2025 Opinions on the future of WordPress

Taking guesses at the future based on observations over the last 5 years.

Let’s take a look at the current web trends…WordPress, websites, apps, social media, search engines, AI. At the end of it all…I make my predictions on web trends moving forward.

When all is said and done, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming!

1. WordPress popularity

WordPress is still the king.

Way too much speculation put here. Yes, it’s true that WordPress may have lost some market share. But it’s very slight and it’s still very much the default standard. Do I care that WordPress slid 2% to still remaining about 63% (almost 2/3rds) of all websites? None whatsoever. Just to make a point, second place is Shopify at 6.5%. Everybody else (Wix, Weebly, Webflow, Joomla, etc) is barely even a fraction of that.

What I do care about is that WordPress is now officially a household name. Regardless of who uses WordPress, it seems everybody has heard of WordPress. Certainly more people today than 5 years ago. Especially when I talk to non-techies.

If you’re in the WordPress space scheming to pivot to another platform for work, I think it’s premature for that.

2. WordPress success (usability & user experience)

I still think WordPress is wildly successful, rampantly successful even.

It’s easy to use and honestly, I think it’s even easier to use today than when I first started. It’s no easy feat, mind you.

Sure…some of you may feel WordPress is too bloated or complicated and I partially agree. The WordPress of today has slightly more learning curve than the one 15 years ago. But also…all of the web today is more complicated and has a generally more web-savvy userbase. I see all kinds of kids on Instagram and TikTok putting out professional-grade polished content. And having zero issues looking up how-to’s online.

WordPress has more features and can do exponentially more things today.

Yet learning curve is only slightly more. Once a beginner figures out the basics…theme, plugin, customize, user, post management…they’re off to space!

I’ve watched non-techy friends cry and pull their hair out when first learning how to use WordPress. But in no-time at all (12-24 months later), they were tinkering around and enjoying the freedom of messing around with their site.

The free price of WordPress certainly helps to keep people trying again until they figure it out. Anybody paying $20-50/month for another platform is STILL going to have a learning curve. And they’ll be less patient with its shortcomings. Have you seen Shopify’s admin interface? YUCK YUCK YUCK! I think it’s so much more confusing than WordPress…for both techies and non-techies.

3. WordPress trends

Economic recession means less budget to spend on things.

Lots of bandaid solutions and quick fix services thriving. Lots of switching webhosts for lower price. This also means more low-grade and copycat shops going out of business. Which I’m happy for.

Pagebuilders (Elementor) are more popular than ever.

We’re reaching the point where new users think WordPress is just a platform for “hosting” Elementor. LOLOLOL. (There’s easily 4-5 times the amount of searches for “Elementor” than for “pagebuilder”.) Elementor’s branding is that freaken strong and has long been synonymous for “pagebuilder”, perhaps even synonymous for “WordPress”.

Elementor also offers hosting…which further blurs the line between hosting, WordPress, and pagebuilder. And then they also have their own theme, AI stuff, mailing service. To the non-techy user, Elementor seems like the one-stop shop for all the fancy buzzwords they’ve heard.

To the techie developer or service provider, Elementor is your #1 competition. Whatever it is you’re offering in the WordPress space, it needs to be easy to understand, feel like your shop can scratch every itch, and that clients don’t have to shop at 8 places to get going (hosting, DNS, theme, plugins, security, backup, email, etc).

Premium plugin fatigue and the growth of one-stop shops.

Premium plugin fatigue is official. Gone are the days of new paid plugins getting announced every week. That whole LTD pyramid scheme business model has long been exposed and collapsed on itself. Longtime developers no longer trust new plugins with inflated claims and promises. New users don’t want to pay for every add-on. Most of all…nobody has that kind of money to keep buying every shiny new plugin.

For that reason, I now understand the convenience of one-stop shop umbrella dev houses. Usually, they’re focused towards beginners…offering theme, pagebuilder (or Gutenberg blocks), WooCommerce hacks, marketing (forms/email/popup). Or more towards established businesses…user engagement (membership), payments. Or developers…galleries, tables, script libraries, and specialized functions.

As a developer, I love giving clients just one brand to subscribe to like say Kadence. And within that, they have everything they need to get going. They buy the package, give me one login or one license key and I do the work. Nobody is confused with 10 different sites to log into, or different payment plans. Easy for the client to pay for and keep updated. Easy for me to log into one place and get my work done. The best part is that all extensions are under the same umbrella and work together seamlessly, instead of cluttering the dashboard with numerous similar-sounding brandnames.

Is speed optimization still a thing?

This question was what inspired this post actually. My thoughts came together after reading Steve Teare’s thoughts over at PagePipe. Speed optimization is still very much an important issue in WordPress, especially as long as pagebuilder-cancer continues to be a thing.

But the whole subfield of speed optimization has been greatly demystified nowadays. It seems every webhost, theme, plugin, and service is deathly cautious of website speed (and its supposed effect on search engine rankings). Thanks to endless blog posts, YouTube videos, and plugins on speed optimization…the average coder or DIY web-admin is now quite capable on the matter.

The speed optimization troubles you see nowadays are either with total newbies, who barely know how to use WordPress. Or large complicated sites with high traffic, that need a complete rebuild from scratch.

4. Websites vs Social Media

How do you build a brand?

This question is now synonymous with “how do you build traffic?” And if you’re thinking traffic…then you’re probably thinking of where to start. With a website? Or an Instagram/TikTok profile?

And boy do I totally get it.

Websites feel so cumbersome, overly technical, and most of all…very unsexy. They aren’t very fun to maintain. Making changes, tweaking the design, adding content…debatable. Doing updates, random site errors, having to pay for things, having to log in, not able to make changes from a mobile app…definitely not sexy.

Strengths of social media apps

Not every brand can or should be built off of social media, but certainly enough to where it should be your very first consideration when starting a new business. Many brands starting nowadays should be tested first on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Facebook Group for interest and viability.

These platforms already have traffic, are well-built and easy to use, and pass onto you their brand familiarity and social trust. You get to focus on YOUR identity (your logo and your content) rather than all the technical stuff.

This all sounds much more convenient than paying lots of money to build a new website, then spending more hours and money for SEO or paid traffic…right??? Social media is the fastest way to get your new brand out there. You can do it in 24 hours even!

5. Websites vs Apps

The app-ified experience continues to dominate.

People are spending more time on apps than on websites. And new websites continue to be built more like apps or with a companion app. Apps especially make the mobile experience more fun and engaging, easier to use, more seamless with the brand.

While I don’t think every site should be an app, I can certainly see how many organizations might benefit from a more comprehensive app-experience. Apps can do more things, and more quickly notify users of updates and actionables.

Maybe you’ll actually build your business off an existing popular social media app. Or you’ll make your own app. Or you’ll make an app-like website.

As opinionated as I am, I wouldn’t dare tell you how to incorporate more of the app-experience into your site:

• Maybe you need endless scroll.
• Perhaps more javascript and AJAX instant information (e.g. results appearing as you type in search box).
• Hover effects?
• What else?

I’m still very much a traditionalist in terms of how websites should function. I like clean and simple. We’ll see how the future goes. Maybe speed improvements get to a point where we CAN have fancy app-like effects.

6. Websites vs AI

This is a real war breaking out.

People used to think you just had to build a website, make some tweaks for Google, and free traffic would come. But AI is changing all this.

Nobody cares to research when you can source quick answers via AI or human discussion (FB groups). Google’s AI-farmed answers is definitely leading to fewer site-clicks. For 95% of general questions, I found no need to click in to each individual website.

This mindset prevails on other websites and social platforms as well. On Instagram and TikTok, you just scroll through and let content pass by in front of you. On YouTube, you can fully watch videos from the preview thumbnail without having to click into them.

There’s a lot more friction now to get a click-through. Which goes back a lot to my earlier sentiment of everything becoming more “app-ified”. People want their actions (clicks) to be rewarded with on-page engagement….and NOT with a pageload.

AI content scraping

A big win in terms of technological advancement and benefit to users. But a big loss for website owners. AI bots can now scrape your site aggressively, using up your server resources, and then display your content on their site. So they get the traffic, they get the credit, and they get to monetize your content instead of you.

Very shady ethics if you ask me. (Many people are now trying to block AI bots from scraping their site. And for good reason. I’ll make a post on this later.)

7. AI website design

I haven’t tried it and honestly, I don’t take it seriously.

Anybody thinking AI is going to kill off designer’s jobs is smoking crack. There’s plenty of free graphic design tools, yet logo designers still have jobs.

AI doing web design worries me as much as $5 t-shirts bothers boutique fashion brands. (Meaning none whatsoever.) There will always be people looking for the cheapest, most generic, copycat shitty option. You wouldn’t want them as a client anyway.

Serious businesses are looking to stand out, with their own identity, their own brand. And you need a human to that. Only a human can break rules. Robots don’t.

My predictions for the future of websites & WordPress

1. Connection over information

Personal connection becomes more rare and even more desired in this increasingly technical world devoid of human touch. As much as we want instant gratification, we still instinctively look for human connection.

We instinctively seek out things that interact with us. Things that hear us, react to us, talk back to us. No machine can ever replicate this. I get more dopamine boost counting my Instagram reactions than I do searching for “best power bank” on Google.

Outside of impersonal searches like “New York weather now”, I’m sick of generic AI-sourced answers. Many people are fine with generic answers but I’m not. I still like exploring sites and spending time clicking around…AS LONG AS THEY FEEL HUMAN. As long as their writing feels personal, one man/woman with a clear voice, and speaking from their own damn personal opinion (and not copycatting other existing posts).

New brands and new websites absolutely need a personalized human touch. Your face should be the first thing on the home page….or at least ANY human face. All written text, verbiage, copywriting…needs to be relatable to the individual user. Everything on that site needs to communicate “I am a human, a human is talking to you.”

Staying human is the ONLY WAY to keep brand engaged with users. To help them relate and remember you. Don’t be shy, be you.

2. Further trend of one-stop shops

This is most definitely the future of WordPress development shops going forward. The WordPress plugin eco-system is very heavily matured now, thanks to open-source and healthy competition. Just about everybody does more or less the same thing. All themes, all pagebuilders, all membership plugins, etc.

Except for a few very niche solutions…all WordPress extensions seem to overlap at least 95% of each other’s features. Their differences varying mostly in UI and workflow style. Whatever new features developed by competitors are easily copied within a year anyway.

Since they’re all so full-featured and similar, what puts them apart is how well they integrate with your other dozen plugins. For this reason, we’re probably best served using plugins from the same unified dev-house….rather than mix-and-matching between different themes, Gutenberg blocks, etc. You pay one price and get access to a whole suite of plugins to use across various sites, and faster corporate-level support for any issues. It’s a win-win for everybody. (Nobody wants to subscribe to 30 different plugins.)

3. New plugin operating models

The current pricing models for premium plugins are not working. I know this from both sides of the plugin (as user & developer). Gone are the days of 1-man plugin devs selling clean-functional plugins for a small fee. Now, paid plugins need to have beautiful UI, super polished website, documentation, chat support, compatibility with every other plugin, Facebook Group community, affiliate program, and constant reputation management on social media.

Many extra considerations that require time to manage and add to the plugin price. And to further justify the price, they’d have to add more features and more support for those features. Just so much extra bloat.

But on the flip side…business owners do not have funds to pay for several “best in class” plugins. And it seems everybody nowadays wants to charge “premium pricing”.

This definitely doesn’t work when today’s WordPress sites are more plugin heavy than ever. You’ve got your theme, and premium theme add-on plugin. Then you’ve got pagebuilders and add-on plugins for them, and then other essential business plugins such as shopping cart or membership. And you guessed it…add-on plugins for them as well. And then site management like security, backups, caching, etc.

Plugins either need to be cheaper. Or we need to go back to full-featured FREE plugins. (Like back in the days before Syed Balkhi bought them all out and charged money for essential features.)

Or maybe we need a unified app store where users can shop for paid plugins right from their dashboard, which are then billed to your WP org account. Maybe with this model, plugin devs can charge lower prices and still make more money due to exposure. This plugin market could be like Apple’s mobile app market. You pay a small price and never have to see that number again. Easy to sign-up and easy to use.

4. AI features with WordPress

“AI” reminds me a lot of the last great trendy buzzword “cloud”. Hahaha, do you remember 10-15 years ago when “cloud” was everywhere?! Cloud server, cloud hosting, cloud theme, or even just simply “the cloud”.

But what was it, really? The underlying function of most things was still the same…at least as far as hosting goes. As for WordPress themes and plugins that tried to innovate “cloud” features…most of it went nowhere. Innovative (yes), game-changing (potentially), but not widely used much. They were either too ahead of their time, or not practical in day-to-day tasks.

I feel a bit of these same parallels with AI. Very innovative and potentially game-changing, but not enough to be practical (let alone “best practices”). Sure…I see the utility of AI chatbots, AI-trained site security, or how about something like AI business reports. That sounds cool.

But let’s go back to reality. Most website AI functions marketed to common users right now are based around AI-generated content. I even see AI-design features in Elementor. Let’s be honest…do we really want more generic site design and generic site content? Do you really think generic content is gonna help your SEO or make your brand stand out?

Nonetheless, AI possibilities have a seemingly limitless ceiling we can’t see yet. Especially with AI-coding. But even with that, there’s still a high learning curve. Yes, you can generate coding without having to code it yourself…but you still have to know a bit of coding. 😉

5. WordPress mobile app improvements

This is a massive area of opportunity to me. Improve the mobile app to where it’s as intuitive as social media apps. I’m not asking to design a whole site and make complicated tweaks off my tiny mobile screen. But to be able to pop in there and make quick changes to my content and plugin settings would be huge.

It would also be great if WordPress sites could somehow have native PWA features built in. I maybe had different feelings many years ago (demanding a clearer separation between site vs app) but I’ve come around to feel differently now.

I’m thinking the more mobile-friendly WordPress can be, the more interaction it gets, and the more useful it becomes. Many everyday business apps can now be managed from mobile…so it only makes sense that we ask a bit of that out of WordPress.

6. Webhosting services restructuring

So many new webhosts popped up in the past 5-10 years that they’re all pulling back now, or flat out going out of business. It’s hard to compete with overpriced big label hosts with big marketing budgets and 24/7 support. Also hard to compete with dev-panels offering every advanced feature for $10/month.

Hard to establish an advantage in technology, marketing, or pricing. If you and your client are not best friends, you’re out of the game.

But this recent economic downtown.

What are your predictions?

• Where do you think the future changes in websites and WordPress will go?
• What will the future of website management and content creation look like?
• What skills or services do new WordPress service providers need to adopt?
• How else will AI flip the web world around?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Let’s make our bets and see who’s right in 1, 2, 5, and 10 years down the line. 😉

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