that directly affect search rankings. Modern frameworks routinely achieve 90%+ pass rates. Second, the WordPress governance crisis of late 2025 eroded developer and enterprise trust, with key contributors and hosting companies distancing themselves from the project. Third, the maturation of replacement options — Next.js with headless CMS, Astro for content sites, Shopify for ecommerce — has reduced the switching cost that historically kept sites on WordPress.
The Security Dimension
WebPulse's data adds a dimension that W3Techs does not track: security posture. WordPress's 18,005 CVEs, the June 2026 plugin massacre (UpdraftPlus, Burst Statistics, Kirki, Ninja Forms, Avada), and the ongoing supply chain attacks against WordPress plugin infrastructure make the platform's security cost increasingly visible to decision-makers.
The 1.3 percentage point decline represents approximately 2.5 million websites that have moved away from WordPress in six months. Each of those sites made a decision that the cost of staying — in performance, security, maintenance, and developer productivity — exceeded the cost of migrating. For the first time in WordPress's history, the migration math is working against it at scale.
What This Means for Executives
For organizations still running WordPress, the market share data is a leading indicator. When the dominant platform loses share at an accelerating rate, the ecosystem effects compound: fewer developers specialize in it, fewer premium plugins receive active maintenance, and the remaining install base becomes a more concentrated target for attackers.
The question for executives is not whether WordPress will disappear — it will power a significant share of the web for years. The question is whether their organization should remain in a shrinking ecosystem or join the migration that 2.5 million sites have already completed.
