OMG! WordPress Is Dying! 😜

I always find it humorous when the WordPress developer community gets all hot and bothered over something.

They can be a super opinionated bunch. Feeling like they need to react to every little thing.

That’s what was happening last week with Cloudflare’s launch of EmDash. Does this mean WordPress is going extinct?!

LOL! 😂

Anyway, I’m flying to Phoenix this week to hang out with some of these guys at PressConf. This is a smaller event for people active in the WordPress space…. and I’ll be meeting the developers of many of the top plugins. Should be interesting.

I admit… I come to these events feeling like an outsider, at times. After all, I’m as active in this world as the best of them, but I come at it more from a client and business perspective. I’m not a developer. But, I still find it helpful in my line of work to meet and talk with some of the people who build the tools and hosting companies we use every day. So, that’s why I’m flying out.

For clients… know that I’ll be out of the office Wednesday through the end of the week. As always, I’ll be connected the whole time. But, not in full “work mode” for obvious reasons.

OK! Let’s light this candle…

WordPress 7.0 Is Delayed. Cloudflare Launched a “Replacement.” Everything’s Fine.

The WordPress world got a little spicy this past week.

Two things happened almost simultaneously. First, WordPress 7.0 – which was supposed to ship on April 9th – got delayed. No new date yet, but it’ll be “a few weeks.” Second, Cloudflare dropped something called EmDash, which they’re calling the “spiritual successor to WordPress.”

Cue the hot takes. 🔥

And boy, were there hot takes. My X feed was full of WordPress developers and community folks opining on whether EmDash is a real threat, whether WordPress is “dying,” whether the 7.0 delay is a sign of trouble, and basically doing what the WordPress community does best: reacting to things loudly. 😜

I find it all pretty amusing, honestly. It’s a symptom of modern social media culture — this compulsion to have a strong opinion about every single thing the moment it happens. Someone launches a v0.1 developer preview and suddenly people are writing eulogies for WordPress.

Let me offer a calmer take. Cuz I’ve watched this kind of thing happen more times than I can count.

The EmDash thing

Cloudflare launched EmDash as an open-source CMS built in TypeScript, running on their serverless infrastructure. Their pitch is essentially: WordPress plugins are a security problem (true), so we rebuilt the whole CMS from scratch with sandboxed plugins.

Let’s be honest about why this got so much attention. It’s not because of what EmDash is right now. It’s because Cloudflare called it a “spiritual successor to WordPress.”

That’s it. That’s the whole reason.

If they’d called it “a new developer-focused CMS built on Astro,” almost nobody in the WordPress world would have blinked. But when you invoke the name of the platform that powers 42% of the web, you inherit the attention of the whole ecosystem.

Smart marketing on Cloudflare’s part? Hell yeah, it was. But let’s look at what EmDash actually is today:

• It’s version 0.1.0. An early developer beta.
• It has no plugin ecosystem. Zero.
• There is no visual site builder. No drag-and-drop. No point-and-click anything. You’re basically back to the old-school “classic editor” again.
• You literally can’t set it up without using a command line interface.
• There are no migration tools to bring a WordPress site over.
• Oh, and it launched on April 1st. Several people initially thought it was an April Fools joke. I kinda did, too. 😇

I’m not saying EmDash won’t ever become something. The architecture is genuinely interesting — the sandboxed plugin model is smart, and the security argument they’re making is legitimate. But right now? If you’re a coach, course creator, or consultant running a WordPress site for your business, EmDash is about as relevant to your daily life as a concept car at an auto show. Cool to look at. You’re not driving it to work tomorrow. And probably never will.

What Cloudflare built is essentially a pitch for their own Workers platform wrapped in WordPress’s name recognition. Matt Mullenweg himself pointed out that EmDash is designed to sell Cloudflare services. And honestly… that’s fine. Competition is healthy. But let’s not confuse a v0.1 developer preview with a genuine alternative for people who actually run websites.

The WordPress 7.0 delay

Now, the delay. This one matters more to you — but maybe not in the way the doom-and-gloom crowd would have you believe.

WordPress 7.0 was supposed to ship April 9th. The core team pushed it back by a few weeks because the real-time collaboration feature — which lets multiple people edit in WordPress at the same time — wasn’t stable enough. Specifically, they had concerns about database architecture, performance under load, and how it would interact with existing setups.

Here’s what I think…

Most solopreneurs reading this don’t care that much about real-time collaboration. If you’re the only person editing your site, it’s a non-feature for you.

What you should care about is what else is shipping in 7.0 — specifically the AI integration layer. The Abilities API (which I talked about last week), AI Connectors, and the whole foundation that’s going to let AI tools interact with your WordPress site natively. That’s the big deal.

And the delay? It means they’re taking extra time to get the foundation right. The WordPress team specifically said they’re targeting “extreme stability” for this release. Given how much is riding on 7.0 — and how much the architecture matters for everything that comes after — I’d rather they take a few extra weeks than ship something shaky.

What It All Means…

Here’s my take…

WordPress sits at roughly 42% of the web. Its market share dipped slightly this past quarter — from about 43% to 42.4%. Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace each gained a fraction. But the most interesting shift? The “no CMS” category grew for the first time in a decade. Developers using AI to build sites aren’t always reaching for a traditional CMS at all.

That tells you something. The bottom of the market is what’s eroding. The simple brochure sites. The “I just need a basic website” crowd. AI can build you a basic HTML site in minutes now. Why bother with WordPress for that?

But here’s what AI can’t do: run a membership site. Manage your email list integrations. Handle WooCommerce orders. Power a course platform with conditional access and drip content. Manage SEO across 200 blog posts with custom schemas. Coordinate a plugin stack that handles forms, payments, scheduling, and analytics all working together.

That’s the WordPress that matters. And that’s the WordPress that isn’t going anywhere.

The solopreneurs who use WordPress as a serious business platform aren’t threatened by EmDash or by AI site builders. If anything, the AI features coming in WordPress 7.0 make WordPress more powerful for that audience, not less.

WordPress is a website operating system, when you get right down to it. It isn’t going to be replaced by AI… or any of these competitor CMS platforms.

So when you see the next hot take about WordPress being “dead” or “replaced” — and you will, probably by next Tuesday — just remember: the people saying it are usually talking about a version of WordPress that most serious site owners don’t even recognize.

The WordPress you’re using? It’s about to get better. 7.0 just needs a couple more weeks to cook. 👨‍🍳

WordPress News & Updates

Elementor 4.0 Released — Biggest Architectural Update in a Decade Elementor shipped version 4.0 with a completely new “atomic” editor — reusable Classes, Variables, and Components for more scalable site design. New installs get it by default; existing sites can opt in without breaking anything. V3 and V4 elements work side-by-side on the same page. What’s new in Elementor 4.0 . I’ve updated several clients to Elementor 4 and it seems to work fine without anything breaking. As always, backup first just in case. 😇

SEOPress 9.7 — New React-Based Settings UI SEOPress shipped version 9.7 with its first React-powered settings screens, preparing for WordPress’s planned shift to a fully React admin. For the non-nerds, that just means a faster and more modern user interface. Full details on the SEOPress blog

Fluent Forms 6.2.0 — Performance Upgrade and 700K Installs Fluent Forms crossed 700,000 active installations and shipped version 6.2.0 with a full internal framework upgrade, PHP 8.4 support, a major Square payment integration overhaul, tightened Stripe security, and improved Conversational Forms. What’s new in Fluent Forms 6.2.0

ACF 6.8 — AI-Ready with Abilities API and Automatic Structured Data Advanced Custom Fields 6.8 integrates with WordPress’s Abilities API, adds automatic Schema.org structured data for custom fields, and ships new WP-CLI commands. This positions ACF-powered content to be natively discoverable by AI tools once WP 7.0 lands. ACF PRO 6.8 release announcement

“WordPress Isn’t Dying. The Bottom of the Market Is.” Johanna Courtright at Groundworx Agency published what many WordPress professionals are calling the best take on the market share conversation. AI is replacing simple brochure sites, not serious WordPress businesses. The real WordPress market is healthy. Read the full article at Groundworx

Page Builders and Performance — The Honest Trade-Off Remkus de Vries published a frank assessment of what page builders actually do to your site’s performance. They add real overhead, and site owners should understand the trade-off between convenience and speed. The brutal truth on page builder performance

WordPress AI Connectors Need More Testing Before 7.0 WordPress 7.0’s AI integration depends on AI Connector plugins, and the core team is asking the community to test them before release. These connectors are what will let AI tools interact with your site through the Abilities API. Call for testing on Make WordPress

OMGF v5.0 — Smart Optimize Removes Unused Fonts Automatically OMGF (Optimize My Google Fonts) v5.0 introduces Smart Optimize — it automatically removes unused fonts, preloads the right ones, and strips unused subsets on a per-page basis. Zero configuration needed. OMGF Pro details at Daan.dev

Perfmatters 2.6 — Major Performance Plugin Update Perfmatters, a popular lightweight performance optimization plugin, shipped a significant update with numerous additions, improvements, and fixes. Worth updating if you run it. Perfmatters changelog

How to Audit Your WordPress Plugin Stack

One of the arguments Cloudflare made for EmDash (which I talked about above) is that 96% of WordPress security vulnerabilities come from plugins. And, they’re not wrong.

Most plugin security issues aren’t caused by some flaw in WordPress itself. They’re caused by site owners installing flawed plugins, forgetting about them, and never looking at them again. The plugin tab becomes a junk drawer.

So let’s clean it out.

Deactivate What You’re Not Using

Go to Plugins → Installed Plugins in your WordPress dashboard. Look at the list. Be honest with yourself.

If you installed a plugin six months ago for one specific thing and haven’t thought about it since… deactivate it. If you installed something to “try it out” and never actually set it up… deactivate it. If you see a plugin and your reaction is “wait, what is that?”… definitely deactivate it. If you see a plugin you bought and just wanted to have it sitting there so you remember you have it…. definitely deactivate it until you actually need it.

Don’t just deactivate them, either. Delete them. A deactivated plugin can still be a security risk because the files are still on your server. While the code isn’t being executed, if that plugin does have any kind of file system vulnerability, it could still be a risk even just sitting there. The risk isn’t high, but it isn’t zero.

Check for Duplicates

You’d be surprised how many sites I’ve seen running two SEO plugins, two caching plugins, or three different analytics tools all at the same time. This usually happens when someone switches tools but forgets to remove the old one.

Look for overlap in these categories especially: SEO, caching/performance, security, analytics, and contact forms. One of each, max.

Stop Using a Sledgehammer for a Thumbtack

Someone needs one small thing — disable comments, insert a tracking script into their header, customize the login page. So they install a big, feature-heavy plugin with settings panels, database tables, and a bunch of functionality they’ll never touch. All for one little thing.

A lot of that simple stuff can be handled with a small code snippet instead. A few lines added to your theme’s functions.php file (or better yet, a lightweight code snippets plugin like FluentSnippets) can replace an entire plugin.

You’d probably be surprised what you can do with simply code snippets inside a snippets manager. You can replace entire plugins, in many instances.

And if you’re not comfortable writing snippets yourself, this is exactly the kind of thing AI is great at — describe what you need in plain English and Claude or ChatGPT will write it for you. Just be aware…. AI can also write some piss-poor code snippets. I’ve had clients get themselves into trouble blindly trusting AI before. 😇 So, powerful tool, but you gotta use it with eyes wide open.

Check for Updates and Abandoned Plugins

Go through your active plugins and check two things.

First — is it up to date? If it has a pending update, do it. Outdated plugins are the number one attack vector for WordPress sites.

Second — when was it last updated by the developer? You can check this on the plugin’s page at wordpress.org. No update in over a year is a yellow flag. Two years or more is a red flag — if a vulnerability gets discovered, nobody’s patching it. Start looking for an alternative.

Also, periodically just check the changelog for the plugins you’re using manually. Many times, I’ve found plugins that just don’t have a fully operational update mechanism for whatever reason. You could be running an old version and not even know it unless you look for yourself.

Find Your Heavy Hitters

Not all plugins are equal when it comes to performance. Some are lightweight. Others quietly load scripts and stylesheets on every single page — even pages where they’re not being used.

Install the Query Monitor plugin and load your site. It’ll show you exactly which plugins are running on each page, how many database queries they’re making, and how much time they’re consuming. You’ll often find one or two plugins eating a disproportionate share of your load time.

The usual suspects? Page builders (a known trade-off). Social sharing plugins that load dozens of scripts on every page. Sliders. Anything making external API calls on every page load. And “Swiss army knife” plugins that do twenty things when you only need one.

Run a speed test at GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights before and after your cleanup. I’ve seen sites shave a full second or more off their load time just from removing unused plugins.

Have Me Do It?

This is the kind of stuff I have entire systems built around – and do regularly for my clients. I also routinely do audits of the plugins my clients are using.

Some of this stuff still requires some experience and knowledge of the ecosystem.

So, if you’d rather not think about this at all? Well… that’s literally what Concierge is for. Plugin management, updates, security monitoring, performance audits — it’s all part of what I handle for clients so they can focus on their actual business. 😎