In this issue of Delicious Brain Bytes, we look at the recent WordPress® market share decline, dive into Brian Gardner’s perspective on WordPress 7.0 as a design-focused operating system for the intelligent web, check the pulse of the ecosystem with the WP Community Collective’s State of the Community survey, and much more!
Unpacking the WordPress Market Share Decline
The WordPress community has been abuzz with recent data showing a contraction in its once-untouchable market dominance. According to the latest data from W3Techs, WordPress currently powers 59.4% of all websites with a known content management system, which translates to roughly 41.9% of all websites on the internet. While those numbers still represent a massive amount of sites, the trajectory has raised eyebrows across the industry.
As reported in a detailed analysis by Search Engine Journal, WordPress is facing its first sustained, multi-quarter decline in recent history. While a minor drop in 2025 was easily dismissed, the pace of the decline seems to have picked up.
“WordPress market share stood at 43.20% in December 2025 and declined to 41.90% by May 27, 2026. That’s a drop of 1.3 percentage points in six months, double what it was for the entire year of 2025,” writes Roger Monti on Search Engine Journal. “That’s a drop of 1.3 percentage points in six months, double what it was for the entire year of 2025.”
Where are these users going? While WordPress has dipped, closed-ecosystem competitors and modern developer frameworks are steadily scooping up the crumbs. Over the same timeline, platforms like Wix (+0.6), Shopify (+0.4), and Squarespace (+0.2) have seen modest gains.
WordPress Core Calls: Test Client-Side Media and Join the 7.0.x Release Squad
The WordPress core team has issued a call for testing client-side media processing, a progressive enhancement targeting WordPress 7.1 as a core capability. Rather than depending solely on server-side image processing pipelines, this feature offloads the decoding, resizing, and encoding of images directly to the user’s browser using WebAssembly. It provides a uniform, high-quality experience across different hosting environments while supporting advanced formats like AVIF, WebP, HEIC, UltraHDR, and JPEG XL without bloating initial bundle sizes. Testing across diverse devices is highly encouraged to smoke out bugs and stress-test upload resilience paths before the 7.1 cycle accelerates.
There’s also an open call for WordPress 7.0.x release managers to steer minor maintenance versions. This lean squad will be responsible for triaging bugs, drafting announcements, and running release operations, beginning with the tentative rollout of WordPress 7.0.1 later in June.
State of the Community Survey Now Open
The WP Community Collective has launched its State of the Community survey, an anonymous initiative inviting anyone who works with, contributes to, or cares about the WordPress open source project to share their perspectives.
Open from May 27 through June 28, 2026, the survey takes 10 to 20 minutes to complete and aims to capture a comprehensive snapshot of ecosystem health and participant trajectories.
Rather than just collecting basic demographics and professional background, the 10-to-20 minute questionnaire gathers broad feedback on project sentiment, community and event participation, core open-source values, and the shifting impacts of artificial intelligence.
All responses are completely anonymous and will be used to better understand the collective state of the project. To make your voice heard, head over to the WPCC and share your feedback before the June 28 deadline.
WordPress 7.0: A Design-Focused Operating System for the Intelligent Web
Brian Gardner of WP Engine recently shared a deep-dive perspective on the release of WordPress 7.0. Gardner notes that for twenty years, building great digital experiences often felt like a series of compromises between creative vision and software limitations. With the arrival of version 7.0, however, he believes the core software has officially matured into a sophisticated, future-ready operating system.
In the article, he explores in depth how the release transitions the CMS into an AI-ready, design-focused operating system by introducing a native AI framework, utilizing the Connectors API and WP AI Client SDK, alongside core enhancements like customizable navigation overlays, “content-only” pattern editing, and responsive block visibility.
Read the [full breakdown] (https://wpengine.com/blog/wordpress-7-0-release/) and see how these guardrails, performance updates, and media optimizations are helping to prepare your sites for the next era of web development.
Build a WordPress Admin Copilot with OpenAI and Smart Search AI MCP
“Find the right post quickly” sounds simple, but becomes more challenging as your content library grows. In an ideal world, you’d be able to search your indexed content with natural language, return results in real time, and handle follow-up requests like “show more” and “summarize the first result.”
In this tutorial, Fran Agulto shows us how to build a WordPress admin copilot that does just that, using a Next.js API backend as the coordinator, OpenAI for reasoning and tool orchestration, and WP Engine Smart Search AI MCP for deterministic search and retrieval.
Managing Third-Party API Bottlenecks in WordPress
No WordPress site is an island. Sites routinely integrate with external CRMs, enterprise ERP systems, inventory managers, payment gateways, and fulfillment APIs. These integrations add value, but they also introduce architectural vulnerability.
Any given third-party service might go down and cause a specific feature to stop working, but the bigger risk is a cascade failure. If an external API experiences latency or drops offline entirely, a poorly isolated WordPress site will go down with it.
Your server won’t crash because your database failed or because you ran out of memory. It will crash because your server’s PHP-FPM workers are stuck waiting in a synchronous queue for a response that isn’t coming.
In this article, we discuss defensive code isolation, and how to decouple your site’s frontend uptime from the reliability of your third-party dependencies.
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