The question is more pointed than it was in 2020. WordPress still runs roughly 42.5% of all websites and 59.9% of those with any CMS, but the platform contracted 2.9% in market share between December 2024 and December 2025 while Wix grew 28.9% and Squarespace grew 9.7%. The growth of hosted builders has eaten into the assumption that WordPress is automatically the right call for a small business site. The real answer for any owner depends on what the site needs to do, who maintains it, and how much technical control matters. The data and feature gaps in 2026 make the decision sharper than at any point in the last decade. The sections below break down what each platform does well now, where the lines have moved, and which type of business should pick what.
What WordPress Still Does Better
WordPress remains the platform with the largest plugin and theme ecosystem. Over 60,000 free plugins and tens of thousands of themes give a small business site access to features that hosted builders charge for or skip entirely. The cost structure favors WordPress when budgets matter. Self-hosted WordPress requires only a domain and a hosting plan. There is no monthly platform tax beyond the host.
Content ownership is the other lasting WordPress advantage. The site files, database, and content all sit on infrastructure that the owner controls. A WordPress site can move between hosts in an afternoon. A Wix or Squarespace site cannot leave the platform without a full content migration that often loses formatting, custom code, and SEO equity.
The release cycle remains active and developer-driven. The 2025 WordPress release schedule shipped versions 6.8 and 6.9, with 6.9 introducing block-level Notes for collaboration and an Abilities API designed for AI integrations. Hosted builders rarely match this pace at the open-source layer.
Hosted Builder Gains Since 2020
The 2025 versions of Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow look nothing like their 2018 counterparts. Average page load on a Webflow site runs 1.4 seconds. Average WordPress page load runs 3.4 seconds, well above the 2.5-second LCP target Google sets in Core Web Vitals. The difference comes from how each platform handles caching, image optimization, and CDN delivery as platform defaults.
Design quality has narrowed too. Squarespace templates rank consistently among the best designed in the market, and the platform now captures 39% of the top 10,000 websites built on any builder, compared with 12% for Wix. A small business that wants a polished site without hiring a designer can ship one in a weekend on either platform.
The total cost of ownership argument has flipped for some segments. A Wix or Squarespace plan at $20-40 per month covers hosting, security, backups, design tools, and platform updates. A self-hosted WordPress site at the same monthly cost still requires the owner to manage plugin updates, security patching, backup verification, and theme maintenance personally.
The Plugin Surface and Maintenance Reality
The same plugin ecosystem that gives WordPress its flexibility creates the largest source of maintenance work and security exposure. 11,334 new vulnerabilities were cataloged in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, with 91% in plugins and only 6 in the core. A site running 30 plugins from various authors carries 30 separate exposure paths and 30 separate update schedules.
Maintenance time matters. A small business owner who treats WordPress as set-and-forget accumulates outdated plugins, broken integrations, and security holes within a year. The owner who treats WordPress as a managed asset spends 2-4 hours a month on updates, audits, and backups. Hosted builders absorb that maintenance cost into the monthly subscription, which is why they appeal to owners who would prefer to avoid system administration.
Hosting Stack and WordPress Performance
The performance gap between WordPress and hosted builders narrows when the host is properly chosen. A WordPress site on a managed environment with object caching, opcode caching, and a CDN routinely loads in 1.5-2 seconds. The 3.4-second average is for stores on shared environments or older configurations.
Operators who plan to grow past basic shared environments tend to invest in powerful wordpress hosting with PHP 8.x optimizations, automatic core updates, and isolated resources. The hosting choice determines if the WordPress decision pays off in performance or compounds the maintenance burden.
The E-commerce Decision
For small businesses with online stores, the question gets more specific. WooCommerce powers between 4 and 6 million stores worldwide, with 70%+ being small to medium businesses. The state of WooCommerce shows the United States hosts over 2 million active stores, the largest single market.
Shopify took a different path and is winning with merchants who want speed of setup and built-in tools. Shopify revenue hit $11.56 billion in 2025, up 30% from 2024, and the platform processed over $300 billion in gross merchandise volume across 5.6 million active stores.
The choice between WooCommerce and Shopify for a new store comes down to two questions. Does the owner want to manage the stack? Does content marketing factor into the strategy? WooCommerce favors flexibility and blog-driven traffic. Shopify favors time to launch and operational simplicity. Both produce successful stores when matched to the right operator.
Who Should Pick WordPress in 2026
WordPress remains the right call for several specific cases. The first is content-heavy sites where blog posts, knowledge bases, or documentation drive most of the traffic. The plugin ecosystem and SEO control give WordPress an edge that hosted builders cannot fully match.
The second is sites with custom workflows that need integration with internal tools, CRMs, or industry-specific software. WordPress’s REST API, plugin architecture, and database access support customizations that hosted builders block by design.
The third is owners with technical capacity. A developer or technically inclined owner gets full value from WordPress’s flexibility. A non-technical owner who picks WordPress without budget for ongoing maintenance often regrets the choice within 12 months.
The fourth is large content libraries that need migration freedom. The portability of a WordPress site protects against platform shutdowns, pricing changes, or feature removals on hosted services.
The Honest Answer
WordPress is still the right platform for a meaningful share of small businesses in 2026, but that share is smaller than it was three years ago. Hosted builders have closed the design and performance gap for businesses that need a clean, fast site without managing infrastructure. For the WordPress market share of 42.5%, the decision is increasingly between WordPress on a solid host and a hosted builder with strong platform defaults. Both options produce good sites when matched to the operator’s preferences and capacity. The bad outcomes happen when an owner picks WordPress for the wrong reasons and never sets aside maintenance time, or picks a builder and outgrows its limits inside the first year. The decision deserves the same scrutiny the rest of the business plan gets.
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