You have probably seen the headlines.
WordPress is losing market share. AI website builders are taking over. Businesses are moving to simpler platforms. The software powering your company’s website is supposedly old, bloated, insecure, and slowly heading toward extinction.
That is a compelling story.
It is also missing a large part of what is actually happening.
I have worked in SEO since 2005, long enough to see platforms, tactics, agencies, and supposedly revolutionary technologies appear and disappear. One lesson I have learned is to be suspicious when the popular narrative does not match what people are actually doing.
Here is one interesting contradiction: search interest in WordPress has recently reached a five-year high in the United States.
Interest is rising while reported market share is falling.
Something does not add up.
For small-business owners, the important question is not whether WordPress powers a slightly smaller percentage of every website on the internet. The real question is whether WordPress remains a strong platform for serious businesses that need search visibility, lead generation, ecommerce, memberships, integrations, ownership, and room to grow.
The answer is still yes.
The “Decline” May Be the Web Getting Cleaned Up
For years, WordPress powered an enormous number of legitimate business websites.
It also powered a huge portion of the low-quality web.
Think disposable affiliate sites, automatically generated blogs, hacked domains, abandoned websites, scraped content, doorway pages, and enormous networks of thin articles built primarily to manipulate Google.
I watched much of that economy develop firsthand.
WordPress was commonly used because it was free, flexible, widely supported, and easy to automate. Those same strengths that made it useful for small businesses also made it attractive to spammers publishing thousands of low-value sites.
Google has become much more aggressive about removing this type of content from its search results. Hosting providers are also shutting down infected and abandoned websites, while domain owners are becoming less willing to pay for sites that no longer generate traffic.
When millions of low-quality WordPress installations disappear, WordPress technically loses market share.
But that does not necessarily mean real businesses are abandoning it.
It may simply mean the web is losing a large amount of WordPress-powered garbage.
That distinction matters.
A declining number of disposable websites is not the same thing as declining value for established companies.
Look at the Websites That Actually Matter
Market-share statistics often treat every website equally.
A neglected blog created in 2013 counts as one website. A large publishing platform serving millions of visitors also counts as one website.
That makes the overall percentage easy to misunderstand.
WordPress reportedly powers roughly 58% of the world’s top 10,000 websites. Platforms such as Wix and Shopify have a much smaller presence at that level.
That does not mean Wix or Shopify are bad. Both can be excellent choices in the right situation.
Shopify is particularly strong for businesses that want a focused ecommerce platform without managing much of the underlying technical infrastructure. Wix can work well for small brochure websites that need to launch quickly.
But larger and more complex organizations frequently need capabilities that packaged website builders struggle to provide.
They may need:
- Custom product databases
- Advanced SEO controls
- Membership systems
- Multilingual content
- Learning-management tools
- Complex forms and workflows
- Customer portals
- CRM integrations
- Custom APIs
- Detailed analytics
- Thousands of pages or documents
- Control over hosting and performance
That is where WordPress continues to separate itself.
Small businesses should not choose a website platform based entirely on what is easiest during the first weekend. They should consider what the business may need after three, five, or ten years.
Switching platforms later can mean rebuilding pages, recreating integrations, redirecting URLs, migrating customer information, repairing SEO damage, and retraining employees.
A simple platform can become expensive once the business stops being simple.
AI Website Builders Are Useful, but They Are Not Magic
Artificial intelligence has made it easier than ever to generate a website.
You can describe a business, choose a style, and receive a homepage in minutes. AI can produce headlines, images, service descriptions, calls to action, and even functional code.
That is genuinely useful.
It also creates a dangerous illusion: because something can be generated quickly, it must be ready for production.
AI-generated websites can contain security weaknesses, accessibility problems, broken mobile layouts, duplicated content, weak internal linking, inaccurate claims, bloated scripts, and code that becomes difficult to maintain.
One widely circulated estimate suggests that approximately 45% of AI-generated code contains serious security vulnerabilities. Regardless of the precise percentage, the larger lesson is clear: generated code still requires professional review.
This is especially important for small businesses handling customer information, payments, appointments, medical inquiries, legal inquiries, or employee data.
AI can help build the website.
AI should not automatically be trusted to secure it.
We are already seeing a “vibe-coding hangover.” Founders use AI to assemble an application or website quickly, only to discover that nobody fully understands how it works. Every attempted repair creates another problem. Features conflict. Updates become risky. Security audits reveal issues that should have been addressed at the beginning.
Eventually, the business returns to a proven platform with established documentation, experienced developers, mature plugins, and predictable maintenance.
In many cases, that platform is WordPress.
WordPress Is Also Becoming an AI Platform
The conversation is often framed as WordPress versus AI.
That framing is wrong.
AI is not simply replacing website platforms. It is also becoming integrated into them.
WordPress is moving toward a future in which AI agents can interact directly with the website’s publishing tools, data, plugins, and administrative functions. WordPress 7.0 is positioned to deepen that relationship by giving AI systems more structured ways to operate within the platform.
For small businesses, this could eventually mean using AI to:
- Draft and update product content
- Identify outdated pages
- Improve internal linking
- Organize media libraries
- Generate image descriptions
- Summarize form submissions
- Suggest SEO improvements
- Monitor broken links
- Update structured data
- Assist with routine website administration
The advantage of combining AI with WordPress is that the business retains a stable underlying platform.
Instead of asking AI to invent an entire system, you are asking it to assist with a system that already has defined users, permissions, content types, security controls, backups, and workflows.
That is a much safer and more practical model.
What This Means for SEO
WordPress does not guarantee strong search rankings.
Neither does any other website platform.
Google does not reward a business merely for installing WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, or an AI-generated website.
Search performance depends on what the website provides.
A successful small-business website still needs clear service pages, useful local information, fast loading times, trustworthy authorship, strong internal links, accurate business details, logical navigation, helpful original content, and technically accessible pages.
AI can help businesses produce and organize this material, but it can also create enormous amounts of generic content that says very little.
Publishing 500 AI-generated articles is not automatically an SEO strategy.
In many cases, it creates a larger website filled with weak pages that compete with one another, confuse visitors, waste Google’s crawling resources, and make the company appear less credible.
The better approach is to use AI as an assistant.
Let it help with research, outlines, content updates, schema markup, frequently asked questions, and identifying gaps. Then apply real business knowledge, customer experience, examples, photos, expertise, and editorial review.
AI can accelerate expertise.
It cannot manufacture genuine expertise on its own.
Should Small Businesses Stay on WordPress?
Businesses should evaluate their website based on results, not headlines.
Ask whether the website is secure, maintained, fast, backed up, easy to update, generating qualified leads, appearing in search, and supporting the company’s current goals.
A neglected WordPress website with 47 outdated plugins is a problem.
A professionally managed WordPress website with quality hosting, limited plugins, strong security, regular updates, reliable backups, and useful content remains one of the most durable digital assets a small business can own.
The same principle applies to membership businesses using tools such as MemberPress. They benefit from a mature ecosystem, established payment integrations, content controls, developer availability, and the ability to expand without moving the entire company to another platform.
WordPress is not perfect.
It requires maintenance. Plugin quality varies. Poor hosting can cause performance problems. Business owners must take updates, backups, and security seriously.
But those are management issues, not evidence that the platform is disappearing.
The web is changing. Low-quality sites are being removed. AI is transforming how websites are created and maintained. Closed platforms are improving, and businesses have more options than ever.
Through all of that, WordPress remains strongest where it matters most: businesses that need flexibility, ownership, search visibility, integrations, and the ability to grow.
The web did not move beyond WordPress.
The low-quality portion of the web is being cleaned up, while WordPress is becoming more useful to the businesses that were serious in the first place.