WordPress Still Runs 32% of the Web vs 34.9% a Year Ago

Open any list of the software behind the web and WordPress sits at the top by a distance. Small business brochure sites, news publishers, nonprofits and online stores built with WooCommerce all run on it. For two years it held a steady 34% to 35% of website homepages. In 2026 that number started to move.

That matters to anyone who owns a WordPress site or is choosing a platform for a new one. The platform you build on decides who can work on your site, which plugins and themes you can use, and how much of the upkeep falls on you. A shift in where websites are built tells you where the web's tools, developers and attention are heading.

WordPress still runs 31.97% of website homepages, nearly one in three and several times any rival. But a year earlier it ran 34.85%. In raw numbers it went from 5,536,822 homepages to 4,945,320, over a year in which the total number of homepages measured fell 2.6%, and Wix, Joomla, Drupal and WooCommerce also lost share.

HTTP Archive is a public project that loads the homepages of millions of websites in a real browser every month and records the software each one runs. We counted the homepages where WordPress was identified in each monthly snapshot from October 2024 to September 2026, between 14.7 million and 16.4 million homepages a month, and divided by the total for that month. The one-year change compares September 2025 with September 2026.

A website's share is the percentage of all homepages in that month's snapshot that run WordPress. The share is the fairer measure over time, because the number of homepages HTTP Archive loads changes from month to month; between September 2025 and September 2026 the total fell 2.6%. We also looked at the 1 million most visited websites, as ranked by Google's Chrome UX Report, and counted those whose platform in March 2026 differed from their platform in September 2025. Those are the switchers.

No other platform comes close: WordPress's 4,945,320 homepages are more than twenty times the 239,175 on Squarespace. For a business owner, that scale still means the largest pool of developers, themes and plugins of any website platform.

The direction has changed, though. WordPress's share fell from 34.85% to 31.97% in a year, a relative drop of 8.3% once the smaller total is taken into account. Its raw count fell 10.7%, from 5,536,822 homepages to 4,945,320.

For most of the two years, WordPress held a steady share of about 34% to 35%. The fall came late. Between March and September 2026 its share dropped from 34.54% to 31.97%, the steepest six-month slide in the series, and its count fell from 5,475,602 homepages to 4,945,320.

Its high point was the first month measured: 5,811,375 homepages in October 2024. WordPress declined in 17 of the 23 month-to-month steps that followed, and over two years it fell 14.9%. WordPress was not alone in the 2026 slide: Wix, Joomla, Drupal and WooCommerce also lost share between March and September 2026, while Shopify grew.

Among the 1 million most visited websites, WordPress was the second most popular destination for sites changing platform, after Shopify: 352 websites moved to it in six months. But 575 left, a net change of -223. Online stores built with WooCommerce on WordPress lost another 239 on balance, and 264 WooCommerce stores moved to Shopify alone.

The switcher numbers point the same way as the monthly counts: part of the web that used to run on WordPress now runs on hosted platforms, where the platform company manages hosting, updates and security. The most visible move is online stores going from WooCommerce to Shopify.

If your site runs on WordPress, there is no reason to move because of these numbers. It is still the largest platform on the web by a wide margin, with the biggest pool of developers and plugins. The practical issue is upkeep: in a separate Suff Digital study, 44% of WordPress sites that show their version run an outdated one. Keep WordPress core, your theme and every plugin updated, and remove plugins you no longer use.

If you are weighing a move off WordPress, plan it as a migration, not a rebuild. Export every page, post and product address with traffic or links, map each one to its new address and put the redirects in place before launch. Platform moves often cost traffic in the months after launch when redirects are missed. A wordpress migration service that maps every URL before the switch protects the search traffic you have built.

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