This post first ran in December 2024 as a set of predictions for 2025. It’s mid-2026 now, so instead of quietly leaving those predictions up, here’s an honest look at what actually happened, and where WordPress genuinely stands today.
WordPress still runs a large share of the web. W3Techs has put its share of all websites above 40% for years, and that hasn’t meaningfully changed. What has changed is what “running WordPress” actually means day to day.
What the 2025 Predictions Got Right, and Wrong
AI integration happened, but not the way most 2024-era predictions framed it. It didn’t arrive as a single flashy feature. It showed up as AI-assisted content tools, AI blocks in the editor, and, more recently, a formal path for AI agents to interact with WordPress sites directly. Headless WordPress grew too, but it stayed a specialist choice for teams with the engineering budget to support a decoupled front end, not a mainstream default. Security did tighten, mostly through better core defaults and more aggressive auto-updates rather than the biometric-login hype. And the Web3 and NFT integration angle, which a lot of “future of WordPress” posts leaned on back then, simply didn’t materialize as a mainstream WordPress feature. It’s fine to say that plainly instead of pretending it was always a fringe idea.
Where WordPress Actually Stands Heading Into 2026
AI Is Now Wired Into the Editing Experience
The bigger shift isn’t AI writing your blog posts for you. It’s AI acting as a collaborator inside the WordPress admin itself, with agents that can read, edit, and act on your site through structured, permissioned interfaces rather than screen-scraping the dashboard. If you want the full technical picture, the WordPress Abilities API guide covers how that actually works under the hood, and how WordPress is redefining collaborative editing looks at what that means for teams working inside the block editor day to day.
Full Site Editing Finally Matured
Gutenberg’s Full Site Editing was rough for years after launch. By now it’s a legitimate page-building tool: templates, patterns, and global styles that non-developers can actually use without breaking the layout. If your theme still relies on a classic PHP template structure, this is worth revisiting, since it changes how much a client can safely edit without your involvement.
Headless WordPress Found Its Niche
Headless didn’t replace traditional WordPress, and it was never going to. It settled into a specific niche: content-heavy sites that need a React or Next.js front end for speed or app-like interactions, with WordPress running quietly in the back as the content API. The headless WordPress pros, cons, and use cases guide is a fair starting point if you’re weighing whether that trade-off is worth it for your project, since it isn’t the right call for most brochure or small-business sites.
WooCommerce Leaned Into AI Shopping
On the commerce side, the real movement has been AI-driven product discovery: assistants that act more like a knowledgeable store clerk than a search box, surfacing the right product based on a conversation rather than exact keyword matches. The WooCommerce AI personal shopper guide walks through what that looks like in an actual store build.
What’s Actually Coming Next
Voice and audio interfaces are the next practical step, less “smart speaker gimmick” and more customers handling bookings or basic support by talking instead of typing, covered in more depth in the audio-first WordPress piece. Expect AI-assisted site building, generating a working layout from a Figma file or a rough brief, to keep improving rather than arriving as a finished product overnight; the AI-powered WordPress development guide is a reasonable read on where the tooling actually is right now, as opposed to where it’s marketed to be.
Should You Still Build on WordPress in 2026?
For most businesses, yes. It’s still the platform with the widest plugin ecosystem, the most available developers, and the lowest switching risk if a project needs to change hands later. It’s not the automatic answer for everything: a highly custom app-like product might genuinely be better served by a different stack. The WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org breakdown is worth a look first if you’re still deciding between a managed and a self-hosted setup. If you know WordPress is the right call and want it built properly from the start, that’s exactly what custom WordPress development is for.
