The WordPress community has long valued openness, collaboration, and candid discussion. So, when a report titled “WordPress in 2025” appeared on the official WordPress.org news blog on 15 February 2025, many of us hoped for a comprehensive look at the platform’s present and future. What we got reads, in our view, more like a polished enterprise sales pitch than a state-of-the-project analysis. Like Karol K of WPShout, we were disappointed by its selective focus and its omissions.
The short version: the problem is not that the report talks about enterprise WordPress. The problem is that it presents that angle as if it were the whole story, on a site most readers take as the voice of the project.
The sections below separate three things. First, what the report actually says, with quotes. Second, the facts it leaves out, each with a primary source. Third, our criticism, which is opinion and is marked as such.
Who wrote the WordPress in 2025 report and what it covers
The post on WordPress.org is bylined Noel Tock and links to a 15-page PDF called WordPress in 2025 and the massive enterprise opportunity it presents. The “About the author” page of the PDF describes Tock as “co-owner at leading enterprise WordPress agency Human Made”. The document is not a WordPress Foundation report and it is not an annual series. It is one agency owner’s essay, published on the project’s news blog.
The PDF has five numbered sections:
- The CMS trade: long open-source, short proprietary
- The most advanced no-code editor on the market
- The 100x play: AI and the rebirth of WordPress
- Headless is dead, long live headless
- How you can get the most out of WordPress in 2025
Two pages also advertise WP:25, a free virtual conference on 6 March 2025 for “enterprise teams”, including “The State of Enterprise WordPress 2025 research findings”. The PDF’s subtitle already names its audience: the enterprise. Read that way, the content is consistent. Read as a report on “WordPress in 2025”, it is narrow.
What the WordPress in 2025 report actually says
The first section argues that open source outlasts proprietary vendors in downturns. Tock writes: “True open-source simply has a way of enduring market cycles, continuing to innovate through periods of high volatility, whilst other proprietary vendors end up stagnating.” He supports this with historical examples (Apache overtaking Microsoft IIS, MySQL and PostgreSQL gaining on Oracle) and with a chart of fundraising by proprietary CMS vendors.
The one WordPress-specific number in the document is about the Block Editor: “amassing a total of 34k code commits to its repository”, with a footnote to the Gutenberg repository on GitHub. The report names recent WordPress platforms for “NASA, Disney, CNN, The New York Post, Harvard and Amnesty International”. The Times and TechCrunch are not on that list.
The second section is about Full Site Editing. Its recommended “enterprise action” reads: “Remove the need for development teams entirely, especially on microsites, landing pages, etc.”
The third section is about AI. The key passage says WordPress can build “an exciting multi-agent and LLM-agnostic ecosystem that represents an intelligent content operating system”. The phrase “AI-driven content workflows” does not appear in the report; “multi-agent” does.
The fourth section argues for hybrid builds: CMS templates “for the 90% long tail, and 10% headless for the high-traffic/high-interactivity portions”. It names Contentful Studio, Sanity Studio and dotCMS Universal Visual Editor as “very basic block editor implementations”.
The document also points readers to the author’s agency three times: “Work with partners such as ourselves to conduct an audit of your existing platform”, “Work with an agency such as ours”, and “Talk to an agency like ours”. It closes with “we at Human Made are incredibly excited about the new year”.
What is missing from the WordPress in 2025 report
What the report leaves out is as telling as what it includes. A text search of the PDF finds no mention of WP Engine, governance, the WordPress Foundation, Five for the Future, small businesses or freelancers. Contributors appear once, as “its incredible contributor population” that could build AI features. The areas below are where we think the gap matters most.
WordPress governance and contributor health
The months before publication were a period of open conflict about how the project is run. Yet the report does not mention it. How are contributors faring? What is the state of volunteer engagement amid a growing commercial ecosystem? These questions matter to the developers, designers, and users who keep WordPress alive, and they are absent here.
WordPress controversies in 2024 and 2025
The plugin directory, trademark licensing and Automattic’s role were all in court when the report went up. These are not footnotes; they influence trust and adoption. By ignoring them, the report presents an incomplete picture, which undermines its credibility as an “official” document. The timeline in the next section lists what had already happened.
WordPress for small businesses and freelancers
WordPress is not just for enterprises. It is the backbone of countless small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers. The report’s focus on large implementations leaves this segment out. What about their challenges, like rising hosting costs or adapting to the Site Editor? In our agency work, many clients still pick a page builder over Full Site Editing, and the report does not ask why. Their story deserves a voice too.
Block Editor, Full Site Editing and performance
The report leans on phrases like “multi-agent” and “intelligent content operating system”. AI integration is interesting, but vague without context. What about the practical evolution of the Block Editor, Full Site Editing adoption rates, or performance work? These updates affect users daily, yet the report gives them less space than the AI vision.
The WordPress Foundation and money
The report does not explain how the WordPress Foundation, WordPress.org and Automattic relate to each other, which is exactly what a reader of an “official” text on WordPress.org might assume it speaks for. The court order quoted below records that Matt Mullenweg describes himself as the individual owner of the wordpress.org domain and a founding director of the Foundation, and that the Foundation owns the WordPress trademarks. A report on the state of the project could have explained that structure in one paragraph.
What happened between WP Engine and Automattic before the report
The facts below come from WordPress.org posts and from the preliminary injunction order of 10 December 2024 in WPEngine, Inc. v. Automattic Inc., case 3:24-cv-06917 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California (docket on CourtListener). Statements the order attributes to one party’s declaration are marked as such.
| Date | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Sep 2024 | ”WP Engine is banned from WordPress.org” is posted on the WordPress.org news blog | WordPress.org post |
| 2 Oct 2024 | WP Engine files suit against Automattic and Mullenweg | Court order, procedural background |
| 12 Oct 2024 | The WordPress security team forks Advanced Custom Fields into Secure Custom Fields under point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines | WordPress.org post |
| 26 Nov 2024 | Hearing on the motion for a preliminary injunction | Court order |
| 10 Dec 2024 | The court “GRANTS the motion, with modifications” | Court order |
| 9 Jan 2025 | Automattic announces it will reduce its sponsored contributions to WordPress | Automattic post |
| 15 Feb 2025 | ”WordPress in 2025” is published on WordPress.org | WordPress.org post |
The order of 10 December required the defendants, within 72 hours, to restore WP Engine’s access to wordpress.org “as it existed as of September 20, 2024” and to remove a list of WP Engine customers published on a tracker website. On Secure Custom Fields, the order records WP Engine’s position (that the plugin listing was changed without its authorization) and Mullenweg’s (that a security patch from WP Engine was incomplete). The court weighed those positions at the preliminary stage; it did not decide the case.
The report went up two months after that order. It does not mention the dispute at all. A buyer reading only the report would not learn that access to the plugin directory had just been the subject of a federal injunction.
How much companies contribute through Five for the Future
Five for the Future is the program in which companies pledge staff time to the WordPress project. According to Mullenweg’s declaration as summarized in the court order, he launched it in 2014, and WP Engine joined in 2020. At WordCamp US 2024 he said WP Engine’s listed time had dropped from 47 to 40 hours a week; the order reports this as his statement.
On 9 January 2025 Automattic wrote that it would “reduce its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project” and match WP Engine’s pledge, “or about 45 hours a week”. It added: “WP Engine’s historically slim contributions underscore the imbalance that must be addressed for the health of WordPress.”
The Five for the Future pledges page listed 306 pledges when we checked it on 12 October 2026, with Automattic shown at 2,156 hours per week. That is today’s figure, not the figure in force in February 2025.
None of this is in the report, even though Automattic’s announced reduction was public five weeks before it appeared. For a document arguing that WordPress will out-innovate proprietary vendors, the size of the contributor base is the central variable. In our view, leaving it out is the clearest gap in the report.
How big is WordPress in 2025 and 2026
The report gives no market share figure. The numbers below come from three different sources and use different bases, so they should not be blended:
| Measure | Value | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Share of all websites | 43.6% | State of the Word 2024 recap, 16 Dec 2024 |
| Share of all websites | over 43% | State of the Word 2025 recap, 3 Dec 2025 |
| Share of the CMS market | 60.5% | State of the Word 2025 recap |
| Plugins in the directory | over 60,000 | State of the Word 2025 recap |
| Contributors to WordPress 6.8 | 921 | State of the Word 2025 recap |
| WordCamps in 2025 | more than 81, in 39 countries | State of the Word 2025 recap |
| Share of all websites | 40.1% | W3Techs, 12 Oct 2026 |
| Share of sites with a known CMS | 58.6% | W3Techs, 12 Oct 2026 |
On the technical side, the version data behind wordpress.org/about/stats showed, on 12 October 2026, 61.35% of reporting sites on WordPress 7.1 and 16.4% still on PHP 7.4, a branch PHP lists as end of life since 28 November 2022 on its unsupported branches page. That is the kind of figure a state-of-the-platform report can use: it says how many sites are current and how many run on an unsupported PHP branch. For what comes next in core, see our WordPress 7.1 roadmap.
Is the WordPress in 2025 report enterprise PR
This section is our opinion. Karol K’s critique on WPShout nails it: this feels like enterprise PR dressed up as an industry report. He wrote that it “should have been titled ‘WordPress in the Enterprise Sector in 2025’ and published on Human Made’s own website”, and that it “should be labeled as an ad or some form of ‘partner content.’” We agree with both points. Published on WordPress.org, the text carries an air of authority, but its scope aligns more with Human Made’s clientele than with the broader community. Open-source platforms thrive on transparency, but this document picks successes and skips the messier realities.
For enterprise buyers, it is a compelling pitch: WordPress is mature, extensible, and ready for large organizations. But for the rest of us (developers in Poland, small agency owners, or hobbyists) it is a missed chance to reflect on where WordPress stands. The three calls to hire “an agency such as ours” are what move it from analysis to advertising.
What should a state of WordPress report include
A representative “WordPress in 2025” report could have balanced enterprise insight with community realities. This is our wish list:
- Adoption by segment: beyond big brands, how small sites, shops and non-profits use WordPress, with sourced share figures like those above.
- Governance: who makes decisions, how the Foundation, WordPress.org and Automattic relate, and how the community can influence direction.
- Contribution: Five for the Future hours, the number of contributors per release, and what changed after January 2025.
- Technical health: versions and PHP branches in use, security releases, performance work in core, and backwards compatibility.
- Regulation in the EU: the report says nothing about GDPR or the European Accessibility Act, which matter to every European site owner.
- User and developer sentiment: surveys, not anecdotes.
- Roadmap: what is planned for core and the editor, with dates.
These topics would serve WPPoland.com readers, who expect product, roadmap, and community context in one place instead of a sales deck.
How to evaluate an official WordPress report
The critique above turns into three checks that take about fifteen minutes.
Start with scope. Check what the report claims to represent and who it seems written for. “WordPress in 2025” claimed the whole project and was written for enterprise buyers, and that gap is the core of the complaint here.
Then look for omissions by holding the report against the wider ecosystem. The list from this year works as a template: governance, the WP Engine dispute, contribution levels, small businesses and solo users, and practical changes such as Block Editor work, Full Site Editing adoption and performance.
Finally, judge the framing. Ask whether the document reads as broad analysis, advocacy or market positioning, and check where it is published and who wrote it. A report by an agency owner, placed on WordPress.org, carries the authority of the project while reflecting one company’s clientele. None of these checks requires agreeing or disagreeing with the conclusions. They tell you how much of the ecosystem the document covers.
Strengths and limits of the WordPress in 2025 report
The “WordPress in 2025” report is not without merit. It highlights real strengths, like open-source resilience, the Block Editor’s development pace and enterprise traction, which are worth celebrating. However, its narrow lens and its omissions make it feel less like a community resource and more like a marketing tool. For a platform built on inclusivity, that is a letdown.
At WPPoland.com we will keep covering the full WordPress story: enterprise wins, community challenges, and the facts behind both. Let’s keep pushing for reports that reflect all of WordPress’s users, not just the ones in boardrooms.
