Why I moved away from WordPress
Every few months someone declares WordPress dead, and every few months the numbers say otherwise.
W3Techs has it on 40.2% of all websites as of October 1, 2026, which is 58.7% of the sites where a CMS can be identified. Nothing else comes close. WooCommerce alone holds roughly a third of the ecommerce market.
WordPress is still the biggest thing out there by a long way, and I'm not here to argue otherwise.
Where it stopped working for me
WordPress assumes your content ends up on a page, and for most sites that's exactly right. Mine didn't. The same articles had to go to a website, a mobile app, a newsletter and a docs portal. I ended up using WordPress as a content API while paying the upkeep on a theme layer, an editor and a plugin stack I barely touched. At some point it made more sense to use something built for that job.
A headless CMS does one thing: it stores structured content and hands it over through an API. What you build on top is up to you. For me that meant a static front end, a content model with proper types (articles, authors, products), and a workflow where preview branches and automated tests cover the whole project instead of everything except the CMS.
It also changed how I think about maintenance. A statically generated front end has very little to attack, which is a nice side effect.
What I lost
Quite a bit, honestly. WordPress has a plugin for nearly everything and a community that has already solved whatever problem you're about to have. In headless, forms, search, redirects and SEO tooling are either a paid service or something you build. Live preview takes real effort to set up and still doesn't feel like editing the actual page. Content editors miss that more than developers do, and they're right to.
You're also running two systems now, and that costs money and attention. If you don't have a developer on the team, headless is the wrong call. My migration took longer than I'd planned, mostly because of years of old URLs that needed redirects.
On the market side, headless is still small. Estimates vary a lot by research firm, but Mordor Intelligence puts the headless CMS software market at $1.56 billion in 2025, rising to $4.42 billion by 2031. The overall CMS market is around $33 billion. It's growing fast from a small base, so I wouldn't call it a takeover.
If you're staying on WordPress, lock it down
Plenty of people should stay, and a few free steps make a big difference.
Most of the trouble on WordPress sites comes from neglect, not from the platform. A plugin that hasn't been updated in two years, a theme nobody remembers installing, a site that's three major versions behind. Update core, themes and plugins as soon as releases land, and check regularly for anything outdated or abandoned. If a plugin hasn't had an update in a long time or its developer has gone quiet, replace it. Delete anything you aren't using, since deactivated plugins can still be a way in.
Have your code reviewed on a schedule too. If you or a developer maintain custom themes or plugins, go through them regularly, especially after updates, to catch anything that broke or became insecure. Test updates on a staging copy before pushing them live.
Beyond that, install a free security plugin such as Wordfence, which gives you a firewall and malware scanning at no cost. Turn on two-factor authentication for every admin and drop the default "admin" username. Take backups and store them somewhere other than your server.
If your site doesn't need the REST API, restrict it. Just test first, because the block editor and a number of plugins rely on it. Limiting API access to logged-in users is usually safer than switching it off entirely. And if you ever want to go headless, WordPress can serve as the backend through that same API, so you can try the approach without migrating anything.
So who should move?
If your site is a blog, a business site and it works, leave it alone. Rebuilding a working site because the architecture sounds cleaner is a good way to waste a quarter.
I moved because content had to reach several places, I had developers who wanted to own the front end, and I wanted tighter control over speed. If you only have one of those, you probably don't need to.
If you're weighing a move to headless, or you want help securing and maintaining an existing WordPress site, feel free to contact me. I'm happy to share advice or support you with the next step.
