WordPress market share drops to 41.9% amid Automattic WP Engine dispute

WordPress still powers more than two-fifths of the entire web. That fact is worth keeping in mind before reading what comes next, because context matters here. Nevertheless, something has shifted, and the data from web technology tracker W3Techs is specific enough to warrant honest attention.

WordPress held 43.2 percent of all websites six months ago. By the end of May 2026, that figure had dropped to 41.9 percent, extending a downward trend that began in 2025. For a platform whose market share had barely moved for years, that kind of sustained decline in such a short window is a meaningful change in direction.

For most of its history, watching WordPress’s W3Techs numbers was genuinely uneventful. The line sat around 43 percent and barely moved. Then, starting in late 2024, it began drifting downward, and it has not recovered since. By January 2026, the figure had slipped to 43.0 percent from 43.6 percent a year earlier. The decline since then has accelerated.

Meanwhile, competitors moved the other way. Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, and Webflow each recorded small gains in the same period. Duda held flat. None of them posted losses.

The obvious question is causation, and it is the right one to approach carefully. The W3Techs data shows correlation only. There is currently no direct evidence that website owners are leaving WordPress specifically because of the public dispute between Automattic and WP Engine. Growing competition from hosted platforms and newer web frameworks could account for some or all of the decline entirely on their own.

That said, the timing is difficult to separate from the broader context. The decline tracked closely with Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg’s campaign against WP Engine, which escalated through late 2024 and into 2025, producing lawsuits, injunctions, plugin disputes, and sustained public conflict that kept WordPress in the news for reasons unrelated to product development.

Whether the dispute caused migration decisions or simply coincided with broader competitive pressure, the outcome for Automattic looks the same from the outside. A few years ago, WordPress’s market share numbers pointed upward. Today, they do not.

That is a problem regardless of what is driving it.