The Slow Implosion of WordPress: 2025 and the CMS That’s Losing Its Soul

WordPress, the behemoth that once empowered a third of the internet, stands in 2025 as a paradox. On one hand, it’s still everywhere — powering blogs, newsrooms, e-commerce empires, and SaaS landing pages.

On the other, it’s increasingly irrelevant to the forward march of the modern web. It’s bloated. Fragmented. Over-commercialized. And its once-vibrant open-source soul is slowly being strangled by a familiar antagonist: profit.

Let’s talk — candidly, brutally, and with a sense of mourning — about what WordPress has become.

From Power to Paralysis: A Platform Eating Itself

WordPress was always a bit of a Frankenstein. PHP? Check. MySQL? Of course. Thousands of plugins duct-taped together with mixed standards and varying support? Absolutely. Yet, for nearly two decades, this messy architecture worked. It offered unprecedented freedom and customization to developers and non-developers alike.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: in 2025, WordPress has become a victim of its own inclusivity. The democratization of publishing — its rallying cry — is now a marketing cliché, plastered across investor decks and Automattic’s keynote slides while the actual experience of building with WordPress is increasingly undemocratic, commercialized, and convoluted.

Gutenberg: Visionary or Vanity Project?

Let’s address the Gutenberg-shaped elephant in the room.

The block editor, launched in 2018, was supposed to modernize WordPress. It did — technically. But in practice, it created a divide. Gutenberg represents a single-page application mentality slapped onto a legacy CMS.

It alienated experienced developers who had mastered the classic editor, and it confounded casual users who just wanted to “write a blog post” without dealing with columns, containers, or reusable blocks that break mysteriously.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Gutenberg has metastasized into Full Site Editing (FSE), patterns, block themes, and a jungle of UI metaphors that require a mental model more suited to React developers than casual bloggers.

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

The Marketplace Has Been Monetized to Death

Themes in 2025 are paywalled at every turn. Plugins that once offered free functionality now drip-feed their usefulness behind ever-higher paywalls. You’re not building with WordPress anymore — you’re shopping.

It’s not uncommon to build a functional site and find yourself juggling six paid plugins, three freemium themes, and a bloated stack of dependencies. Performance? Who cares, as long as it converts. The ethos of “just works out of the box” has been replaced by “works… after you’ve paid $500/year in subscriptions.”

The freemium economy around WordPress isn’t just thriving — it’s cannibalizing the platform’s original value proposition.

The open-source ideal has been squeezed into the margins by venture-backed plugin developers and theme shops using WordPress as bait, not a foundation.

Developer Experience: A Study in Frustration

Let’s be honest. WordPress in 2025 is a terrible place for modern developers.

You want to write TypeScript? Good luck. You want to deploy with GitHub Actions and CI/CD pipelines? Possible — but painfully over-engineered. You want composable architecture, headless CMS workflows, GraphQL APIs, or serverless functions? Why not just use Sanity, Astro, or Next.js?

The most damning indictment: WordPress no longer inspires developers. It drains them.

The REST API, once hyped as a revolution, is largely unused in favor of GraphQL alternatives like WPGraphQL (a third-party plugin, of course). Local development environments are still clunky. Security is a perennial migraine. The core is creaky, the dashboard archaic, and the reliance on hooks and filters feels like coding in Morse code.

The Headless Delusion

Speaking of modern architectures — WordPress has flirted with being headless. But here’s the rub: if you decouple WordPress from its frontend, what’s left? A mediocre, legacy CMS backend that’s outclassed by younger, leaner headless systems.

Sure, you can use WordPress as a headless backend. Plenty do. But why would you, when tools like Strapi, Payload, and Contentful offer cleaner APIs, better developer ergonomics, and less historical baggage?

This is WordPress’s existential problem in 2025: it no longer knows who it’s for.

Automattic’s Corporate Drift

It’s time we talk about the empire behind the curtain. Automattic — WordPress.com’s parent — has grown increasingly corporate, opaque, and dissonant from the open-source community that birthed it.

As WordPress core development drags forward under the weight of consensus, Automattic ships polished, premium experiences on WordPress.com that leave the .org version in the dust. There’s now a two-tier system: a WordPress for the masses, and a WordPress for the monetized.

The community? Still passionate. Still building. But now operating more like unpaid laborers sustaining a legacy codebase for the benefit of Automattic’s bottom line.

What Comes Next: Forks, Fights, and Futures

Some whisper about forks. Others dream of a leaner WordPress 2.0 — stripped of backwards compatibility and rebuilt for the modern web. But let’s be realistic: that’s unlikely. The inertia is too massive, the ecosystem too entangled.

Instead, what we’ll see is fragmentation. Specialized WordPress distros. Even more headless hybrid stacks. A slow bleeding of core contributors into rival ecosystems. And, for the first time in decades, serious competition from open-source contenders that are not afraid to kill their darlings.

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

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

What remains is a legacy platform doing its best to pretend it’s still leading the charge — when in fact, it’s being dragged forward by inertia and monetization rather than vision or innovation.

If you’re a content creator with no technical needs? WordPress still works. If you’re an enterprise needing cheap, fast content deployment? It still checks the box.

But if you’re a modern developer building for the web in 2025? WordPress is the past, and you’re already reaching for something else.

And maybe that’s okay.

Noah Davis

Noah Davis is an accomplished UX strategist with a knack for blending innovative design with business strategy. With over a decade of experience, he excels at crafting user-centered solutions that drive engagement and achieve measurable results.