/ Craig Burgess
Every week somebody tells me WordPress is dead. It still runs about 40% of all the websites on the internet. Here's why the rumour won't go away, how the other website platforms compare, and when WordPress is the wrong choice.
No. WordPress isn’t dead, and it isn’t close.
I hear this every single week. WordPress is dead, WordPress is too complicated, just use Squarespace or Wix because it’s easier. I started making websites at 15, I’ve been paid to do it for twenty years, and I’m sick of hearing it.
Pretty much every website we’ve built at Genius Division since 2010 has been on WordPress. So yes, I’m biased. The numbers are on my side though.
How many websites use WordPress in 2026?
As of September 2026, WordPress runs 40.2% of all websites on the internet, according to W3Techs. That’s every website, including the 31.5% that don’t use a content management system at all. Of the websites that do use one, 58.8% are on WordPress.
When I made a video about this in March I was quoting 43%. It’s slipped a bit since then. The next biggest, Shopify, is on 5.4%. If WordPress is dead, somebody forgot to tell four in every ten websites.
Why does everyone say WordPress is dead?
Because there’s a lot of money riding on you believing it.
Squarespace, Wix and Webflow sponsor an enormous number of podcasts and YouTubers. Go on YouTube, search for any of them and count the videos. They need you to think WordPress is old and too hard to use, because the moment you realise it does what their platforms do, for less money, their pitch falls apart.
They didn’t make it up out of nothing, to be fair. Old WordPress was clunky. The editor was awful, and moving a button meant learning code or paying a developer. The code underneath WordPress is still genuinely terrible, and I’ll say that as someone who’s built hundreds of websites on it. It still does the job.
Is WordPress hard to use now?
Not any more. The block editor, the one they called Gutenberg, arrived years ago and changed how you edit a page. You drag blocks around and edit what you can see. No code for any of the easy stuff the website builders keep going on about in their adverts.
WordPress kept the powerful bits while it got easier. You can still change anything, connect it to your CRM or email marketing, set up proper tracking with whichever analytics you like, and build a checkout the way your business needs it. There are tens of thousands of free plugins, so when you need your website to do something specific, there’s a plugin for it nine times out of ten.
Meanwhile Squarespace in 2026 looks a lot like Squarespace in 2020, with a slightly newer screen and a bigger bill.
How do the other website platforms compare?
These are the platforms with a real share of the web, as of September 2026, from W3Techs:
| Platform | Share of all websites | Can you move the website somewhere else? |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 40.2% | Yes. Open source, host it anywhere |
| Shopify | 5.4% | No. It runs on Shopify |
| Wix | 4.2% | No. It has to run on Wix’s servers |
| Squarespace | 2.4% | Partly. Some content exports, the design doesn’t |
| Joomla | 1.1% | Yes. Open source |
| Webflow | 0.8% | Partly. Code exports, the CMS content and shop don’t |
| Duda | 0.7% | Hosted builder, usually run by your agency |
| Drupal | 0.6% | Yes. Open source |
| Framer | 0.2% | Hosted builder |
Shopify is the one I’d look at if you mainly sell products. It’s built for it and it’s good at it. The catch is the monthly bill and the apps on top, and Shopify charges an extra transaction fee when you take payments through a third-party provider instead of Shopify Payments. Your shop lives on Shopify, so leaving means rebuilding it.
Wix is fine for a one-page website you’ll never touch again. You own your words and photos, but the website itself has to run on Wix’s servers and can’t be exported. If you leave, you rebuild.
Squarespace is much the same deal with nicer templates. Its export gives you an XML file meant for WordPress, covering one blog, basic pages, text and images. Store pages, product and video blocks, and your design don’t come with you. They’ve put their prices up before, and when that happens you pay it or you start again.
Joomla and Drupal are open source like WordPress, so you own the lot. Drupal suits big, complicated websites with a proper development team behind them. For most businesses, both are harder to work with than WordPress and there are far fewer people who know them.
Webflow is a good tool that gets misused. It’s great for a campaign page or a photographer’s portfolio. I wouldn’t put a main business website on it. I’ve spoken to a business that spent tens of thousands on a large Webflow website and realised within months it was the wrong platform. You can export the code, but CMS content, the shop and anything dynamic stay behind. A lot of Webflow and Framer websites are so animated they remind me of the Flash websites of the 2000s.
Duda is a builder aimed at agencies, software companies and hosting providers building websites for their own customers. If a marketing company built your website and you’ve never heard of the platform, check whether it’s this, and ask what happens to your website if you stop paying them.
Who owns your website?
For a business, this matters more than anything else here, and the adverts never mention it.
On a hosted builder you’re renting the website. You own your words and photos, but the thing that shows them only works on that platform. If they put their prices up, you pay it or you leave, and leaving means building your website again.
WordPress is open source. You download it, put it on whatever hosting you want, and nobody at WordPress has any say over what you do with it after that. Basic hosting for a small WordPress website can cost you around £100 a year. Not the best hosting in the world, but it’s yours, and you can move it whenever you like.
It also means thousands of developers around the world keep improving it because they want to, without an executive board deciding which features make enough money. Now and again they make something worse. That’s open source for you.
What is the Genius Division website built on?
Not WordPress, as it happens. Our own website runs on Hugo, a static site generator. We’re developers, we’re the only ones editing it, and we wanted it as fast as it could possibly be. For a client who needs to update their own website, WordPress is still what we’d pick.
When shouldn’t you use WordPress?
WordPress isn’t right for everybody.
Owning your website comes with a catch: you have to look after it. WordPress and its plugins need updating, and something needs to be taking backups. Cheap hosting keeps the website online and that’s about it. Somebody on your team has to do the rest, or you pay somebody who knows what they’re doing. Leave a WordPress website alone for a couple of years and it’ll let you know.
If you want a single page that says who you are and you’ll never touch it again, Wix or Squarespace will do the job. A hobby or a brand-new idea you’re testing, same again. I’d say the same about using AI to build it for those. If you mainly sell products, look at Shopify alongside WordPress.
If your website needs to bring in work, it’s a different story. That includes:
- connecting it to your CRM, booking system or email marketing
- tracking where enquiries come from properly
- ranking in Google and actually growing
- changing things whenever you need to, without asking a platform’s permission
For any of those, I’d use WordPress.
So is WordPress dead in 2026?
No. It’s the most used way of building a website by a mile, and it’s easier to use than it’s ever been.
If you’re weighing up platforms, have a look at how much a website costs in the UK first.
Or ignore all this and go with whatever the last podcast advert told you. Your competitors will love you for it.