Web design · WordPress
Why it is still the platform I recommend for a business that wants to own its site, where the real risk sits, and when something else is the better fit.
Still runs about 40% of websites
Plugins carry most of the risk
Ownership is the main reason to choose it
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WordPress is still a good choice in 2026 for most business websites, and it is still the one I would recommend by default to a company that wants to own its site. It is open source, it runs on almost any host, there is a large pool of people who can work on it, and you can take the whole site with you if you change agencies. The condition is maintenance. A WordPress site that someone updates, backs up and watches is a sound business asset. One that nobody touches for two years is a liability with your logo on it.
The question comes up because WordPress has been around since 2003, and because newer builders market themselves as modern. Age is not the problem people think it is. The software gets regular releases, and the block editor has changed how pages are built quite a lot over the past few years.
Its share of the web has drifted down a little. W3Techs, which tracks this, put WordPress at 40.1 percent of all websites and 58.6 percent of sites whose content management system it can identify, as of October 12, 2026. That is lower than a couple of years ago, as hosted builders such as Wix, Squarespace and Shopify grow. It is also still, by a long way, the most used system on the web. A tool that runs four in ten websites is not going away soon, and that matters for a business because it means developers, hosts, plugins and answers to almost any problem are easy to find.
The main reason is ownership. WordPress is licensed under the GPL, which means the software is free to use, change and move. Your content, your design and your database can be exported and hosted anywhere. If you fall out with your agency, you hire another one, and the site stays yours. On a hosted builder you rent the platform, and moving off it usually means rebuilding.
Range matters too. The same system can run a five-page brochure site, a 300-page service site with location pages, a membership area or a WooCommerce shop. Businesses change, and it is useful not to have to switch platforms each time.
And if search traffic matters to you, WordPress gives you control over titles, descriptions, redirects, structured data and page speed, either directly or through well-established plugins. Other platforms can do much of this too, but with WordPress there is rarely a setting you simply cannot reach.
Here is the honest downside. WordPress’s strength is that you can add almost anything with a plugin. Its weakness is the same thing.
Patchstack’s State of WordPress Security in 2026 report counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, a 42 percent increase over the year before. Of those, 91 percent were in plugins and 9 percent in themes. Only six were reported in WordPress core, all low priority. And 46 percent had no fix from the developer at the time they were disclosed.
Read that carefully. WordPress itself is in good shape. The risk is the stack of plugins people add over the years, some of which stop being maintained. A site with 45 plugins, half of them installed by a former employee for a campaign in 2021, is a site waiting for a bad week.
So maintenance means four things done regularly: core, plugin and theme updates, applied promptly and checked; fewer plugins, each one with an active developer; backups stored away from the site and tested; and monitoring that notices when something changes. Our WordPress security checklist goes through it step by step.
WordPress is the default, not the answer to everything. I would point a business elsewhere in these cases:
Notice that none of these says “WordPress is bad”. They say a different trade-off fits better.
Picture a 40-person insurance agency with a 60-page WordPress site, run two different ways. In the first, nobody is assigned to it. Updates are applied when someone remembers, roughly twice a year. It has 38 plugins, a page builder that is two major versions behind, and backups on the same server. Then one of those plugins gets a published vulnerability with no patch, and automated scanners find the site within days. The cleanup, the downtime and the “Google says this site may be hacked” warning cost far more than a year of maintenance.
In the second, the same site has 14 plugins, each with a reason to exist. Updates go on weekly after a check on a staging copy, backups are held off-site, and monitoring alerts someone when files change. The platform and the content are identical in both. What changed is that somebody owns the second one.
If you are deciding whether to stay on WordPress, move to it, or move off it, book a free 30-minute call. We will look at your current site and tell you what we would change first, including when the answer is a different platform. Book your free call.
We build custom WordPress sites, and most launch in 6 to 10 weeks. Clients can edit their own site and keep it if they leave. Our hosting and support includes constant automated monitoring and malware cleanup, because a WordPress site without maintenance is the version I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. For a business that wants to own its website and will have someone look after it, WordPress is still the safe default. See our web design services for how we approach a build. Getting visitors but not calls? Here is what we check on a free website call.
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Yes. W3Techs put it at 40.1 percent of all websites as of October 2026, far ahead of any other system, even though its share has slipped slightly as hosted builders grow.
WordPress core is in good shape; Patchstack counted only six core vulnerabilities in 2025. Most risk comes from plugins and themes, so keep the plugin list short, update promptly, and keep tested backups off the server.
For a business that wants to own its site, grow it and control SEO in detail, usually yes. For a very small site nobody will maintain, a hosted builder can be the more practical choice.
Updates every week or two, a regular review of plugins, off-site backups that are test-restored, and monitoring. Who does it matters less than that it happens.
