Why we still ship WordPress in 2026
Every year someone declares WordPress dead. Every year it powers another third of the web. Here is why we keep reaching for it.
Every year a Hacker News thread declares WordPress dead. Every year it powers another third of the web. There is a lesson in that.
We pick WordPress when the brief includes three words: blog, ecommerce, and team. The team part matters most. A founder who has never opened a Markdown file can publish a post in WordPress on day one. That is rare in 2026.
Where it still loses
We don't reach for WordPress when a site is mostly logged-in flows, when the page count is small enough that hand-rolling components is cheaper, or when performance has to clear a budget no plugin stack can hold. For those, Next.js wins.
The real argument
The "modern stack vs WordPress" debate frames this as taste. It isn't. It is a question about who maintains the site twelve months from now. If the answer is "the marketing person who has been around longer than us," WordPress.
If the answer is "us, forever," pick whatever lets us move fastest.