WordPress 7.0 RC1 ships, market share dips below 43%, and AI reshapes the ecosystem

#Is WordPress 7.0 RC1 ready for production

WordPress 7.0 RC1 shipped on Tuesday, March 24, but not before some candid conversations in the #core Slack channel about whether the release was actually ready.

After an impromptu bug scrub before the release party, there were still 21 tickets open in the milestone. Core committers Aaron Jorbin and Joe Dolson both shared their reservations publicly. Jorbin said he was “still worried that we don’t actually feel like this is code we would be confident releasing, and thus it’s not a true RC.” Dolson added that the open tickets included known issues he “would not consider releasable.”

Both ultimately gave the green light anyway. Jorbin invoked a Matt Mullenweg post about the risks of waiting too long to ship, and Dolson acknowledged it was “just not ideal.” Bluehost-sponsored core committer Jonathan Desrosiers said his goal was for everyone to feel confident about the remaining work and the team’s ability to resolve outstanding issues before the stable release.

#Why WordPress 7.0 needed six betas

By any measure, WordPress 7.0 has been a complicated release. The development process included six betas and a delayed RC1 - well beyond the typical release cadence. The sheer volume of changes landing in a major version, combined with reduced contributor bandwidth (a recurring challenge in recent release cycles), has stretched the process.

Mullenweg, posting in #core after the release party, seemed to acknowledge the tension: “I’d rather have a really stable 7.0 than hit the WC Asia date, so let’s make sure this one is really rock-solid.”

RC2 shipped two days later, on March 26, without reported issues, and new contributors joined the testing effort - a positive sign for the project’s ability to mobilize community resources when needed.

#When to update production sites to WordPress 7.0

If you manage WordPress sites professionally, the takeaway is clear: do not update production sites to 7.0 on release day. Test thoroughly on staging environments. The open discussions about readiness are actually a healthy sign - transparency about concerns is far better than silent worry - but they also signal that extra caution during the rollout is warranted.

For WPPoland clients, we follow our standard practice: all major updates go through our 4-step staging process before touching production. WordPress 7.0 will be no exception.

#What is WordPress market share in 2026

WordPress now powers 42.4% of the web, according to W3Techs. It is the first time the figure has dropped below 43% since 2022. The usual suspects - Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace - each saw modest 0.1% increases over the past three months. But the more interesting number is elsewhere.

Update (late May 2026): WordPress has since slipped further, to 41.9 percent, the sixth straight month of decline. For the full evergreen analysis of what the W3Techs numbers actually mean, see is WordPress dying? what the data really says.

#Why sites without a CMS are growing

The “None” category in W3Techs data - sites running no detectable CMS at all - climbed from 28.6% to 29%. This is its first increase in over a decade, possibly ever. What is driving it? Our reading is AI, and it is worth being clear that this is our reading: W3Techs detects what a site runs, not why it was built that way.

Developers are building and rebuilding sites with AI tools, and not always choosing WordPress when they do. AI coding assistants make it trivial to generate a complete static site - HTML, CSS, JavaScript - without any CMS layer. For simple sites (portfolios, landing pages, blogs), the question “do I need a CMS?” increasingly has a different answer than it did two years ago.

#Why Joost de Valk moved his blog from WordPress to Astro

Yoast founder Joost de Valk put a prominent face to this trend when he shared that he had migrated his personal blog off WordPress and onto Astro. He published a post titled “Do you need a CMS?” and his answer was: for most sites, increasingly no.

This is notable not because one migration matters, but because of who is making the argument. De Valk built one of the most successful WordPress plugins ever. When someone with that depth of WordPress experience says the CMS layer is optional for many use cases, it signals a real shift in thinking within the community.

#What Matt Mullenweg said about static sites

Matt Mullenweg posted his own take: “I feel like ‘This is the year of static sites!’ is the new ‘This is the year of Linux desktop!’” The joke being that the Linux desktop has been almost ready for mainstream users for 30 years and never quite arrived.

The comparison is clever but may underestimate what is happening. Static sites in 2020 required significant technical skill. Static sites in 2026, with AI generating the code, require a prompt. That is a fundamentally different accessibility curve.

#How AI-built sites change the WordPress value proposition

For years, the WordPress community assumed the competitive threat came from Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace - platforms with big marketing budgets targeting WordPress’s market share. Nobody had “None” on their bingo card.

The practical implication for agencies: the value proposition for WordPress must shift from “easy to set up a site” (AI can do that without a CMS) to “easy to manage, scale, and integrate a site over time.” WordPress’s strengths - its plugin ecosystem, its editorial workflow, its flexibility for complex sites - remain genuine advantages. But the entry-level use case is under pressure from a direction nobody expected.

At WPPoland, we have been watching this trend closely. Our migration services include both traditional CMS-to-CMS migrations and increasingly, headless WordPress setups where WordPress serves as the content backend while a modern framework handles the frontend. This approach preserves WordPress’s content management strengths while delivering the performance benefits that make static sites attractive.

#Can AI agents edit WordPress.com sites via MCP

WordPress.com expanded its MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration to include write capabilities, adding 19 new abilities across six content types: posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, and media.

The update, announced by Automattic’s Jonathan Bossenger, means AI agents can now create, edit, and manage site content on WordPress.com - not just read it. Previously, the MCP integration was read-only, useful for querying content but not modifying it.

Matt Mullenweg marked the news on his blog and encouraged users to hook it up to whatever AI tool they are using and “have fun.”

#What AI agents can do on WordPress.com with MCP

MCP is the protocol that allows AI tools (Claude, ChatGPT, custom agents) to interact with external services in a structured way. With write access, a WordPress.com site becomes something an AI agent can actively manage: drafting posts, categorizing content, moderating comments, uploading media.

For agencies managing multiple WordPress.com sites, this opens up workflow automation possibilities that previously required custom API integrations. An AI agent connected via MCP can handle routine content operations - creating draft posts from briefs, tagging and categorizing content, managing comment moderation - freeing up human time for strategy and creative work.

#Does WordPress.com MCP work with self-hosted WordPress

The MCP integration is currently limited to WordPress.com (hosted). Self-hosted WordPress sites would need a separate MCP server implementation. The WordPress AI Connectors project (covered separately this week) is working on related but different functionality for self-hosted sites, though concerns about plugin-level access controls have been raised.

#What Elementor Angie Code does in WordPress

Elementor launched Angie, an agentic AI plugin it has been testing publicly since September 2025. The first capability released is Angie Code, which lets users build custom WordPress functionality using natural language prompts.

The key differentiator from generic AI code generators: Angie writes code, then tests it in a sandboxed environment before anything goes live on the site. It understands the WordPress environment it is building for - installed plugins, active theme, site configuration - rather than generating code in a vacuum.

#How agencies can use Angie Code for client requests

Elementor’s Head of WordPress, Miriam Schwab, told The Repository that Angie Code was designed to address a problem agencies encounter constantly: clients requesting custom functionality that is hard to deliver within a real budget and timeline. Small customizations - a custom post type, a specific form behavior, a conditional display rule - often take more time to scope and implement than clients expect.

Angie’s pitch is that it can handle these requests directly: describe what you need in natural language, and Angie produces a working code snippet that has been verified against your specific site environment. The plugin is free, lowering the barrier for agencies and freelancers to try it.

#Will AI integrations keep WordPress competitive

Both the WordPress.com MCP expansion and Elementor’s Angie point in the same direction: AI is becoming an active participant in WordPress site management, not just a content generation tool. The question for the WordPress ecosystem is whether these integrations will make WordPress more competitive against the AI-native alternatives that are driving the “None” category growth, or whether they represent a transitional step before AI-generated sites bypass the CMS layer entirely.

#Other WordPress news from March 2026

#WP Community Collective pay standard for contributors

The WP Community Collective published a five-level pay framework for open source contributors - the first publicly versioned compensation standard for the WordPress ecosystem. This is a significant step toward making open source contribution sustainable as a career path, not just a volunteer activity.

#Can any plugin use WordPress AI Connectors

Marcus Burnette from The WP World raised concerns about unchecked plugin access to WordPress AI Connectors. Currently, any plugin can use the AI Connectors infrastructure without explicit user consent or per-plugin permissions. The WordPress AI Team acknowledged the gap and is building two features to address it: a consent management layer and per-plugin access controls.

#WordPress Security Team retrospective on the 6.9.x releases

The WordPress Security Team published a retrospective on the 6.9.x release series, detailing the checklist gap that led to 6.9.4 and tensions with project leadership over backporting decisions. The document is a rare look at the internal processes (and friction points) of WordPress security releases. It highlights the challenges of maintaining security across multiple active branches - a problem that grows more complex with each major release.

#How agencies should prepare for WordPress 7.0

This week’s news paints a picture of WordPress at an inflection point. The 7.0 release process shows a project grappling with the mechanics of shipping a major version with limited contributor resources. The market share data shows external pressure from an unexpected direction. And the AI developments show the ecosystem racing to stay relevant in a world where AI agents are becoming first-class participants in web development.

For WordPress professionals, the actionable takeaways are:

1. Test WordPress 7.0 thoroughly before deploying - the RC process has been transparent about concerns, and that transparency should inform your rollout strategy
2. Articulate your WordPress value proposition beyond “easy setup” - AI can generate a site, but it cannot manage a complex content workflow, plugin ecosystem, or multi-user editorial process
3. Experiment with AI integrations now - whether it is WordPress.com MCP, Elementor Angie, or tools like our own headless WordPress approach, understanding how AI fits into WordPress workflows is becoming a professional necessity

The WordPress ecosystem is not in crisis, but it is in motion. The projects and agencies that adapt fastest will be the ones that thrive.

#When was WordPress 7.0 released and what share does it hold now

The RC1 announcement on WordPress.org News gave April 9, 2026 as the scheduled final release date. That date did not hold. Release Candidate 3 followed on May 8 and Release Candidate 4 on May 14, and the stable WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong” shipped on May 20, 2026, six weeks after the original target. The release post describes an AI Client in core, a Connectors screen for managing AI providers and a redesigned admin dashboard.

Maintenance releases followed over the summer, from 7.0.1 on July 9 to 7.0.4 on August 12. The 7.1 cycle opened with Beta 1 on July 15.

On market share, W3Techs reported on October 14, 2026 that WordPress runs 40.0% of all websites and 58.5% of the sites whose CMS it can detect. The same page shows version 7 on 65.7% of WordPress sites. The March figure of 42.4% comes from the same survey, so the two numbers can be compared directly.

#Related resources

• WordPress vs Wix vs Squarespace in 2026
• ROI of migrating to WordPress in 2026
• Headless WordPress: Next.js and Astro migration guide
• WordPress maintenance services