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The Post-CMS Web and the Battle for AI Server Access · Wpfavs - Your favourite WordPress news

• 0:13
  Here's a number I can't stop thinking about.
• 0:15
  48.3% of the measurable web runs no detectable CMS at all.
• 0:20
  That's HTTP Archive data, tracked by Casey Burridge at GravityKit,
• 0:25
  and it was 46.75% in mid 2024.
• 0:29
  Static sites, headless builds, hand coded pages.
• 0:33
  Everyone is arguing about AI plugins, and the bigger story might be sites that skip
• 0:37
  the CMS entirely.
• 0:38
  I want to keep this grounded, though.
• 0:40
  WordPress still runs 33.21% of all measurable web origins as of April 2026,
• 0:47
  and about 64% of sites with a detectable CMS.
• 0:51
  You may have seen W3Techs say 41.2%.
• 0:54
  That's not a contradiction.
• 0:56
  It leaves out the no CMS sites, so the denominator is different.
• 1:00
  Where WordPress has slipped is from its peak of 35.76% in July 2022.
• 1:06
  That's 2.55 points, roughly a 7% relative drop over four years.
• 1:12
  It's a slow leak, not a collapse.
• 1:14
  And the leak has a destination.
• 1:16
  Shopify sits at 4.74%, up 12.4% year over year, and it absorbed roughly 59%
• 1:23
  of the share WordPress lost.
• 1:24
  The ecommerce picture is split too.
• 1:26
  WooCommerce leads overall, 6.64% of origins to Shopify's 4.76%.
• 1:33
  But in the top 1 million popularity tier, Shopify leads 6.08% to 3.12%.
• 1:40
  WooCommerce wins on breadth, Shopify wins at the top.
• 1:43
  Inside WordPress, the builder story is interesting.
• 1:45
  Elementor is on 32.67% of WordPress sites, up 2.51 points.
• 1:51
  I'll flag that I work at Elementor, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly.
• 1:55
  The block editor is at 20.62%, wpBakery slipped to 8.52%, and Bricks
• 2:02
  is up 71.2% year over year.
• 2:04
  That's off a tiny base of 0.34%, so it's a rising signal, not a takeover.
• 2:09
  The less visible shift is how people sell these things.
• 2:13
  On July 1, 2026, Envato moved to a flat 50% author fee and ended its exclusive
• 2:19
  author tier, where selected authors paid the platform a lower fee.
• 2:24
  The reaction in the community was telling.
• 2:26
  Vova, the Freemius founder, said going independent is inevitable.
• 2:31
  Xaver said the marketplace model feels dated.
• 2:34
  Lawrence Ladomery asked whether it's time to sell direct.
• 2:37
  Add the StellarWP news.
• 2:39
  That umbrella brand no longer exists, and its products moved under Liquid Web.
• 2:43
  Some keep their names, some get rebranded, some get merged into other plugins.
• 2:47
  So you've got marketplaces squeezing authors and brands consolidating at the same
• 2:51
  moment.
• 2:52
  If you're a solo plugin builder, that's an urgent signal.
• 2:55
  But here's the honest complication.
• 2:57
  Selling direct sounds liberating until you pay for your own customer acquisition.
• 3:01
  Marketplaces gave you traffic, and nobody has shown that independent developers can
• 3:07
  rebuild that funnel at a sane cost.
• 3:09
  That question is still open.
• 3:11
  And the other end of the market is neglected.
• 3:14
  The WP Goldmine report looked at 57,383 plugins in the WordPress.org directory.
• 3:21
  In the 10K to 100K active install band, 24% haven't been updated in over two years.
• 3:27
  That's 1,209 popular plugins with real user bases and no maintainer.
• 3:32
  In the 100K to 1M band it's 10.2%, including Limit Login Attempts,
• 3:38
  Layout Grid Block and WP Downgrade.
• 3:40
  Which is a problem and an opportunity at once.
• 3:43
  When it comes to finding your next product, abandoned plugins with real installs are
• 3:48
  a map.
• 3:49
  Someone will take them over, fork them, or replace them.
• 3:53
  The WP Plugin Info Card plugin was literally offered up for developer takeover this
• 3:58
  month.
• 3:59
  Now the AI part, but not the usual hype.
• 4:01
  I think there are two competing architectures forming, and almost nobody names the
• 4:05
  split.
• 4:06
  Model one is native.
• 4:07
  Benjamin Intal, founder of Stackable and WP Interactions, previewed an experiment
• 4:12
  called Ahentic AI workspace.
• 4:14
  In the preview, it understands the whole site, helps launch it,
• 4:17
  and helps install plugins.
• 4:19
  And it uses no external servers, no external services, no MCPs.
• 4:24
  Just WordPress and its new APIs.
• 4:26
  That lines up with what WPBeginner has been reporting about the Abilities API
• 4:30
  catching on fast.
• 4:32
  Plugins expose actions as structured endpoints, and assistants like Claude and
• 4:36
  ChatGPT can actually do the work.
• 4:39
  The benefit is clear.
• 4:40
  The site declares what an agent may do, and the agent stays inside that.
• 4:44
  Model two is the opposite instinct.
• 4:46
  Novamira CLI lets a terminal coding agent, Claude Code, Codex CLI,
• 4:52
  Gemini CLI, or anything that can run shell commands, connect to a site running
• 4:57
  Novamira.
• 4:58
  Novamira itself gives agents PHP execution, database queries and file operations.
• 5:04
  Elementor's Angie added a super admin mode that can read and write the file system,
• 5:09
  query the database, and execute PHP.
• 5:12
  That's power, and the ceiling is much higher.
• 5:14
  Higher ceiling, higher trust requirement.
• 5:16
  And the market is already crowded around both.
• 5:19
  Vercel released an AI Gateway plugin giving a site access to hundreds of models from
• 5:24
  more than 40 providers through one API key.
• 5:27
  So the model layer is getting commoditized, and the real fight is over permissions.
• 5:31
  Who gets to touch the server?
• 5:33
  My view is practical.
• 5:35
  Agency owners will love the terminal agent on a staging site and hesitate on a
• 5:39
  client's production site.
• 5:41
  A sandboxed, declared set of abilities is easier to explain to a client.
• 5:46
  Still, I can't tell you which wins.
• 5:49
  That's the unresolved question, whether site owners trust elevated server agents or
• 5:53
  settle on core APIs.
• 5:54
  One more trend that sounds tiny and isn't.
• 5:57
  The official WordPress Browser Extension, in the works for Chrome and Safari,
• 6:02
  with the project on GitHub.
• 6:04
  It detects a WordPress site and gives you quick links to edit,
• 6:07
  the admin, logout, and a new content menu, all from the browser.
• 6:11
  The point is that the admin bar stops being injected into the front end.
• 6:15
  And that's exactly my lens.
• 6:17
  Once the page stops carrying admin clutter, what's left is cleaner for visitors and
• 6:21
  for machines reading it.
• 6:23
  The admin moves out of the page and into the tooling around it.
• 6:26
  So where does this leave people?
• 6:27
  If you're building, think about where your customers come from before the
• 6:31
  marketplace changes your math.
• 6:33
  Audit the plugins you rely on for maintainers.
• 6:36
  And decide now what you'll let an agent touch.
• 6:39
  My prediction for the next three years is that the center of gravity moves.
• 6:42
  WordPress stays huge, but more of the interesting work happens at its edges,
• 6:46
  in sites without a CMS, in direct sales, and in agents that operate it from outside.