Why WordPress Is Still the Best Choice in 2026

With Wix running ads everywhere, Squarespace sponsoring every podcast, and Shopify dominating e-commerce conversations, you might wonder if WordPress is still relevant. It is. WordPress powers 43% of all websites on the internet and 61% of sites using a CMS. Here is why it remains the best choice for most businesses.

The Numbers Do Not Lie

WordPress runs on approximately 587 million websites worldwide. That is not a typo. When you include WooCommerce, it powers more online stores than any other platform. Time Magazine, Sony, Disney, The New York Times, and Facebook's newsroom all run on WordPress.

For comparison, Shopify holds 6.7% of the CMS market. Wix has 5.2%. Squarespace has 3.3%. WordPress has 61.2%. It is not even close.

Market share alone does not make something good. But when that many websites choose the same platform, it creates an ecosystem that benefits everyone. More developers, more plugins, more themes, more tutorials, more hosting options optimized specifically for WordPress.

You Actually Own Your Website

This is the most important difference between WordPress and platforms like Wix or Squarespace, and most people do not understand it until they need to.

With self hosted WordPress, you own everything. Your files, your database, your content, your design. You can move your site to any hosting provider. You can hire any developer. You can export your entire site and do whatever you want with it.

With Wix and Squarespace, you are renting. Your site exists on their platform, under their rules. If you stop paying, your site disappears. If you want to leave, you cannot take your design with you. Squarespace's export feature is deliberately limited. You can export some content in XML format, but pages, galleries, product pages, and most blocks will not transfer. You are starting over.

This is not a theoretical problem. In my experience, businesses outgrow Wix and Squarespace all the time. When they do, they face a painful migration that often means rebuilding from scratch. With WordPress, you can switch hosting providers in an afternoon without losing anything.

What Most People Get Wrong

The biggest mistake I see is choosing platforms based on marketing rather than fit. Wix and Squarespace are great at marketing. They make website building look effortless in 30 second ads. But when you actually need to do something beyond basic, you hit walls.

The second mistake is undervaluing ownership. When you build on a proprietary platform, you are betting that company will exist, will not raise prices, and will not remove features you depend on. I have watched businesses lose years of work when platforms pivoted or deprecated features.

The third mistake is assuming WordPress is hard. It used to be harder. The block editor has matured significantly. Full site editing is now genuinely usable. The learning curve still exists, but it is not what it was five years ago.

The fourth mistake is thinking security is a WordPress problem rather than a maintenance problem. WordPress core is secure. The vulnerabilities come from outdated plugins, weak passwords, and neglected sites. Those same problems would affect any platform if you stopped maintaining it.

Flexibility That Actually Matters

WordPress started as blogging software. It is now a full application framework that can build almost anything. Blogs, business sites, portfolios, membership sites, online courses, forums, directories, booking systems, job boards, real estate listings, podcasts, e-commerce stores. The list keeps growing.

The plugin ecosystem is what makes this possible. Over 59,000 plugins extend WordPress in every direction imaginable. Need a booking system? There are dozens of options. Need to add a membership area? Multiple plugins handle it. Need to integrate with your CRM, email marketing, or accounting software? Already done.

This flexibility means you can start simple and add complexity as you grow. Launch with a basic business site, add a blog, add e-commerce, add a membership area. You do not need to migrate to a new platform when your needs change. WordPress grows with you.

E-Commerce Without Limits

WooCommerce powers 33% of all online stores, more than Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace combined. It runs on approximately 120 million websites.

Unlike Shopify's transaction fees on external payment processors, WooCommerce lets you use any payment gateway without additional charges. Unlike Squarespace's limited product options, WooCommerce handles complex product variations, subscriptions, bookings, and digital downloads. Unlike Wix's inventory limits on lower tiers, WooCommerce scales to thousands of products without artificial restrictions.

The trade off is that WooCommerce requires more setup than turnkey solutions. But that setup gives you control that proprietary platforms cannot match. You own your customer data. You control your checkout experience. You are not paying a percentage of every sale to your platform.

SEO That Search Engines Love

WordPress generates clean, semantic HTML that search engines can easily crawl and index. It creates SEO friendly URLs automatically from your page titles. It handles metadata, sitemaps, and structured data through plugins like Yoast and Rank Math.

More importantly, WordPress gives you full control over your SEO. You can customize every meta tag, every URL structure, every piece of structured data. You can implement technical SEO changes that proprietary platforms simply do not allow.

For content heavy sites focused on organic search, WordPress consistently outperforms drag and drop builders. The flexibility to optimize exactly how you want, without platform limitations, makes a measurable difference in rankings.

Cost That Makes Sense

WordPress itself is free. Open source, no licensing fees, no per seat charges. The costs are hosting, a domain, and whatever premium themes or plugins you choose to use.

A small business can launch a professional WordPress site for under $100 per year. Compare that to Squarespace at $192 per year minimum, or Wix at $204 per year for their basic business plan.

The cost advantage compounds over time. Premium WordPress themes are typically one time purchases. Premium plugins are often available for affordable annual rates. You are not locked into escalating monthly fees that increase every year.

For agencies and freelancers managing multiple sites, the economics are even more compelling. WordPress does not charge per site fees. Your only scaling cost is hosting.

The Block Editor Has Grown Up

The Gutenberg block editor was controversial when it launched. It is now a sophisticated, React based editing framework that rivals dedicated page builders.

Full Site Editing lets you build entire websites without touching code or relying on traditional themes. Global styles let you apply design changes site wide instantly. Block patterns provide pre built sections you can drop in and customize.

The performance advantage is significant. Native blocks are dramatically lighter than third party page builders. Less CSS, fewer JavaScript calls, faster load times. Sites built with the block editor consistently score better on Core Web Vitals than those using heavy page builders.

Security Is Manageable

WordPress security concerns are real but overblown. Yes, 96% of WordPress vulnerabilities come from plugins. Yes, WordPress sites get hacked. But the platform itself is maintained by a dedicated security team that releases patches quickly.

The security problems are almost always human problems. Outdated plugins. Weak passwords. Cheap hosting. Abandoned sites. These are not WordPress problems. They are maintenance problems.

For small businesses, basic security hygiene covers most risks. Keep WordPress and plugins updated. Use strong passwords. Enable two factor authentication. Use a reputable host. These fundamentals prevent the vast majority of attacks.

When WordPress Is Not the Answer

WordPress is not perfect for every situation. If you need a simple digital business card with minimal ongoing changes, Wix or Squarespace will get you online faster with less friction.

If you are building a pure e-commerce business and want the simplest possible path to selling products, Shopify's all in one approach has real advantages. You trade flexibility for convenience.

If you have no interest in learning anything about websites and just want to pay someone to handle everything, managed WordPress services exist but proprietary platforms might feel simpler.

But for businesses that plan to grow, that want control over their digital presence, that need flexibility to evolve without platform constraints, WordPress remains the clear choice.

The Reality

WordPress dominates for a reason. It offers a combination of ownership, flexibility, cost effectiveness, and ecosystem support that no proprietary platform matches.

The learning curve is real. The maintenance requirements are real. But these trade offs give you something the alternatives cannot: a website you actually own, that can grow in any direction, that is not dependent on any single company's continued existence or pricing decisions.

In a digital landscape where platforms rise and fall, where pricing models change without notice, where features get removed to push you to higher tiers, ownership matters. Forty three percent of the web figured this out already. That is why we build plugins for WordPress. The platform is not going anywhere.