The Future of WordPress in 2024: Trends, Predictions and New Possibilities

WordPress has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a basic blogging tool in 2003. Today, this open source content management system (CMS) powers over 40% of all websites, with a massive global community of users and contributors. But what does the future hold for this ubiquitous platform? Based on insights from WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy at WordCamp Europe 2022, as well as our own research and analysis, here‘s what we predict for WordPress in 2024 and beyond.

WordPress Market Share May Fluctuate, But Dominance Will Continue

For years, WordPress enthusiasts have proudly touted that this open source CMS "powers over 40% of the web." But Mullenweg warned that this impressive statistic may get "wonky" in the coming year as W3Tech, the firm tracking this data, changes its measurement approach.

However, he‘s not worried. "Market share is not the goal, but a result," Mullenweg explained. "What we need to focus on is creating an accessible software in as many languages as possible, regardless of technical ability and economical ability, and creating an inclusive community."

With its ease of use, vibrant ecosystem of plugins and themes, and focus on democratizing publishing, WordPress has become the dominant CMS, far surpassing competitors like Shopify, Wix and Squarespace. While there may be short-term fluctuations in the specific usage percentage, we predict WordPress will maintain its dominance through 2024 and beyond, as the platform continues expanding its capabilities and investing in its community.

Gutenberg Block Editor Will Power More Applications

In 2018, WordPress made a bold move by introducing Gutenberg, a new block-based editor to replace its classic WYSIWYG editor. Since then, the Gutenberg project has expanded beyond just editing blog posts into full site customization and has begun appearing in applications beyond WordPress itself.

"We‘ve tried to create Gutenberg as a standalone project from WordPress. In fact, I believe that Gutenberg could be a bigger contribution we make to the world than even WordPress itself," Mullenweg said. The Gutenberg block editor can already be found in Tumblr, the Day One journaling app, and is even being integrated into the Drupal CMS.

Mullenweg envisions Gutenberg becoming the de facto standard for content creation across all platforms and CMS‘s. "We can essentially have standard interfaces across CMSes and applications." As Gutenberg‘s adoption increases, it holds the potential to greatly simplify content creation on the web and make it accessible to more users.

Rapid Adoption of New Releases Will Accelerate Innovation

WordPress development moves quickly, with major releases now happening every four months. But this fast pace doesn‘t mean site owners are getting left behind. In fact, WordPress has made huge strides in enabling auto-updates while working with hosting providers to ensure backward compatibility.

The result? WordPress 6.0, released in May 2022, achieved 35% adoption across all WordPress sites within just one week – a 10% increase over the previous release. This signals that more site owners are feeling confident relying on the latest version, with all its new features and improvements.

"The speed at which people are adopting the new releases is definitely one of the most exciting things happening with WordPress right now," Chomphosy noted. Faster adoption cycles mean innovations can reach more users quickly while also accelerating the feedback loop with developers. Over the next few years, expect this rapid cadence to drive bigger leaps forward in WordPress‘s feature set and capabilities.

Improved Documentation Will Empower More Creators

With each release packing in more features and flexibility, WordPress can have a steep learning curve, especially for new users. During a Q&A session at WordCamp Europe, members of the documentation team acknowledged they‘re struggling to keep pace in documenting all of WordPress‘s features and APIs.

Chomphosy called for companies in the WordPress ecosystem to get more involved in documentation as part of the "Five for the Future" initiative, where organizations contribute 5% of their resources back to the WordPress open source project. "Documentation is a diversity initiative," she said. "I think it‘s one of the ways that we bring people into WordPress and can help people learn WordPress more and better."

As WordPress aims to reach even more users across the globe, clear, up-to-date and localized documentation will be essential to its continued growth. Expect to see the WordPress community place a higher priority on documentation in the coming years, with more contributors and companies pitching in. Better onboarding and learning resources can empower more creators and site builders while strengthening the WordPress ecosystem.

Multilingual Functionality Slated for 2025

One of the most anticipated upcoming features is multilingual support in WordPress core. But Mullenweg cautioned this is a longer-term project not likely to launch until 2025. Currently, site owners who want to publish their content in multiple languages must rely on multilingual plugins.

The reason for the longer timeline is that WordPress is taking an iterative approach, first improving its content creation workflows before tackling the complexities of multilingual. "Part of the reason is that we‘ve learned it‘s hard to create architecture for something without creating the user experience," Mullenweg explained. "Workflow is basically when we‘re going to take real-time co-editing into WordPress, much like Google Docs. With multilingual, I think that particularly the workflows around multilingual content are important."

In the meantime, Mullenweg recommends site owners work with existing multilingual plugins while the core team observes their approaches. When native multilingual support does land in core, he anticipates these plugins will provide a migration path. For a CMS used worldwide, multilingual support will be a huge step forward in making WordPress accessible to more communities.

More Thoughtful Defaults to Guide Beginners

One side effect of WordPress‘s vast flexibility is that users can easily get overwhelmed with choices when it comes to design options, block patterns, plugins and more. To help guide beginners, Mullenweg said a focus going forward is providing more opinionated and thoughtful default experiences – while still enabling customization.

"We are trying to give folks a lot of options in Gutenberg. We want there to be great control in the way you lay things out, in typography, in colors, in everything," he said. "It‘s fundamental to the idea of Gutenberg that there‘s flexibility for how it‘s built."

At the same time, WordPress aims to offer high-quality default themes, block patterns and configurations – carefully considering typography, accessibility, responsive design, performance and clean code. Curating more "sane defaults" can help users avoid missteps while still allowing them to personalize their sites. As the saying goes, "Decisions, not options."

Shift from PHP to JavaScript for a Modern Web

Historically, WordPress was built on PHP, a server-side scripting language. But as the platform evolves to enable richer user experiences, it‘s increasingly adopting JavaScript, the programming language that powers interactive websites and web applications.

"More and more parts of the WordPress interface — things that you‘d have to go to a different admin screen to do — you‘re going to be able to do inline in Gutenberg," Mullenweg said. "The beauty of that is we can create really fast performant and responsive interfaces using JavaScript because we don‘t have to reload the page or load everything, and it uses the REST API."

However, PHP isn‘t going away anytime soon. "I think the backend will be in PHP for the foreseeable future and a lot of the application itself will be in JS," Mullenweg clarified. This shift reflects the overall trajectory of web development, with more sites leveraging JavaScript frameworks like React for their front-end interfaces atop PHP-based CMS‘s. As WordPress keeps pace with this trend, users can expect faster, more dynamic, app-like experiences within the CMS.

The Bottom Line: WordPress Will Continue to Evolve and Expand

Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, WordPress shows no signs of slowing down its incredible growth trajectory. With steady progress on the Gutenberg block editor, a strong emphasis on accessibility and multilingual support, and a vibrant global community, this open source CMS is poised to reach even more users in the coming years.

But this rapid pace of development doesn‘t come without challenges. WordPress must continue investing in documentation, learning resources and thoughtful default configurations to lower the barriers to entry for new users. At the same time, it must provide robust tools and frameworks for developers to extend the platform and integrate it with emerging technologies.

As the web evolves, expect to see WordPress not only keep pace but continue driving innovation in the CMS space – just as it has for nearly 20 years. By staying true to its mission of democratizing publishing and empowering creators, WordPress can maintain its dominance while expanding its impact in the decades to come.