Where's WordPress Headed In 2025?

We’re going to see a lot of growth in the CMS space in 2025. Like any product lifecycle, the CMSs of old such as WordPress and Drupal have grown and hit a point of no return while new, more focused CMSs are being consistently released.

If you’re a company who uses WordPress, you may be wondering why this matters. At least I’d assume that’s the case anyways if you’re reading this article to begin with. Kudos. Smart companies watch their performance metrics and take note of who has their hands in the development pot so to speak.

It matters because we can ultimately draw a fairly straight line from your CMS to its not so small impact on your bottom line. In short, developer experience, site performance, and user experience are all going to influence what happens to your website and in turn what happens on your balance sheet.

WordPress Drama 2024

Just Google it. I don’t want to rehash it all here. To summarize, Matt Mullenweg, WordPress co-founder and Automattic CEO, clashed with WP Engine over alleged exploitation of WordPress without sufficient contributions. Automattic blocked WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org and took control of its ACF plugin (the most important plugin for custom WordPress development), prompting a lawsuit. A court ordered Automattic to restore access, sparking governance concerns in the WordPress community in December 2024.

Frankly, I don’t think this is going to evolve into something that affects business owners directly. I just think it’s another page of evidence that WordPress is going through an identity crisis right now.

WordPress (De)Evolution

WordPress started out as a blog platform. As people hacked away trying to bend it into a CMS for custom websites, WordPress eventually added custom post types (CPT), used to build out other types of posts in addition to blogs - like teams, publications, or recipes for example. Then the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin came along. This plugin allowed developers to place custom fields (inputs, checkboxes, selections etc.) anywhere inside the CMS so that WordPress admins and editors could have a 1-to-1 experience with editing content. For example, devs could build a hero with an image field, a title field, and a content body field. Editors could easily add the image and content.

A few years later, WordPress introduced Gutenberg, now commonly just known as Blocks or Block Editing. Blocks aimed to take a similar approach to ACF and allowed users to input content, images, video etc. into reusable components and reorder them to fit their page’s need.

Most recently, WordPress has introduced Full Site Editing (FSE) where blocks can be combined into reusable Patterns (I know, this is exhausting, bear with me) to create entire pages include headers, navigation, footers and everything in between.

Of note, virtually all of this WordPress functionality is abstraction upon abstraction from how you would work with code anywhere else. That is to say, you have to learn the WordPress way of doing things - a skill that isn’t very portable and also affects site owners by missing out on tons of modern code benefits.

Prediction: I think the Automattic team will start to implement AI data gathering to analyze everything being done with Blocks and eventually release AI-driven WordPress design. There are already plugins cropping up with this functionality. It’s going to be a mess for quite a while as we see plugin developers tacking “AI” on to everything while producing little additional value.

The WordPress Plugin Ecosystem aka Are There Over 100 Devs Working On Your Website?

One of the biggest benefits (and risks) of using WordPress is its plugin ecosystem. A WordPress plugin is a bundle of additional code, usually from developers not employed by Automattic (the owner of core WordPress) that you can install to provide some specific function ranging from complex booking calendars or drag-and-drop editors (Elementor, Beaver Builder etc.) to things that shouldn’t even be a plugin like URL Redirection or Broken Link Checkers.

Here’s the rub. These plugins are developed and maintained by someone. But who? It’s not hard to find out. Just go to the source page of the plugin. Sometimes they are developed by a reputable company with paid support options and several well-known plugins. Sometimes they are developed by somebody who forgot the plugin even exists anymore and hasn’t updated it in years. The latter of course can introduce serious performance and security risks. And many developers are perfectly happy shooting from the hip and installing any and every plugin under the sun.

Did you know this already? Another thing business owners may not (probably not) be aware of is that a lot of freelancers and WordPress agencies cobble together WordPress sites using dozens of plugins. I’ve seen sites with 70+ plugins! In the words of one agency owner I was employed by, “clients don’t care about how their site is built so long as it works.” I’ve heard this from a few well-known PR people as well. I think what the owner meant to say is that he doesn’t care about how the site is built so long as the client thinks it works. I believe clients sure as hell care about the risks that are being introduced by using shortcuts and that agencies have an obligation to act in the best interest of clients.

When you have dozens of plugins on a website, you also now have dozens if not 100+ developers working on your website. And it all comes down to your agency or freelancer to vet these developers (and the code) who are supposed to maintain the plugin. But I’ve never encountered a single business who thinks about this, probably because they don’t know the issue exists to begin with. It seems to be one of those things where we’ve just coasted on trust for many years. Clients trust their agencies. Some agencies know better. Others aren’t aware of the risks to begin with.

My advice - ask your agency to show you the plugins installed on your website. If you have a mostly informational website (like most biotech, renewable energy and other startup websites, food and wine festivals, small businesses, restaurants etc.) and there are more than ten plugins, there’s a problem.

The agency is absolutely introducing unnecessary code bloat and risk to your site for their benefit, not yours. Sure they’ll claim that it keeps costs down, but do you really believe you’re the one reaping that benefit? Of course not. Either they’re not component enough to write the code needed and they HAVE to use the plugins or they are just cutting corners and you’re paying for it.

WordPress vs SquareSpace et al and Being All Things to All People

I think WordPress and Automattic have been going through a bit of an existential crisis on where they fit into the CMS space. On one end you have the SquareSpace’s, Webflow’s and Wix’s of the world. These are drag-and-drop builders that continue to evolve and allow users to build sites with little to no coding knowledge. The tradeoff is varying levels of code bloat which hurt performance and then running into edge cases (“crap, my platform doesn’t allow me to do X”) where you find out something isn’t possible at all or without great difficulty and cost, AFTER you’ve already gone all in on the platform.

On the other end are the rise of modern CMS solutions like Payload CMS, Strapi, and Sanity which aim to decouple various parts of the website architecture to improve flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability. This is accomplished by creating a CMS system that aims to be as little code as possible starting out rather than trying to solve all problems for all people from the get go.

WordPress is neither a drag-and-drop builder (there are plugins for this though) or a modern CMS that lets you start from scratch. WordPress is its own thing which can be described as a mature CMS with backwards compatibility and the largest plugin ecosystem. To achieve those two accolades, WordPress is also a huge mess of legacy code which will never evolve without breaking thousands of sites and plugins. This has led to many outdated practices and developing in WordPress is a poor developer experience where devs must do things “the WordPress way” instead of taking advantage of a multitude of advancements in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and browser APIs (the main ingredients of all website) that have been created over the past 10-15 years.

Again, I see WordPress continuing down the Blocks and Full Site Editing path to try to both maintain backwards compatibility and remain relevant amongst the huge advances by competitors.

What Should You Do in 2025?

If you already have a WordPress site created by a competent developer and you aren’t currently planning a redesign, then it’s probably fine to sit tight for now. The caveat here is “competent developer.” Your WordPress site should have roughly 10 plugins or less and your developer should have a damn good reason for having those plugins including some proof that they are being maintained properly.

If you are in need of a new website, then budget should probably dictate which direction you go. For smaller businesses without several thousand to invest in a new site, go with one of the modern builders mentioned above like Webflow. Webflow has basic CMS features for you to manage content and a competent Webflow designer can get you a polished, modern site with animations for far less resources than can be done in WordPress.

If you are in need of a new website and you do have the budget, then talk to your developer about using a new CMS such as Payload CMS. These platforms streamline development, resulting in a website that loads faster, delivers a better user experience, and is easier to customize or update as your business grows. Editors can manage content more efficiently, reducing time and costs. For brochure-style sites, this means a polished, professional online presence that keeps visitors engaged, reflects your brand effectively, and requires less ongoing investment - all of which positively impact your bottom line.

And a word of caution - if your developer argues for WordPress, ask them to show you some examples of sites they have built using a modern CMS. I’d bet that if they are arguing in favor of WordPress and against modern CMSs that the reason is they don’t have experience building with modern CMSs. Find a developer that does so that you can get an opinion based on experience working with multiple systems.