A post on LinkedIn this week, "The WordPress Era Is Ending" by Murat Tekmen, makes a sharp case, and parts of it are right. The strongest point is about cost. WordPress became the default because building custom code was expensive, so a theme and a stack of plugins was the cheap way to get a site. If an agency can write a clean custom build quickly with AI, the reason to start from a plugin pile gets weaker. I agree with that.
The security numbers are the part that should change how we work. The post cites Patchstack data showing 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, with 91% of them in plugins and only six in core. If those figures hold, the risk is not the core software. It is the number of plugins a site carries, and how many of them are abandoned, unaudited, or quietly exploited. That is a real reason to run fewer plugins and to document what each one does.
Where I part ways with the post is the leap from "the default is weakening" to "the era is ending." The post's own figures do not support that. Its share numbers show WordPress falling from a 43.6% peak in early 2025 to 40.2% by October 2026. That is a slow decline over about eighteen months, and the same post expects existing WordPress sites to persist through 2027. A slow decline in share is not a platform dying. It is a platform losing its easy default.
I also don't think the slow-to-adapt story fits what happened. WordPress 7.0 put AI into core. That was messy, and the community split over it, but it is the project moving in public. The author's own read is that WordPress is turning into a background content layer, moving "from the shop window to the stockroom." I think that is closer to the truth than an ending. The shop window is the part that is getting crowded, and the stockroom is where the durable value sits.
So what do we do with this? I would not move a client site off WordPress because of a LinkedIn post. I would take the parts that are true and make them practical. Cut the plugin count on every site we touch. Write down what every remaining plugin does and why it is there. Treat a custom build as a deliberate choice with an owner, not a default. Ask whether a feature belongs in a plugin at all before installing one. Those habits make a WordPress site cheaper to own, and they hold up whether WordPress thrives or fades.
The honest version of the argument is this: AI has made the plugin shortcut less necessary. It has not made the platform obsolete. Anyone who tells you the platform is over is selling the next platform. Anyone who tells you nothing has changed is ignoring the security data. The useful position is in between, and it is mostly about discipline.