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.

Re-verified 2026-08-04 — regraded stable

Source re-read: Search Engine Journal, 2026-05-28, not updated since. Its figures are 43.20% (December 2025) → 41.90% (27 May 2026), a 1.3-point fall across six consecutive monthly declines, drawn from W3Techs.

Regraded stable under the convention written today. This is a dated report of a trend, and re-reading it returns the same numbers — the flag could never be cleared from this URL. Current WordPress share is a different question needing W3Techs directly, which this corpus does not hold and which is the source worth adding if the trend matters to the spoke’s thesis.