The oft repeated stat is that WordPress powers 43% of the web. It’s closer to 41% today, and there are signs that its overall market share may be declining slightly. But there’s a lot going on in the web ecosystem today causing even more fragmentation than past years, which makes it all the more interesting that WordPress is still able to maintain such a large percentage.
The newest competitor has no official platform, but it is a new way of building websites altogether: AI-driven web development. Many are using tools like Claude Design, Replit, and Lovable, or just taking to their favorite IDEs (integrated development environments) like Visual Studio Code to build a website with AI-assisted coding.
AI-driven web development is allowing people to build their own websites at record pace; going from prompting AI questions to asking it to build websites.
Despite this, WordPress will continue to adapt and even thrive, much like it has done against every major change since 2003.
What’s really happening is the web splitting in two. Simple brochure sites are moving to AI generators, and honestly they should. What’s left is everything with logins, customer records, and workflows attached, and that half is going the other way.
And with that, I introduce the CODES acronym: a new framework to determine if your website platform is worth building on.
CODES: Five Tests for Any Platform
When choosing how to build your website, or what platform to use, there are certain parameters that are globally true. They can help you make the right decisions from the outset, so that your website remains an asset that you own in five years, without incurring significant costs or having limitations on what you can build. They are Control, Ownership, Data, Extensibility, and Scalability.
Control - Change How It Works, or Only What They Let You
Control is whether you have the agency to change how the systems and workflows and tooling actually behave. Think permissions, workflows, and what happens overall. On WordPress, you can change any of it. On a hosted builder you get whatever is exposed in the settings panel.
Ownership - Nobody Can Change the Deal
Ownership is about more than whether you can leave: it’s whether someone can change terms while you stay. Think usage, pricing, what you can or cannot build, and what happens to the site if a policy shifts. WordPress is open source running on the hosting of your choice, so there’s no vendor whose terms of service sit between you and your own site. The catch is the update channel, which runs through WordPress.org and is not yours. More on that below.
Data - Your Records Live in Your Database, Or Someone Else’s
Every site collects data, continuously, and ongoing. Customers, visitors, analytics, orders, submissions, user history, and more. Whose infrastructure does it sit on, and who benefits from those insights? WordPress has a MySQL database that you control, not a shared system where your records sit next to everyone else’s and get processed under a third party’s terms.
Extensibility - Add What You Need; No Roadmap
If control is changing how the platform works, extensibility is the option to add what isn’t there yet. Whether that’s a new type of content, new user roles, new pages, or building out a brand new function or feature altogether. Today, that might mean how much AI or agents can interact with or modify the website, and there’s now real plumbing for it: the Abilities API landed in WordPress core in 6.9, and the official MCP Adapter is a plugin you add on top of it, so an agent can find out what your site can do and act inside the permissions you set. The limit is what you can build, not what someone decided to expose.
Scalability - Will You Hit a Ceiling?
Not just in terms of traffic, but the long-term vision of what you’re building. Do the platform and the systems in place support a long-term structure that can help you evolve, adapt, and grow? Think: hundreds of articles or pages, or even dozens of team members. WordPress has a low floor and a high ceiling. Organizations that outgrow a builder keep landing on it, and the ones already there rarely have to move.
Which Half Do You Sit In?
It’s difficult to find solutions that fully meet the needs of CODES. Here’s how the options score.
| Platform | C | O | D | E | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Partial | Partial |
| Shopify | Partial | ✗ | ✗ | Partial | Partial |
| Webflow | Partial | ✗ | ✗ | Partial | Partial |
| WordPress (self-hosted) | ✓ | Partial | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Custom code, AI-built (exported and self-hosted) | ✓ | ✓ | Partial | ✓ | ✓ |
✓ passes as it ships. Partial, with real caveats. ✗ no.
One note on how Data is scored: it’s about where your records live and whose terms govern them, not whether you can pull a CSV out. Shopify and Webflow both have excellent export tooling and still fail it. If you have to export before their deadline, you’re leaving with a copy. They still hold the record.
The two options that pass most of the letters get there in opposite ways. WordPress hands you the passes on day one, because the license, the source, and the database are already yours before you build anything. AI-built code scores just as well on paper, but you earn every one of them: export the code, move the database onto infrastructure you run, and accept that everything the agent wrote is now yours to maintain.
Neither one sweeps. WordPress drops to a partial on Ownership because of October 2024, when WordPress.org cut off one host’s update access and handed its plugin, which had over two million installs, to someone else. A judge ordered both reversed in December. It got fixed, but it happened, and it can happen. AI-built code drops to a partial on Data because the default in most builders is a database sitting in the vendor’s account, and getting it out is on you.
So if you’re brochureware, let the generators keep getting better, because they will. But if your site carries workflows, customer data, permissions, and real obligations, run CODES against whatever you’re being sold.
What works today but will be ready for tomorrow, especially during this fast moving AI revolution?