WordPress Market Share: Stagnation or Decline?

In a recent episode of the WP Product Talk podcast, industry leaders gathered to discuss a pressing question: Is WordPress’ market share declining, and what should product businesses do about it?

The conversation, featuring Joost de Valk, Noel Tock, Miriam Schwab, and Richard Tabor, shed light on the complexities of measuring WordPress’ market position and the challenges facing the platform.

The discussion began with an analysis of market share data. Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO, presented figures from the HTTP Archive dataset, showing WordPress at 35.26% market share with a slight month-over-month decline of 0.28%. However, de Valk cautioned against over-interpreting small changes, stating, “I think honestly, that there’s too much uncertainty in the data to be able to say that clearly.”

Noel Tock, co-founder of Human Made, focused on the detection of new WordPress websites within the top 1 million sites. He observed a trend of WordPress increasingly being used on subdomains rather than main domains, raising questions about the platform’s positioning in enterprise markets.

While the data didn’t conclusively show a decline, the speakers agreed that WordPress is facing a period of stagnation. Miriam Schwab, head of WordPress relations at Elementor, highlighted a crucial issue: “We’re missing the excitement factor. When WordPress started growing, and we all got excited about it, WordPress brought so much to the table that didn’t exist in any other product at the time.”

This lack of excitement was echoed by Richard Tabor, product manager at Automattic, who emphasized the need for WordPress to become inspiring again. “If we get the product into a point where it is inspiring again… then marketing efforts will have much more of an impact because then now you’re marketing inspiration, you’re not marketing feature sets,” Tabor explained.

The conversation revealed the complex landscape where WordPress must cater to diverse audiences, from DIY website builders to enterprise-level users. This diversity presents challenges in creating a unified marketing strategy and product development roadmap.

A key point of discussion was the need for improved marketing efforts for WordPress as a whole. The panel proposed the idea of a shared marketing coalition, with Schwab suggesting, “A marketing consortium of larger companies in the industry who come together, bring their marketing expertise like Elementor to market WordPress.”

The delicate balance between WordPress core development and the plugin ecosystem, was also brought up. de Valk noted, “I think that both WordPress core is relatively in catch-up mode. And the plugin side of the WordPress ecosystem isn’t as innovative as it used to be.”

The conversation highlighted that while WordPress may not be in drastic decline, its growth has stagnated.

WordPress challenges in marketing, innovation, and maintaining excitement among users and developers. The WP Product Talk guests remained optimistic about WordPress’ potential, emphasizing the need for coordinated efforts in marketing and product development to reinvigorate the platform’s growth and appeal.