[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 480, entitled community, uncertainty and adaptation in the age of AI. It was published on Thursday the 13th of August, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and in a few moments I'll be chatting to Casey Burridge about that very topic.
But before then, a few bits of housekeeping. If you're listening to this podcast episode when it was published, I will be at WordCamp US in Phoenix, Arizona. If you're fancy hanging out, why not tweet me? I have the DMs open. My handle is @wpbuilds, no hyphens or anything like that. It would be nice to meet as many WordPressers as is humanly possible. So if you're there, be sure to connect. That would be really nice.
The other thing to mention is that if you like what we do at WP Builds, why not subscribe. Head to wpbuilds.com/subscribe. Look at the options there. Follow us on social, sign up to our email newsletter, and whatever else you can find on that page.
I'm gonna be mentioning this for a few weeks, but I have a SaaS app, which is launching very soon. It's in the podcasting space, and if you're into podcasting, perhaps you've got an intuition that you'd like to podcast, or you are working for a podcasting company, or perhaps you have a podcast already on the go. I'd really like to connect with people in that situation and show you around the app. We have some special founders pricing, a once in a lifetime deal to get on the app at a really considerably discounted rate.
So if you're into that, why not send me a message? You can either use the email address [email protected], or I have a form on my personal website. If you go to NathanWrigley.com/app, that will redirect you to a form. All I need from you is your name and email address, and I will be in touch when it launches in a few weeks time. Once again, NathanWrigley.com/app, and Wrigley, by the way, has a W in it at the beginning.
Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today I am talking with Casey Burridge. Casey is the strategic growth and operations manager at GravityKit, but he's also got a background in really inspecting data around marketing and WordPress specifically, and he's on the podcast today to talk about what seems, on the face of it, to be a decline in market share in the WordPress space.
We constantly bandy around these numbers, 40% of the internet using WordPress. Well, is that true? Casey, has gathered a load of data and created some sense out of it, and much of it doesn't come from the usual sources, and he explains why that is. He explains his thinking about whether or not you should be panicking in the WordPress space. The short answer is no, and so much more. I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Casey Burrage. Hello, Casey.
[00:03:23] Casey Burridge: Hi, glad to be here.
[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. Casey and I have never met before, so this will be a nice conversation. Casey was kind enough to send me a whole smorgasbord of different conversations that we could have, some of them about AI and things like that. But the one that I plumped for is about the state of WordPress in terms of community, engagement, adoption, decline, those kind of things.
So we'll get into that in a moment. But, first of all, Casey, an opportunity to, for you just to tell, us a little bit about you and, your relationship, with tech and where you sit in the WordPress industry and those kind of things. So honestly, whatever you wish to paint into that box, go for it, your bio, please.
[00:04:03] Casey Burridge: Great. Yeah, so I'm currently the strategic growth and operations manager at Gravity Kit. Gravity Kit is a WordPress plugin developer. we build premium add-ons for Gravity Forms. essentially I lead the full marketing function across, content and SEO to product marketing, go-to-market, paid media, the whole stack.
but I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa. but I grew up, half in the UK, and I've lived and worked in a few different places, including London, Beijing, China, for a few years, and now I'm based in Manila in the Philippines. and my background in tech actually started in ad tech. so if anyone is familiar with programmatic advertising, that's what I used to do, progmatic, programmatic advertising campaigns. I worked in London for a little while. managed to actually work with some quite brands over there, like Expedia and JetBlue and,
[00:05:04] Nathan Wrigley: Wow. yeah
[00:05:05] Casey Burridge: So that was a cool experience, but I found myself getting more drawn towards the marketing side of things. at that time I was doing more technical operations and stuff. so I started doing some freelance work in, web design and marketing and, yeah, that led me to WordPress.
and I think, yeah, I'm a little bit more on the technical side than most marketers, so I quite enjoy... know, I'm a builder, I quite enjoy building things. I'm quite comfortable using like APIs doing a little bit of code and that c- that sort of stuff, and I like working with engineering teams. yeah, and then last year, received my master's degree in information systems management. and at that time I wrote a, thesis exploring the concept of, systems thinking in marketing contexts, and I think that, that whole kind of project has, shaped the way I think about marketing, now. And, yeah, other than that, I'm just very passionate about open source software. I'm very fascinated by AI and all the kind of the disruption that's happening right now and all the
[00:06:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:06:09] Casey Burridge: technologies and, yeah, that's about it.
[00:06:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Honestly, that's great. Thank you. That paints a, real, canvas for us. We know exactly who you are and what your background is. I just wanna dig into the, the Gravity Kit thing a, little minute, if that's all right.
[00:06:23] Casey Burridge: Please
[00:06:24] Nathan Wrigley: I guess it's an opportunity to show off about the brand and what they do and what have you.
So I would imagine that most people listening to this podcast have come across Gravity Forms. one of the, one of the older form solutions, I would say probably. it's been around for a really long time, used by, I'm gonna guess, millions of people. But Gravity Kit is a sort of layer on top of that.
What, do you do over there? What does Gravity Kit enable that Gravity Forms doesn't?
[00:06:53] Casey Burridge: Yeah, absolutely. So like you mentioned, Gravity Forms is plugin for WordPress. I think they were the first premium form plugin. been around a long time and, they have a certified developer program. so they have... we are part of that program. I think there are five or six of us in the program.
essentially trusted third-party developers that Gravity Forms themselves endorses. and all of our solutions center around helping you get more out of the data that you're collecting with your forms, actually going so far as to build full-scale web applications based on that data that you're collecting. So for examp- so we offer a toolkit essentially of add-ons for Gravity Forms. but our sort of central flagship product is called Gravity View. And very simply what that does is allows you to take that data that you're collecting through your forms from a database and actually build front-end displays for it on your website, with a lot of different functionality. So think about, using a form to collect, member profiles and then building a member directory based on that data,
View,
using drag and drop. very simple. And then we have a whole, host of tools that kind of extend that functionality. So for building charts, reporting, data analysis and all that kind of stuff.
So it's an integrated toolkit. we think, like to think of it as an app builder for Gravity Forms
[00:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's absolutely fascinating. So we've got the internet, and then a subset of the internet is WordPress. A subset of WordPress is Gravity Forms, and then a subset of Gravity Forms is Gravity Kit. who knew back in the year 2000 and whenever it was, 2001 or something like that, when WordPress dropped, that it would get such a lot of market share that there could be a business in running an add-on to a plugin, which itself is a business.
it's just wheels within wheels and absolutely fabulous. But that kind of gets to the nub of what we're gonna talk about. In order for a business like Gravity Kit to exist, the CMS WordPress needs to be popular. Gravity Forms within WordPress needs to be popular. And so some of the bits and pieces that have been in the news very l- very recently, so we're recording this right in the middle of July 2026.
There's been a fair amount of doomerism, around in terms of market share. For the longest period of time since I've been in WordPress, the needle has always gone up. the, adoption, the market share, the, I don't know, th- this, underlying number that we always talk about, the, percentage of the internet that's using WordPress, that just went up and up and up and up, and then more recently plateaued, and then more recently we seem to be in a period of decline.
When I say the word decline, it, we're not talking about, "Okay, we've all fallen off a cliff." We are really talking about small numbers. But you've taken it upon yourself recently to gather some of this data. Obviously, that from what you've said about what Gravity Kit does, that, seems to be your thing, analyzing data and drawing conclusions from that.
It's on the Gravity Kit website. I'm gonna ask everybody to pause the podcast. I'll drop the link in the show notes, but if you wanna Google it, just go for this. "WordPress powers 33% of the web in 2026, down from 36% at its peak" CMS market share report. That's the name of the piece that you've got over there.
First of all, instead of doing what we would normally do, which is tell us the sort of like the news bullet items from that, would you mind first of all just telling us how you went about the research? So what is the data that you drew from? how far back did you go? What are your sources?
What's the methodology? Let's just get that all figured out first.
[00:10:49] Casey Burridge: Yeah, absolutely. So first off, I have to give credit to Joost de Valk, very prominent figure in the WordPress community, founder of Yoast SEO. he really started all this, market share analysis, CMS market share analysis. And, we really enjoy the research that he put out. but we noticed that, his research hadn't been updated in a couple of years, so we took it upon ourselves to replicate his methodology and, do our own study with updated data. And so this study uses the HTTP Archive dataset, and essentially the HTTP Archive dataset is based on the Chrome, the Google Chrome User Experience Report. what they do is they look at about, I think it's about eight-- It's about 9 million websites in total that they look at.
[00:11:40] Nathan Wrigley: Great
[00:11:42] Casey Burridge: and there's two criteria that websites have to meet.
They have to be publicly as- accessible, and they have to be, according to Google, quote-unquote, "sufficiently popular."
[00:11:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:11:51] Casey Burridge: they have to meet a minimum traffic requirement to make it in the dataset. and then Chrome looks at that data, to understand how people are experiencing the website. HTTP Archive does is takes that list of URLs, and then they crawl those URLs, and they, their own data on those websites. And they also have a fingerprinter which looks at what technologies those websites are running. and they fingerprint all the kind of main CMSs that you can imagine. And so using that dataset, we can analyze market share over time. think they crawl that dataset once a month, if I'm not mistaken. the ma- the, study is based on that dataset, and we're looking at it through their Tech Report API, is an open API. All of the data is publicly available via Google BigQuery. so if you have a Google Cloud account, you can query their databases. and y- yeah, you can get the data. They also actually do have a public endpoint for their Tech Report API is open, doesn't require auth, so can query that as well. so the reason why we wanted to outline the met- methodology is so anybody could replicate this,
[00:13:08] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, nice. Okay. yeah. o- one thing that jumps out is your use of the HTTP Archive. So obviously based upon this Chrome User Experience Report, acronym of CrUX, and I think you're right, I think it's once a month they push that data out, and then obviously the HTTP Archive scoops that up and, uses it.
Why did you use that one as opposed to other ones that we might see? Because, actually, so for example, W3, what is it? W3 Tech or W... I can't remember, but there, there's two or three other, vendors, I'm gonna ... I don't know if that's the right word, but purveyors of, statistics. What was it about this one which made you feel that's the one to go for?
That's, the one that I can back up with confidence?
[00:13:54] Casey Burridge: Yeah, so Yoast was the one who settled on that dataset
[00:13:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:13:58] Casey Burridge: couple of reasons, and, we wholeheartedly agree that this is one of the strongest datasets to measure this sort of, to measure these kinds of metrics. And the reason being is that W3 Techs,
[00:14:11] Nathan Wrigley: That's it. There you go. Yeah
[00:14:13] Casey Burridge: as I understand it, they count, subdomains of a website as a single website.
[00:14:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. Okay.
[00:14:21] Casey Burridge: HTTP Archive, splits those out and considers them as separate web origins. so that's one reason, and another reason is because the, data's based on the Chrome user experience report, which, it ignores the kind of, very low traffic websites,
[00:14:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:14:44] Casey Burridge: there's of traffic and popularity that your website needs.
Google doesn't disclose what that is. but that's what you need to get into the dataset. So it filters out a lot of the stuff that might be considered not that consequential.
[00:14:58] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So for example, I don't know, a, website which was set up just a few weeks ago, which has basically no viewers, but somehow, is out there somewhere. It may be on a CMS or not a CMS, whatever it may be. But the threshold here is your site has to be, and I'm doing air quotes, "popular." and although we don't know what that means, at least we know that criteria moves from one year to the next, and the data will use that same criteria year over year.
It's interesting because the number that we constantly talk about in WordPress is this market share of 43. We climbed up to 43. But that is not the numbers that come out of the HTTP archive. It's more in the... it basically you re- you replace the beginning four with a three. Instead of it being 43, it's more like 33.
And presumably, that's simply because of the things that you've s- suggested just then. The, different metrics and the different way that data is calculated, subdomains and a whole bunch of popularity metrics and things like that.
[00:16:01] Casey Burridge: Yeah, exactly. And I should also mention that, different data collectors have different ways of, identifying what technologies are being used on a website. we're relying here on the, way that HTTP Archive does it. other providers might do it differently. So there's always gonna be some variance in the data
[00:16:25] Nathan Wrigley: okay. But, nevertheless, that's the one that you've gone for following, in Joost de Valk's footsteps. So I guess we should probably begin with some of the top level items. Now, I know that your report, you-- like I said, dear listener, go and look at it. There's a whole bunch of, diagrams and charts and text which explain it all.
but do you just want to tell us the sort of the quick takeaways, the one or two or three or four things that you think are the most impactful coming out of this survey, and then we can dig into those a little bit more?
[00:16:56] Casey Burridge: Yeah, absolutely. so we found essentially is we wanted to measure market share over time because it's difficult to get a sense of what the trend is unless you're going back, know, a good few years.
[00:17:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:17:12] Casey Burridge: And so what we found was essentially WordPress's market share peaked in July of 2022
about, according to our data, just shy of 36%, call it 36%
[00:17:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:17:26] Casey Burridge: of the measurable web, right?
So we're looking at the entire data set here. and, ever since then, it's been on a relatively steady dec- decline. So our report looked at the April 2026 crawl, and it was WordPress's market share was sitting at about 33.2%.
so that's essentially a, steady decline for the last four years or so. And prior to that, as you mentioned, market share was always increasing.
so that was the tipping point in sort of mid-2022. Now, thing, the thing to keep in mind here is that, okay, it's a decline of, over four years, it's a decline of, 2.6 percentage points. It doesn't seem that consequential, but it is a 7% relative decline off the peak. so I think look- looking at the trend and the way things are going, I don't think it's right to be too pessimistic about it, but it is something to take into account because this is a lagging indicator, right? and I think it's important to see where things are going, that respect.
Yeah
[00:18:43] Nathan Wrigley: So, something curious. So I'm, on the website that I linked to a moment ago. but what's really curious is just before the peak, there was a real spike up in WordPress. So prior to, let's say six months before the peak, there was just this dramatic change upwards. So we went from, oh, I don't know, something, let's say towards the beginning of 2022, we went from somewhere in the region of 33.5%, something like that.
And it spiked in the space of what looks like six months up to 36%. Like a real jump. Like at no point on the graph does it behave like this either before or after. and then after that spike, which is really like a, the, it's like the point of a needle, like a real, like a, real point.
And then after that, the drop is slow and steady, but it gets us back to pre-2022 levels before that spike happened. Do you know why that spike is there? Do you know why it suddenly went up a cliff in the way that it did? Is it... I'm trying to think of anything which happened in 2022 which...
Maybe it was the pandemic. Oh, it was the pandemic. Was it the pandemic? Is that what it was? Yeah, okay. Okay.
[00:20:08] Casey Burridge: So I,
[00:20:08] Nathan Wrigley: Now that, yeah
[00:20:10] Casey Burridge: got quite a big boost around that time.
[00:20:12] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:20:14] Casey Burridge: as far as... Yeah, but you're right. On the chart, that spike up happens in a very short period of time, which is, curious. although the chart is quite condensed, so it probably
[00:20:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was gonna say the chart covers what? six years. And so each, little point is h- is hard to shatter out. Yeah, okay. Sorry, carry on
[00:20:33] Casey Burridge: I think you're right. I would put it mostly down the pandemic. we know that, a lot of businesses were moving online at that
a lot of WordPress companies actually reported quite a big bump in sales and revenue over that time.
[00:20:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay
[00:20:49] Casey Burridge: I assume that is mostly it. it's also worth keeping in mind that, there are, there can be anomalies in the data, like maybe one month, the full crawl didn't finish or something and, the data just get com- didn't get fully populated or something Like, that, that sort of thing can happen. I have found anomalies when digging into the data a little bit more that just look like, artifacts of, things not having been measured correctly. But, but overall, I think it's mostly put down to the pandemic,
[00:21:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, so for example, th- there's a trough, like a sudden spike down, at about, oh, I would say it would be roughly something like August or September 2024. But curiously, the, exact same trough is mapped across a bunch of CMSes. So for example, Shopify, you see the exact same trough, and then Wix, you see the exact...
So that, that feels like something went wrong with the crawler or something for that one. But obviously, if you, if, you were to map out across the, since 2022, what it, what's curious about that is we seem to have, at this point, returned to pre-pandemic levels. So if you were to go into 2021 levels, that's where WordPress seems to be now.
And, so there's a bit of me which is wondering, I wonder if it'll plateau at pre-pandemic levels. And I don't know what it was like where you were in the world during that sort of beginning of the pandemic and lockdown and what have you, but a lot of things changed. So businesses came into existence that you knew once this is all over, they're not gonna be in business anymore.
so I, just imagine delivery, food delivery networks and things like that just suddenly popped up all over the place 'cause that was a real thing that people wanted to do. Life returned to normal, they went out of business. And so any accompanying websites and things like that might have gone out of, just suddenly not needed.
I'm not sure if that really explains it because you would have imagined that drop-off to have been much quicker, whereas this is a much more gradual decline. So I guess the question now, which is unfairly put to you 'cause it's not like you're gonna be able to provide me with the exact answer, do you have any, do you have any sense of why WordPress went from its high point in 2022 to where it is now?
Do you, have any thoughts on why a decline
[00:23:21] Casey Burridge: Yeah, I have a few thoughts. think as usual with these types of things, it's a multitude of factors. It's difficult to put it down to any one or two things. but, we looked at the data, we looked at, the growth and decline of other CMSs, and we found that, while WordPress has been declining, other CMSs have been gaining market share.
it's fair to assume that some of that market share has gone to other platforms. For example, Shopify has been growing very quickly. it's seen, good growth o- over the time that WordPress has been declining. also seen growth in some of the newer, shinier CMSs that have come out like,
[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: So Webflow, things like that?
[00:24:05] Casey Burridge: Yeah,
[00:24:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:24:08] Casey Burridge: just pulling up the list now. where is it now? If I can get to the right table. Sanity,
[00:24:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. that, that's not one I'd heard of. Yeah, interesting. Framer, yeah
[00:24:21] Casey Burridge: are much smaller, but they're much newer and they're, they're doing a lot with, AI and stuff like that. So that is part of it.
part of the share has gone to those platforms. it's also the fact that, WordPress is a very mature platform at this ti- at this point, and, I think it was always gonna be hard for market share just to keep increasing indefinitely, Right.
[00:24:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:24:48] Casey Burridge: it either had to plateau or, decline. And then I would say the other thing is, we're experiencing a lot of disruption right now in the tech space with AI. I think is, definitely having an effect.
yeah
[00:25:04] Nathan Wrigley: sorry, carry on. Keep going.
[00:25:06] Casey Burridge: No, please go
[00:25:07] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. so I was gonna say then, 'cause it, it felt to me as if, we've got the popularity of things like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, those kind of things, and all of... a lot of those, you can look at the data in the, website, but, a lot of those have taken some of it.
And it looks like all of WordPress's, loss is diluted over all of them. It's not like there was one out and out winner. Shopify didn't win the entire game, neither did Wix. They're all taking a little bit of the pie. but I had assumed that AI, or let's call it non-CMS websites or something like that, where there's no CMS detectable, I fully assumed that would've been the big winner because there's a lot of people, a lot of agencies pivoting to that kind of thing.
launching something, giving it to their client. It's static. We can leave it alone. We don't need to fiddle with it too much. Does that represent, do you think, where the needle is moving, or is that as yet still a little bit of a gray area that we're not sure about?
[00:26:17] Casey Burridge: So it's difficult to see that in the data right now.
think, like I said, it's a bit of a lagging indicator, so if that a- is happening, it's not gonna show up just yet probably in the data. But anecdotally, yes, I agree with you you hear about this all the time, people vibe coding sites, people realizing that for a lot of websites you don't even need a CMS,
And it's easier just to build like an Astro site or something like that and host it in Cloudflare pa- pages or whatever. for the, companies that are looking for a CMS, think we have to come to terms with the fact that a lot of them are not interested in WordPress now.
And, I attended a press conf earlier this year, in April, and it w- it was really great, and they had a speaker there, his name is Anthony Ferrara, and, runs a, design agency called Oxy, and, he gave a, really great talk. it was one of the, spiciest talks there. but everyone was listening intently because he was talking about the difficulty he has selling WordPress his clients. now his agency, as I understand, they, service a lot of Silicon Valley kind of chic companies who are probably into the latest stuff. was still very interesting to hear that, he was saying like he's lost deals for recommending WordPress, and companies aren't interested in using WordPress.
They want to use the latest, greatest technology.
they want everything to be like AI native and all this kind of stuff. and that's not because, WordPress is inferior platform. I think, quite, on the contrary. I think it's actually because, because of other issues like marketing, right?
WordPress is not marketed very well. this is a, an issue been going on for a long time. positioning, I think WordPress, suffers from a bit of an identity crisis as to what it actually is, because it's a wonderful publishing platform, but it's also a platform for building web applications, right?
It's a very flexible kind of framework. it's difficult to define exactly what and it doesn't position itself, very, well in that sense either. So I think, yeah, I... Th- those are just some thoughts.
[00:28:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so it, it is curious, the budgets of the Squarespaces and the WIX. I remember reading something a little while ago, and I'm about to get these numbers catastrophically wrong. It-- what you can assume, in the next sentence is that I'm just making up numbers. But it was something along these lines, that Wix had something like, I don't know, $50 million of, income which they'd assigned to marketing, and they had 100-plus people in the marketing department and, paid full time to just do marketing.
And they've obviously got the budget to inject themselves into, I don't know, Super Bowls and things like that. They can really, they can go a long way. And we all know that advertising is effective, and yet WordPress has done a great job historically on word of mouth, kind of agencies adopting it and then persuading their clients.
But I think, you're right. I think that's a real missing piece. A- and I genuinely don't know how an open source project squares that circle. I just have no answer because there is not the money to compete against it. So guerrilla is, the guerrilla kind of marketing is what you've got to do.
But now that the, Wixes and the Squarespaces and the Shopifys have woken up to the fact that spending that money actually gets them a return in a year or what have you, that seems a little bit gloomy. I, I don't know how we compete with that. I'm genuinely not sure. But the marketing piece I think is really important
[00:30:14] Casey Burridge: Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think it is a challenge. somebody, posted a, tweet of market share graph, on Twitter, and, Matt Mullenweg actually responded and said, "Yeah, is what I was warning about." if there is no reinvestment into R&D, a decline is inevitable. And I think, that is accelerated by AI because technology is moving so quickly now with AI, that, there is pressure on all of these platforms to make sure that they're continually evolving, adopting new standards that are coming out, ensuring that they're providing the infrastructure that's required for AI.
so that's another challenge as well. as we move into this more kind of agentic web, agentic world, WordPress has to figure out where it fits in there
[00:31:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's really interesting because the work-- to, say that the WordPress community is bifurcated over this whole thing is not the case. I'm sure there's people in the middle, but there does seem to be a lot of people who are really concerned, really, concerned about these statistics.
There are other people who are much more optimistic, and they're painting a picture that it's all gonna be fine. Let's just weather the storm. Maybe you've got to reconfigure your business or figure out a different marketing channel or, adapt what it is that you're doing. And then there's people in the middle who probably don't really even know that there's a decline or what have you and are just carrying on as normal and, so on and so forth.
But I'm, curious what, this makes you feel as a representative of Gravity Kit. does data like this concern you or do you look at it and think, the, th-this race is not over just yet"? I realise I'm putting you a diff- in a difficult position there, but whatever you are willing to say, I'm curious to hear what it is that you have to say.
[00:32:20] Casey Burridge: Yeah, so it doesn't make us want to run off to Shopify or something like that.
[00:32:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay
[00:32:26] Casey Burridge: but it definitely, I think it definitely is prompting us and a lot of other companies in the space to reconsider, reconsider business models, reconsider the direction that our products are going in, right? so one of the thing you-- One of the things we've seen is that, a lot of companies in the space have reported like lower sales, lower revenue, and that seems to be, by some surveys that have been done, that seems to be correlated with, a lot with the type of product that you offer. if if you offer, a product that is close to the end user's own revenue, like an e-commerce plugin or a, a platform product like a membership plugin, something like that, those products seem to be pretty stable, doing pretty well. whereas if you offer something that it maybe adds a small enhancement to WordPress, those kinds of things are not doing that well because you can just replace it with AI, right?
so it's this double-edged sword where WordPress is losing share and then the c- the smaller products in the space enhance WordPress are also struggling because that kind of stuff is easier to do now, and the barrier to entry is so much lower. So Yeah, I think, there's other challenges as well with AI, like marketing. the typical WordPress kind of marketing funnel has been broken. lot of, companies rely on organic traffic. the, historical model was always, produce good content, Google rewards you with traffic.
percentage incr- converts, and you make money. that's not really happening anymore. your content, synthesizes it, answers users' questions directly. You don't get traffic. people don't convert. So yeah, it's inspiring us to think, differently about marketing, what role content actually plays now, how to make-- how to provide the most value to users, in a world where they can use Claude Fable to spin up a WordPress plugin in five minutes.
[00:34:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:34:45] Casey Burridge: all of these things are becoming, a consideration and, I was, thinking about this a lot, and wrote this piece on my blog about how historically the WordPress business model has always been, sell a license, plugin license or a theme license, and you provide updates, and you provide support, and how those two things are gradually being commoditized by AI. And the onus is on companies to think about how can we add a third pillar the value that we're offering users, whether that be something operational like a managed hosting service or, a, an actual development service that, that we offer, or whether that's, changing a, changing your business model, like maybe building a SaaS and having a, WordPress connector plugin. and then your code lives behind a SaaS, and you you can get more lock-in that way. and we are starting to see these kinds of shifts. companies-- There are companies moving to hybrid models. I know there are some actually busy, working on that shift now, which is interesting.
[00:35:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:35:55] Casey Burridge: think it's all about adaptability. I think, I don't think, I'm not pessimistic. I just think the onus is on us to adapt as we, enter this new world where WordPress is not the that it has been and AI is disrupting things. We just have to adapt and think about things in a new way.
[00:36:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I have a few things to add to that, and the, first one is I share what you said about whether you've got, let's call it a utility plugin or something like that. if you've got this little plugin which does this one thing, in the past, that one thing might have been enough to, to you as a solo developer having a career for that one little plugin.
Now, it would appear that all bets are off really there because most people I think, I say most people, most technical people who've been playing with AI will probably give that a shot first. okay, we've got this, we've got this small thing that we need to do. Shall we go and spend $49, $99, whatever it may be, or should we just spend a couple of hours seeing if we can vibe code that into existence?
And in many cases, those dominoes fall pretty quickly. And like you said, getting close to the buyer, so it's having some solution which the, customer can't really let go of because their business is involved in it. So a membership plugin or an LMS plugin or, dare I say it, a form plugin. you can't really drop that, and the complexity of a form plugin is probably beyond, an LLM at the moment if you wanna have all the functionality.
Sure enough, you could probably just get a basic contact form or something fairly straightforwardly, but you get what I mean. So locking yourself in because you are a crucial component is really interesting. But also, I don't know if you saw l- this week, maybe it was... No, it was the tail end of last week.
There, there seems to be a shift by some of the large media houses in the US to lock out AI, Google in particular, I think they're having a run at Google first, so that would therefore be Gemini and what have you, to try and lock out the AI because they can see this trend is killing their media businesses.
So for example, one of them was USA Today, a giant publishing house in America that produced pa- newspapers and news articles and, news websites and what have you. They've spotted this trend, and in the past, that's always been a, decent bargain. We'll produce the content. Google will surface the content.
Google will hand the content back to us. We'll get the eyeballs on the adverts. That all worked out. More recently, Google will just, tweak that, surface the answer. Nobody ends up back at their website, and now there seems to be pushback, and they're gonna be basically blocking, Google.
So it'll be curious to see if that momentum of AI being able to just surface the answer for what you need, whether or not that'll continue. it doesn't really answer the problem that we're addressing, but it, feels like a little bit of a seismic shift in the relationship between what A's allow- AI is allowed to scoop up and what the con- what the end user therefore will be able to get out at the other end.
So I went off at a bit of a tangent there, but I hope you can see the thread in that.
[00:39:07] Casey Burridge: Yeah, no, I think it's really interesting. and I'm certainly happy about it. but I just think it's just, it's happening whether we like it or not.
[00:39:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:39:21] Casey Burridge: to it.
[00:39:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:39:22] Casey Burridge: yeah, Cloudflare came out with protocol for essentially, locking your content and then having a, having an LLM, pay you through, an API or whatever to access it.
And then y- so you can make money that way whenever an, AI wants to retrieve your content. I don't know what's gonna happen with these things. I, it feels like one of those things where everybody has to adopt it or,
[00:39:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It's a Mexican sort of standoff, isn't it, really? Everybody's holding their gun and not really drawing it just yet. Just trying to figure out what's possible and what the future's gonna be. yeah.
[00:39:57] Casey Burridge: Because if you adopt it, if you adopt it and your competitors don't, they're at an advantage
[00:40:02] Nathan Wrigley: Right
[00:40:03] Casey Burridge: they're gonna get cited in the AI answers and you're not. So it's, it's this awkward situation.
[00:40:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I'm glad to hear that you're still sanguine. let's just assume that the, decline is what it is, and that decline continues. It will be interesting. So this is the opposite of a rising tide, carries all boats. a sinking tide, puts the boats into the mud at the bottom of the harbor.
We'll have to just see how that works out. at some point, if the decline continues, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, doesn't it? the, word gets out, the doomerism becomes more and more vocal. the fact that 10 people left promotes 30 people to leave, who in turn promote another 100 people to leave, and all of that cascades much more quickly.
I feel that's not impossible. I see that there's a universe in where that is the future. But equally, I think this ship could turn itself around, whether it plateaus and people just realize that a CMS is actually quite a useful thing to have. Because once we've built the website with AI, now what?
how do we update it? What, where's the interface for just adding another blog post and all of those kind of things? But only time will tell. yeah, is there anything else that you feel from your report that we missed out? If not, we'll, we'll knock it on the head there
[00:41:27] Casey Burridge: Yeah, no, nothing from the report. I would just say, for anybody who's listening to this who's interested in where WordPress is going in terms of WordPress core itself and how it's developing alongside all the kind of disruptions that are happening, would point them to two really good articles.
the one is a series of articles actually written by James LePage, who was the former head of AI at Automattic, wrote a series on the future of the web. I think it's a five-part series, and I believe in the last part he covers WordPress and how it fits into that. very good read. And then another article by, Grierson, also at Automattic, who wrote a post back in April about, how WordPress could be the foundation of the Agentic web or, sorry, the operating system of the Agentic web. so those are, great reads and they they paint a, very positive picture for where WordPress could go in this Agentic world, because as it turns out, WordPress being this, open source platform this incredible open source ecosystem of plugins and tools and, developers, it's actually perfectly positioned to benefit from a lot of the disruption that's happening with
[00:42:49] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah
[00:42:50] Casey Burridge: probably don't have time to, to dig into that, but definitely go read those articles. It's, it's good food for thought.
[00:42:55] Nathan Wrigley: I will get the URLs for those from you before we, finally go our separate ways, and I'll put those into the show notes. So what Casey's just mentioned there will be in the show notes, those things from, the two Jameses. Let's go, let's call them that. but yeah, that was, that's really interesting.
And okay, I'm gonna segue very quickly to say that I think the open source argument is one which somehow got lost. When I began working on the internet, the open source argument was such a powerful, often heard thing. It, it was just the thing that people talked about. is that thing open source?
Yes. Okay, I might consider using it. Since Facebook came along and Google came along and all of these other big companies came along with their really well-built, incredibly persuasive platforms that on the, on, in most cases were utterly free and never broke, that whole argument got just lost.
and it's only when Facebook goes out of business, whenever that day is, that people using Facebook will discover the folly of that. And if Google goes out of business and everybody's Google Docs, just suddenly disappear, that's the moment when everybody will stare at themselves and think, "Why didn't we think about this beforehand?
Why did we wall everything up in a garden that we didn't control?" That whole bit just somehow went off everybody's radar, and I think there are moves in the open source community. I know that Automattic have just produced a film to try, like a documentary to try and persuade people that this, it, this is still important.
Maybe that's where we need to invest our time, trying to persuade clients about the ownership of data. That old argument that once worked, but in the more recent past seems to have fallen on deaf ears. yeah, there we go. There's my last two cents. So Casey, thank you so much for chatting to me today.
I really appreciate it.
[00:44:54] Casey Burridge: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on. I really enjoyed it.
[00:44:57] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got for you today. Just a quick reminder, if you're into podcasting, you feel like you might like to launch a podcast or perhaps you have one already, Nathan to get yourself on the list, and I will notify you and give you some special pricing when we launch the app in a few weeks time.
Okay? That's it. I hope that you enjoyed that episode. If you did, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 480, and leave us a comment there.
That's all I've got for you this week. I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music and say, stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
Oh, and see you at WordCamp US. Maybe. Possibly. Hopefully.
