What is the future of WordPress in 2024 and beyond?

Turning 20 earlier this year, what started as a mission to make the web a better place has become one of the world’s most prevalent web development platforms, with a thriving community constantly pushing it forward. But as we look upon a past that has powered a good chunk of the internet for two decades, it’s important to also keep track of current developments and the future it may lead to for WordPress.

That’s why, in this article, we’ll review the current state of WordPress to understand what the future may hold for the platform in 2024 and beyond.

1 More AI integration

With artificial intelligence becoming increasingly present in everyday life, it’s unsurprising that many developers are also looking for ways to integrate AI into WordPress.

One of the main players driving AI implementation forward is WordPress’s co-founder Matt Mullenweg. Mullenweg is also the founder and CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress.com, the Jetpack plugin, and the journaling app Day One.

Jetpack already has an AI writing assistant that helps you generate new content, summarize articles, and more. The AI Assistant is activated by default as a block in WordPress’s Gutenberg editor, but the free Jetpack version only allows 20 prompts per month. For unlimited prompts, you need to pay $8.33 per month for Jetpack AI.

But Jetpack is far from the only WordPress plugin that provides AI assistance. Other plugins with AI capabilities include:

• Divi AI. Auto-generates images and text, learns from your content to propose on-brand new content, upscales images, and more.
• Rank Math. AI-powered dynamic SEO optimizations.
• AI Engine. Content generation, translations, ChatGPT-style chatbots, and more.
• Uncanny Automator. Uncanny Automator connects your site with dozens of plugins and third-party services to help you automate tasks.

The official WordPress project is also experimenting with AI. In his State of the Word speech, Mullenweg revealed that the team is experimenting with combining Playground and natural language to create blueprints for WordPress sites based on user prompts. He showcased asking an AI to generate an ecommerce WordPress site with SEO improvements out of the box.

2 Consistently high CMS market share

Over the past decade, WordPress has become the undisputed most popular CMS in the world. According to W3 Technology Surveys, WordPress powered 15.8% of all websites in 2012, nearly tripling to 43.1% by late 2023.

From 2012 to 2023, new CMSs appeared, and older ones other than WordPress remained. Joomla, Drupal, Squarespace, and Bitrix are the only ones on the list that existed in 2012, with Squarespace being the only one that has gained significant ground in the CMS market since.

New competitors emerged in the past decade, too, most notably Shopify, which stands as the second highest CMS market share in 2023 (5.9%).

Given WordPress’s growth and steady performance over the past years, the most likely outcome is that it will continue to be the world’s most popular CMS. Its plugin and theme ecosystem, flexibility, user-friendliness, and developer availability will ensure its relevance for years to come.

3 Ecommerce growth

The ecommerce industry has become essential to global retail over the past decade, generating an estimated USD 5.2 trillion in 2022. It is expected to generate over 8 trillion USD by 2026.

Despite not being built for ecommerce, WordPress’s flexibility and plugin ecosystem allow developers to create high-performing ecommerce sites with plugins like WooCommerce. In fact, in 2023 WooCommerce was the worldwide leader among ecommerce software platforms, with 39% of the global market share. Shopify is the leader in the US, with a 28% market share.

WooCommerce currently powers 8.9% of all worldwide websites, powering more ecommerce sites than entire CMSs like Drupal and Joomla power websites of all kinds.

In the following years, WooCommerce should be able to at least maintain or even increase its ecommerce platform market share, but other WordPress ecommerce plugins could become more relevant, too.

For example, niche solutions like Easy Digital Downloads and MemberPress are excellent for sites that don’t need a full ecommerce marketplace but still need a plugin that streamlines digital transactions.

4 Better performance for translated WordPress sites

In a July 2023 performance analysis, WordPress core developers determined that translated sites can be significantly slower than their non-translated counterparts. Depending on the site’s themes and plugins, the median loading time for a localized site can be up to 50% slower than for non-localized ones.

They also identified multiple potential solutions to improve performance on localized sites, including using lightweight MO parsers, caching translations in the object cache or APCu, using the native PHP gettext extension, and using .php files rather than the .mo files more commonly used to translate sites.

Based on this report, the WordPress Performance Team launched the Performant Translations plugin. Data provided by the developers shows that with this plugin, translated pages now load almost as fast as original language ones instead of significantly slower.

By default, the plugin converts existing .mo files into .php files, which are faster to parse, and from that moment on, it only loads the translations from the .php files. This significantly speeds up translated sites.

Performant Translations is part of an ongoing effort to speed up performance in translated WordPress sites, and the Performance Team intends to eventually merge the plugin’s features into the WordPress core. Currently, it has over 2,000 active installations and only positive reviews.