WordPress, the behemoth that when empowered a 3rd of the web, stands in 2025 as a paradox. On one hand, it’s nonetheless in all places — powering blogs, newsrooms, e-commerce empires, and SaaS touchdown pages.

On the opposite, it’s more and more irrelevant to the ahead march of the trendy internet. It’s bloated. Fragmented. Over-commercialized. And its once-vibrant open-source soul is slowly being strangled by a well-recognized antagonist: revenue.

Let’s speak — candidly, brutally, and with a way of mourning — about what WordPress has turn into.

From Energy to Paralysis: A Platform Consuming Itself

WordPress was all the time a little bit of a Frankenstein. PHP? Test. MySQL? After all. Hundreds of plugins duct-taped along with blended requirements and ranging help? Completely. But, for practically 20 years, this messy structure labored. It provided unprecedented freedom and customization to builders and non-developers alike.

However right here’s the uncomfortable reality: in 2025, WordPress has turn into a sufferer of its personal inclusivity. The democratization of publishing — its rallying cry — is now a advertising and marketing cliché, plastered throughout investor decks and Automattic’s keynote slides whereas the precise expertise of constructing with WordPress is more and more undemocratic, commercialized, and convoluted.

Gutenberg: Visionary or Self-importance Undertaking?

Let’s handle the Gutenberg-shaped elephant within the room.

The block editor, launched in 2018, was purported to modernize WordPress. It did — technically. However in follow, it created a divide. Gutenberg represents a single-page utility mentality slapped onto a legacy CMS.

It alienated skilled builders who had mastered the basic editor, and it confounded informal customers who simply needed to “write a weblog submit” with out coping with columns, containers, or reusable blocks that break mysteriously.

Quick-forward to 2025, and Gutenberg has metastasized into Full Web site Modifying (FSE), patterns, block themes, and a jungle of UI metaphors that require a psychological mannequin extra suited to React builders than informal bloggers.

WordPress now sits uncomfortably between Wix and React — too difficult for newbies, too primitive for contemporary devs.

The Market Has Been Monetized to Demise

Themes in 2025 are paywalled at each flip. Plugins that when provided free performance now drip-feed their usefulness behind ever-higher paywalls. You’re not constructing with WordPress anymore — you’re procuring.

It’s not unusual to construct a useful website and end up juggling six paid plugins, three freemium themes, and a bloated stack of dependencies. Efficiency? Who cares, so long as it converts. The ethos of “simply works out of the field” has been changed by “works… after you’ve paid $500/12 months in subscriptions.”

The freemium economic system round WordPress isn’t simply thriving — it’s cannibalizing the platform’s authentic worth proposition.

The open-source splendid has been squeezed into the margins by venture-backed plugin builders and theme outlets utilizing WordPress as bait, not a basis.

Developer Expertise: A Research in Frustration

Let’s be sincere. WordPress in 2025 is a horrible place for contemporary builders.

You wish to write TypeScript? Good luck. You wish to deploy with GitHub Actions and CI/CD pipelines? Doable — however painfully over-engineered. You need composable structure, headless CMS workflows, GraphQL APIs, or serverless features? Why not simply use Sanity, Astro, or Subsequent.js?

Essentially the most damning indictment: WordPress not conjures up builders. It drains them.

The REST API, as soon as hyped as a revolution, is essentially unused in favor of GraphQL alternate options like WPGraphQL (a third-party plugin, after all). Native growth environments are nonetheless clunky. Safety is a perennial migraine. The core is creaky, the dashboard archaic, and the reliance on hooks and filters appears like coding in Morse code.

The Headless Delusion

Talking of recent architectures — WordPress has flirted with being headless. However right here’s the rub: in case you decouple WordPress from its frontend, what’s left? A mediocre, legacy CMS backend that’s outclassed by youthful, leaner headless techniques.

Positive, you should utilize WordPress as a headless backend. Loads do. However why would you, when instruments like Strapi, Payload, and Contentful provide cleaner APIs, higher developer ergonomics, and fewer historic baggage?

That is WordPress’s existential downside in 2025: it not is aware of who it’s for.

Automattic’s Company Drift

It’s time we speak in regards to the empire backstage. Automattic — WordPress.com’s dad or mum — has grown more and more company, opaque, and dissonant from the open-source group that birthed it.

As WordPress core growth drags ahead beneath the load of consensus, Automattic ships polished, premium experiences on WordPress.com that depart the .org model within the mud. There’s now a two-tier system: a WordPress for the plenty, and a WordPress for the monetized.

The group? Nonetheless passionate. Nonetheless constructing. However now working extra like unpaid laborers sustaining a legacy codebase for the advantage of Automattic’s backside line.

What Comes Subsequent: Forks, Fights, and Futures

Some whisper about forks. Others dream of a leaner WordPress 2.0 — stripped of backwards compatibility and rebuilt for the trendy internet. However let’s be sensible: that’s unlikely. The inertia is simply too huge, the ecosystem too entangled.

As a substitute, what we’ll see is fragmentation. Specialised WordPress distros. Much more headless hybrid stacks. A sluggish bleeding of core contributors into rival ecosystems. And, for the primary time in many years, severe competitors from open-source contenders that aren’t afraid to kill their darlings.

Conclusion: WordPress Isn’t Dying, However It Is Decaying

Don’t mistake this critique for a eulogy. WordPress will probably be right here in 2030. And doubtless 2040. However its golden age is over.

What stays is a legacy platform doing its finest to faux it’s nonetheless main the cost — when in actual fact, it’s being dragged ahead by inertia and monetization slightly than imaginative and prescient or innovation.

In case you’re a content material creator with no technical wants? WordPress nonetheless works. In case you’re an enterprise needing low cost, quick content material deployment? It nonetheless checks the field.

However in case you’re a contemporary developer constructing for the net in 2025? WordPress is the previous, and also you’re already reaching for one thing else.

And possibly that’s okay.