Every January someone publishes a thinkpiece called 'Is WordPress Dead?' Every January, WordPress still runs 43% of the web. The people who keep writing that headline aren't wrong about what they're seeing — they're wrong about the cause.
Why people think it died
They ran into a WP site with 47 active plugins, half of which haven't been updated since 2021, on shared hosting that costs $4 a month. Of course it loads in 9 seconds. Of course the admin is chaos. That's not WordPress being bad — that's a particular WordPress being unloved. Next.js on $4 hosting with 47 copies of Framer Motion would be worse.
What 'done right' looks like in 2026
- —8–15 plugins max, all maintained, all pinned
- —A theme you understand (custom or a known base like Divi/Astra, configured, not decorated)
- —Dedicated hosting on a CDN — Hostinger, SiteGround, Kinsta, or a small VPS
- —PageSpeed 85+ on mobile for the pages that matter
- —A WAF in front (Cloudflare free is enough) + daily backups to S3 or equivalent
- —Content model that editors can edit — no 'only the developer can change this'
Where WordPress still beats Next.js in 2026
One short email every few weeks. Like this note, but in your inbox.
E-commerce with WooCommerce, for stores up to a couple of million a year. Anything the client has to edit daily. Multi-author editorial where the roles are real. E-learning where the LMS and the content live next to each other. And — sorry Next.js crowd — the vast majority of corporate sites that just need to explain what a company does.
"WordPress isn't bad because WordPress is bad. It's bad when it's bad. Same as everything else."
Where we don't use WP
Product apps. Real-time features. SaaS landings that need to share design tokens with the product itself. Anything where our client's developers want to contribute in JavaScript. In those cases we reach for Next.js and don't look back.
The real point
WordPress isn't a status signal. Using it doesn't make you less serious; avoiding it doesn't make you more cutting-edge. It's a tool. Pick it when the job needs it. Don't pick it when it doesn't. And please stop quoting the 2018 article your design friend tweeted.