Are We in a Post-CMS World?

For over a decade, the story of the web was the story of the Content Management System (CMS). Platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla dominated the landscape, eating away at custom-built sites until it felt like a traditional CMS was the only “right” way to build a website.

But the data is starting to tell a different story. We are witnessing a massive shift, and the numbers suggest we might actually be entering a Post-CMS world.

To understand what’s happening, I dug into the W3Techs historical data over the last five years. When you look at the decline of the world’s biggest CMS - and convert those percentages into real numbers - the scale of the migration is impossible to ignore.

The Data: The Giant is Bleeding

Here is WordPress’s CMS Market Share (the percentage of sites using WordPress out of all sites that use a known CMS) since its peak in early 2022.

After a massive jump during the pandemic boom, WordPress hit a ceiling of 65.2% in 2022. Since then, it has been on a steady downward trajectory, dropping below 60% for the first time in years.

Translating Percentages to Real Numbers

It’s easy to look at a 1% or 2% drop and shrug it off. But let’s do the math to see what this looks like in terms of actual websites.

According to industry trackers like Netcraft, there are currently around 200 million active websites on the internet (excluding parked domains, spam, and inactive sites). That means 1% of the active web equals roughly 2,000,000 websites.

Between January 2025 and mid-April 2026 (a span of about 15.5 months), WordPress’s usage across the entire internet dropped from 43.4% down to 42.2% - a decline of 1.2%.

If 1% is 2 million sites, a 1.2% drop means WordPress has effectively lost 2.4 million websites in just over a year.

When you break that down into a monthly rate: WordPress is losing roughly 150,000 websites every single month.

That isn’t a statistical anomaly. That is a mass exodus. Hundreds of thousands of business owners, bloggers, and agencies are actively choosing to move away from traditional CMS setups or passing them over entirely when starting new projects.

What Does a “Post-CMS” World Look Like?

So, where are those 150,000 sites going every month? And why are they leaving? It’s not because another monolithic CMS is beating them at their own game. It’s because the architecture of the web has fundamentally changed.

1. The Rise of Headless & API-First: We are moving away from the all-in-one monolith. Today, content is managed in dedicated, decoupled services like Sanity or Contentful, and pushed via APIs to whatever front-end framework the developer chooses. The “CMS” is no longer the website; it is just a database.
2. The Modern Web Stack (Jamstack & Astro): For developers, frameworks like Astro, Next.js, and static site generators offer unparalleled performance and security. We are seeing a massive shift of agencies and freelancers moving their clients off of bloated database-driven sites and onto high-performing, serverless architectures.
3. Specialized SaaS Platforms: If someone wants an e-commerce store, Shopify is heavily favored. If they want a beautiful brochure site, Framer or Webflow provides a better experience out of the box without the maintenance overhead of a traditional CMS.

The Elephant in the Room: The September 2024 Drama

I would be remiss to talk about people leaving WordPress without mentioning the massive community fallout and WP Engine lawsuit sparked by Matt Mullenweg in September 2024. For many, his actions were shocking, and a common sentiment in the developer community was that he had completely “lost his mind.”

But when you look at this data, it completely re-frames that entire conflict.

Was the drama the cause of the decline? Or was the decline the reason for the drama?

When a behemoth platform starts bleeding 150,000 active users a month and watches its CMS market share plummet from 65% to under 60%, panic at the top is inevitable. The aggressive, seemingly erratic legal and public relations tactics deployed against WP Engine make a lot more sense when you realize WordPress leadership was staring at these exact, terrifying numbers. They weren’t fighting for growth; they were fighting over a shrinking pie.

The Takeaway

WordPress and traditional CMS platforms aren’t dying tomorrow. Being the backbone of over 40% of the web is an astronomical achievement, and they will remain a dominant force for years to come.

However, the era of the “Default CMS” is over. The fact that 150,000 sites a month are moving in a different direction proves that the market is finally diversifying. We are entering a Post-CMS world - one where performance, specialization, and decoupled architectures are the new standard.