WordPress Market Share Declines for Six Months in a Row (Search Engine Journal)
A Search Engine Journal report documenting a sustained, accelerating decline in wordpress‘s share of the web.
Key claims
- WordPress share fell from 43.20% (Dec 2025) to 41.90% (27 May 2026) — a 1.3 point drop in six months, described as double the pace of the 0.6 point decline across all of 2025.
- Gainers: Wix +0.6, Shopify +0.4, Squarespace +0.2 points.
- Cited as a notable signal: astro downloads grew from 4.59M to 9.24M (Jan→Apr), exponential growth — a static-site-generator eating into the same space.
Cited reasons
- The author correlates the drop with Mullenweg’s public attacks on WP Engine (from Oct 2024): anti–WP Engine campaigns, temporarily blocking user updates, cloning premium plugins — “a clear correlation” with the subsequent slide.
- Structural pressures: security concerns, better core-web-vitals on competing platforms, and usability friction.
Why it’s here
This is the market-context source for the spoke: it frames why the static-site-generator / jamstack wave matters commercially — the incumbent CMS is, for the first time in years, losing ground, and a static generator (astro) is explicitly named among the forces. Note the cause it foregrounds is governance/trust drama, not purely technology — see the tension flagged in synthesis.