WordPress Market Share Declining (2026 Data)

📝 Originally published on unfoldcms.com — reposted here for the DEV community. (I work on UnfoldCMS.) WordPress's market share among CMS-using websites dropped from 65.2% in 2023 to 60.2% by Q1 2026, contracting -2.9% year-over-year for the first time in over a decade. The platform that built the modern web is losing share to Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, and an emerging headless category — and the trend is steeper among newly-built sites than the headline number suggests. This post is the data-driven take on WordPress market share declining in 2026 — where the numbers actually come from, where the lost share is going, what age-cohort analysis reveals about the trajectory, and what the developer-signal data (Stack Overflow, GitHub) shows about who's still building on WordPress versus moving on. TL;DR : WordPress isn't collapsing — 60% market share is still dominant — but the lead has shrunk for the first time in 10 years, the cohort of new sites is breaking away faster than the overall number suggests, and the developer mindshare is leaving even faster than market share. The structural pressures (security, performance, plugin tax, modern stack expectations) all point the same direction. The audience: developers, agencies, and CTOs trying to read the WordPress market trend before committing to a multi-year platform decision. If you've been told "WordPress is sinking" or "WordPress is fine, market share gossip is overstated," this post puts numbers behind the actual movement. For the broader context on why WordPress is losing share, see why developers are leaving WordPress: 7 pain points and WordPress vs modern CMS: honest feature comparison . The Headline Numbers Three primary sources track CMS market share. They don't agree exactly, but they all show the same direction: W3Techs (the most-cited dataset, scans the top 10M websites): Metric 2023 Q1 2024 Q1 2025 Q1 2026 Change WordPress share among CMS-using sites 65.2% 64.1% 62.4% 60.2% -5 points in 3 years WordPress shar