I spent twenty years building on WordPress. I know its plugins, its themes, its update emails at two in the morning. I built a business on it, and I've kept a lot of good sites running on it.
So when a chart about website platforms crossed my feed this week, I read it the way you'd read a letter about an old friend.
What the chart shows
Bracemore, a web studio, looked up what the websites of the Forbes Cloud 100, the list of the world's top private cloud companies, are built on, list by list from 2017 to 2025. Then they did something most people sharing the chart skipped: they turned the percentages back into actual websites.
On the 2025 list, 89 of the company websites could be identified:
- Next.js: 47 sites (52.8%). On the 2017 list, 21 of 65 (32.3%).
- Webflow: 16 sites (18.0%). On the 2017 list, 6 of 65 (9.2%).
- WordPress: 10 sites (11.2%). On the 2017 list, 12 of 65 (18.5%).
- Astro: 2 sites. Framer: 1 site.
Next.js and Webflow now hold about 71% between them. WordPress went from the second most common choice to the third.
What it doesn't show
Here's the part I respect most about Bracemore's read. Each column is what that year's list runs on today, not what those companies ran in 2017. Their tell: the 2017 column shows sites on Astro, which didn't exist until four years later. So this isn't a picture of companies abandoning WordPress. Nobody in the chart is shown moving.
What it does show is quieter, and to me more telling. The younger the company, the less likely it is to start on WordPress. These are businesses with money, engineers and every option on the table, and when they build from scratch, most of them pick something else.
WordPress isn't going anywhere overnight. It runs a huge share of the web, and it will for years, the way old systems do: patched, propped up, and a little less chosen every year. But the people starting fresh have moved on, and I'm with them. If you're building a new website today, I wouldn't build it on WordPress.
The reason most people stay
When I talk with owners about leaving WordPress, the worry is almost always the same: I can edit it myself. For years that was true, and it was WordPress's best argument.
You don't need WordPress for that anymore. This week a client published her first article on her new site, on her own, in an editor built around her pages. No plugins to update, nothing to patch on a Sunday night.
Bracemore's best line
The post ends on the question that decides it: who edits the site on a normal Tuesday? A marketing team with no developer needs a visual editor with permissions. A team that ships through code doesn't.
I'd put it the way I always have: the handoff is the product. The right platform is the one the people who own the site can actually live with, week after week.
Three questions for your own site
If your site runs on WordPress, these are worth five honest minutes:
- Who changes it on a normal Tuesday, and how long does that take them?
- What is it supposed to do for the business? Calls, quotes, bookings, trust. Bracemore asks which number the site answers for, and it's the right question.
- How much of your time goes to keeping it running, rather than to what's on it?
If the answers sound fine, there's no need to rush. Keep it updated, and when it's time to rebuild, rebuild on something else. If they don't, it's time to start planning the move.
If you're weighing a move
Moving off WordPress is what my studio does every week, and keeping a WordPress site safe while you decide is part of it. If you'd like a second opinion on yours, nimblefish can help, or just reach out to me. I'm always glad to talk shop.
