The Post-CMS Web and the Battle for AI Server Access

Ido

Here's a number I can't stop thinking about. 48.3% of the measurable web runs no detectable CMS at all. That's HTTP Archive data, tracked by Casey Burridge at GravityKit, and it was 46.75% in mid 2024. Static sites, headless builds, hand coded pages. Everyone is arguing about AI plugins, and the bigger story might be sites that skip the CMS entirely.

Nick d

I want to keep this grounded, though. WordPress still runs 33.21% of all measurable web origins as of April 2026, and about 64% of sites with a detectable CMS. You may have seen W3Techs say 41.2%. That's not a contradiction. It leaves out the no CMS sites, so the denominator is different. Where WordPress has slipped is from its peak of 35.76% in July 2022. That's 2.55 points, roughly a 7% relative drop over four years. It's a slow leak, not a collapse.

Ben cohen

And the leak has a destination. Shopify sits at 4.74%, up 12.4% year over year, and it absorbed roughly 59% of the share WordPress lost. The ecommerce picture is split too. WooCommerce leads overall, 6.64% of origins to Shopify's 4.76%. But in the top 1 million popularity tier, Shopify leads 6.08% to 3.12%. WooCommerce wins on breadth, Shopify wins at the top.

Ido

Inside WordPress, the builder story is interesting. Elementor is on 32.67% of WordPress sites, up 2.51 points. I'll flag that I work at Elementor, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. The block editor is at 20.62%, wpBakery slipped to 8.52%, and Bricks is up 71.2% year over year. That's off a tiny base of 0.34%, so it's a rising signal, not a takeover.

Nick d

The less visible shift is how people sell these things. On July 1, 2026, Envato moved to a flat 50% author fee and ended its exclusive author tier, where selected authors paid the platform a lower fee. The reaction in the community was telling. Vova, the Freemius founder, said going independent is inevitable. Xaver said the marketplace model feels dated. Lawrence Ladomery asked whether it's time to sell direct.

Ben cohen

Add the StellarWP news. That umbrella brand no longer exists, and its products moved under Liquid Web. Some keep their names, some get rebranded, some get merged into other plugins. So you've got marketplaces squeezing authors and brands consolidating at the same moment. If you're a solo plugin builder, that's an urgent signal.

Nick d

But here's the honest complication. Selling direct sounds liberating until you pay for your own customer acquisition. Marketplaces gave you traffic, and nobody has shown that independent developers can rebuild that funnel at a sane cost. That question is still open.

Ido

And the other end of the market is neglected. The WP Goldmine report looked at 57,383 plugins in the WordPress.org directory. In the 10K to 100K active install band, 24% haven't been updated in over two years. That's 1,209 popular plugins with real user bases and no maintainer. In the 100K to 1M band it's 10.2%, including Limit Login Attempts, Layout Grid Block and WP Downgrade.

Nick d

Which is a problem and an opportunity at once. When it comes to finding your next product, abandoned plugins with real installs are a map. Someone will take them over, fork them, or replace them. The WP Plugin Info Card plugin was literally offered up for developer takeover this month.

Ben cohen

Now the AI part, but not the usual hype. I think there are two competing architectures forming, and almost nobody names the split. Model one is native. Benjamin Intal, founder of Stackable and WP Interactions, previewed an experiment called Ahentic AI workspace. In the preview, it understands the whole site, helps launch it, and helps install plugins. And it uses no external servers, no external services, no MCPs. Just WordPress and its new APIs.

Nick d

That lines up with what WPBeginner has been reporting about the Abilities API catching on fast. Plugins expose actions as structured endpoints, and assistants like Claude and ChatGPT can actually do the work. The benefit is clear. The site declares what an agent may do, and the agent stays inside that.

Ido

Model two is the opposite instinct. Novamira CLI lets a terminal coding agent, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, or anything that can run shell commands, connect to a site running Novamira. Novamira itself gives agents PHP execution, database queries and file operations. Elementor's Angie added a super admin mode that can read and write the file system, query the database, and execute PHP. That's power, and the ceiling is much higher.

Ben cohen

Higher ceiling, higher trust requirement. And the market is already crowded around both. Vercel released an AI Gateway plugin giving a site access to hundreds of models from more than 40 providers through one API key. So the model layer is getting commoditized, and the real fight is over permissions. Who gets to touch the server?

Nick d

My view is practical. Agency owners will love the terminal agent on a staging site and hesitate on a client's production site. A sandboxed, declared set of abilities is easier to explain to a client. Still, I can't tell you which wins. That's the unresolved question, whether site owners trust elevated server agents or settle on core APIs.

Ido

One more trend that sounds tiny and isn't. The official WordPress Browser Extension, in the works for Chrome and Safari, with the project on GitHub. It detects a WordPress site and gives you quick links to edit, the admin, logout, and a new content menu, all from the browser. The point is that the admin bar stops being injected into the front end.

Ben cohen

And that's exactly my lens. Once the page stops carrying admin clutter, what's left is cleaner for visitors and for machines reading it. The admin moves out of the page and into the tooling around it.

Nick d

So where does this leave people? If you're building, think about where your customers come from before the marketplace changes your math. Audit the plugins you rely on for maintainers. And decide now what you'll let an agent touch.

Ido

My prediction for the next three years is that the center of gravity moves. WordPress stays huge, but more of the interesting work happens at its edges, in sites without a CMS, in direct sales, and in agents that operate it from outside.