WordPress in 2025 isn’t thriving—it’s rotting. Bloated, outdated, and hijacked by commercial greed, the world’s most popular CMS has become a cautionary tale of innovation gone stale. If you’re still building on WordPress, you’re clinging to a corpse.
Noah Davis
Posted July 7, 2025
WordPress, the behemoth that once empowered a third of the internet, stands in 2025 as a paradox. On one hand, it’s still everywhere—powering blogs, newsrooms, e-commerce empires, and SaaS landing pages.
On the other, it’s increasingly irrelevant to the forward march of the modern web. It’s bloated. Fragmented. Over-commercialized. And its once-vibrant open-source soul is slowly being strangled by a familiar antagonist: profit.
From Power to Paralysis: A Platform Eating Itself
WordPress was always a bit of a Frankenstein. PHP? Check. MySQL? Of course. Thousands of plugins duct-taped together with mixed standards and varying support? Absolutely. Yet, for nearly two decades, this messy architecture worked. It offered unprecedented freedom and customization to developers and non-developers alike.
But in 2025, WordPress has become a victim of its own inclusivity. The democratization of publishing—its rallying cry—is now a marketing cliché, plastered across investor decks and Automattic’s keynote slides while the actual experience of building with WordPress is increasingly undemocratic, commercialized, and convoluted.
Gutenberg: Visionary or Vanity Project?
The block editor, launched in 2018, was supposed to modernize WordPress. Technically, it did. But in practice, it created a divide. Gutenberg represents a single-page application mentality slapped onto a legacy CMS.
It alienated experienced developers who had mastered the classic editor and confounded casual users who just wanted to write a blog post without dealing with columns, containers, or reusable blocks that break mysteriously.
Fast-forward to 2025, and Gutenberg has metastasized into Full Site Editing, patterns, block themes, and a jungle of UI metaphors requiring a mental model more suited to React developers than casual bloggers.
WordPress now sits uncomfortably between Wix and React—too complicated for newbies, too primitive for modern devs.
The Marketplace Has Been Monetized to Death
Themes in 2025 are paywalled at every turn. Plugins that once offered free functionality now drip-feed their usefulness behind ever-higher paywalls. You’re not building with WordPress anymore—you’re shopping.
It’s common to build a site and juggle six paid plugins, three freemium themes, and a bloated stack of dependencies. Performance? Secondary to conversion. The ethos of “just works out of the box” has been replaced by “works after you’ve paid $500/year in subscriptions.”
The freemium economy isn’t just thriving—it’s cannibalizing the platform’s original value. The open-source ideal has been squeezed into the margins by venture-backed plugin developers and theme shops using WordPress as bait.
Developer Experience: A Study in Frustration
WordPress in 2025 is a terrible place for modern developers.
You want TypeScript? Good luck. You want to deploy with GitHub Actions? Possible, but over-engineered. You want composable architecture, headless workflows, GraphQL APIs, or serverless functions? It’s easier to use Sanity, Astro, or Next.js.
The REST API, once hyped as a revolution, is largely ignored in favor of WPGraphQL—a third-party plugin. Local development is clunky. Security is a headache. The core is creaky, the dashboard archaic, and reliance on hooks feels like coding in Morse code.
The Headless Delusion
WordPress has flirted with being headless. But if you decouple WordPress from its frontend, what’s left? A mediocre backend outclassed by younger, leaner systems.
You can use WordPress as a headless backend, but why would you, when Strapi, Payload, and Contentful offer cleaner APIs and better developer experiences?
This is WordPress’s existential problem: it no longer knows who it’s for.
Automattic’s Corporate Drift
Automattic has grown increasingly corporate, opaque, and disconnected from the open-source community.
While core development drags under the weight of consensus, Automattic ships polished premium experiences on WordPress.com that leave the .org version behind. There’s a two-tier system: a WordPress for the masses, and a WordPress for the monetized.
The community is still passionate and building—but often like unpaid labor sustaining a legacy platform for Automattic’s benefit.
What Comes Next: Forks, Fights, and Futures
Some whisper about forks. Others dream of a leaner WordPress 2.0, stripped of backward compatibility and rebuilt for the modern web. But realistically, that’s unlikely. The inertia is too massive, the ecosystem too entangled.
What we’ll see instead is fragmentation. Specialized distros. More headless stacks. A slow bleed of contributors into rival platforms. And, for the first time, serious competition from open-source contenders unafraid to reinvent themselves.
Conclusion: WordPress Isn’t Dying, But It Is Decaying
WordPress will be here in 2030 and probably 2040. But its golden age is over.
What remains is a legacy platform pretending it’s still leading—when it’s really being dragged forward by inertia and monetization rather than innovation.
If you’re a content creator with minimal technical needs, WordPress still works. If you’re an enterprise needing fast, cheap deployment, it still checks the box. But for the modern web, it’s no longer the obvious choice.
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