WordPress 7.0 and the 25 Years That Got Us Here
I downloaded WordPress the day it was released, on May 27, 2003. The web already had Movable Type, Blogger was free, and TypePad had the design crowd locked down, so when a two-developer fork of b2/cafelog showed up with a blog-focused mission and a funny name, I figured it was going to fade out by the end of the year. Twenty-three years later I am writing this post on that same piece of software, which now runs 43% of every website on the internet.
The road from there to here is one of the stranger stories in software history, and WordPress 7.0 is the release that finally feels like the destination the project has been pointing toward since 2003.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Irrelevance
Nobody writing about the web in 2003 expected WordPress to last. Plenty of software was free back then, and open source under GPL was becoming normal, so neither of those was what made the project different. What made it different was how stubbornly it refused to die every time the industry buried it.
Movable Type went paid and WordPress picked up a generation of refugees without charging them anything. When Google Reader shut down and everyone declared RSS dead, WordPress kept publishing feeds long enough for the podcast boom to prove RSS was never actually dying. The rise of static site generators and headless frontends could have taken the CMS role away from WordPress entirely, but the project shipped a REST API early, and WordPress ended up being the backend most of those shiny new frontends called into anyway.
Every shift that was supposed to end WordPress ended up being absorbed by WordPress instead. The project did not pick fights with trends, did not chase them, and did not try to be the cool platform of the moment. It shipped a new version every three to four months for twenty-three years.
That consistency is the reason 43% of the internet runs on WordPress, even though the platform is not the fastest one on the market and the admin UI has never won any awards.
What WordPress has is the ability to be there, working, through every technology cycle since George W. Bush’s first term.
What WordPress Gave Us
Before WordPress, publishing on the internet was hard. You needed to buy hosting, install software by hand, configure a database, edit PHP files, FTP them to a server, and hope nothing broke when someone hit refresh. Then you needed to learn HTML to write your first post. That entire chain of friction kept most people off the internet as creators and left them as consumers on whatever platform would tolerate them at the time.
WordPress made publishing a decision anyone could make rather than a project anyone had to manage. You registered a domain, clicked install, and started writing. An entire class of human expression exists because of that one simplification, from small business sites to personal blogs that turned into book deals, newsrooms rebuilding after the collapse of print advertising, artists posting portfolios, restaurants putting menus online, musicians without labels, teachers sharing lesson plans, and parents documenting a child’s cancer treatment so family three states away can follow along. Most of those sites are running on WordPress today, and most of them would not exist without it.
WordPress did more than host websites. It gave regular people the ability to own a piece of the internet that no platform could take away from them when the algorithm changed or the terms of service got updated.
43% Is Not an Accident
The number gets quoted so often it has lost its texture. 43% of every site on the internet runs on WordPress, which includes e-commerce storefronts, corporate sites, government portals, news outlets, university departments, law firms, car dealerships, and your neighborhood HVAC contractor. The second most popular platform has 3%.
There is no other category of software that looks like this. Operating systems, databases, web servers, programming languages, and cloud providers all have competitive fields with real contenders at second and third place. WordPress is the Windows of the web, except Microsoft never got Windows to 43% of personal computers at its peak, and the WordPress project did it with a volunteer community and a donation-funded foundation running on a budget most Silicon Valley startups would burn through on a single launch party.
The reason nobody has caught up is that the moat is not technical.
The moat is 70,000 plugins, 12,000 themes, 650,000 developers, and 1.5 million volunteers contributing translations, patches, documentation, forum support, and meetups across 190 countries.
That kind of network effect cannot be built by pouring money into a product. It can only be grown, and growing it takes twenty years of showing up.
WordPress 7.0
Every major version in WordPress history has been a decision about what the project wanted to be. Version 3.0 unified multisite and single-site into one codebase, and the 4.x cycle laid the REST API groundwork that eventually made headless WordPress possible. The Gutenberg bet in 5.0 cost the project about half its community for a year and ended up being the right call in hindsight, which 6.0 confirmed by finishing the work and fixing most of the remaining complaints from the 5.0 backlash.
Version 7.0 is the release where the block editor finally feels like a finished product. The editorial experience is no longer in transition. Writers can use the editor to draft, design, and ship a full site without wrestling with legacy shortcodes, metaboxes, or the gap between what the editor previews and what the browser actually renders.
The interactivity API reached stability in 7.0, which means the era of bolting React or Vue onto WordPress sites to get dynamic search boxes or filter panels is winding down. Performance work in this cycle, particularly around deferred asset loading and block rendering optimization, makes every plugin and every theme faster without anyone needing to rewrite anything. This is the first release in years that does not feel like a transitional stepping stone for developers, and the first release where site owners get a noticeably better editing experience from running the update.
25 Years
WordPress turns 25 on May 27, 2028, two years from now. I have been thinking about what to say when that day arrives. The community will probably mark it the usual way, with nostalgia posts and celebration meetups, Matt giving a speech somewhere, old-timers sharing stories about WP-Admin before WP-Admin had a sidebar, and someone digging up a screenshot of the 2004 dashboard that will briefly horrify everyone who remembers thinking it was state of the art.
What I want to say two years early is this: the internet we have today is largely the internet WordPress built, because WordPress wrote the code that let anyone else build a site, and most of them did.
Without WordPress the web would be a smaller place, with fewer small businesses online, fewer independent publishers, fewer communities of practice, and a generation of first-time creators who never found the on-ramp they needed.
The web was supposed to belong to everyone rather than five companies, and WordPress is a big part of why it still does, even partially. I have been using WordPress for twenty-three years and plan to still be using it on the 25th anniversary, and on the 50th if I am lucky enough to still be writing code by then. What the project proved is that open source run by humans who care about their users more than they care about competing can outlast every venture-backed challenger the industry throws at it.
If you run a WordPress site, keep it updated, install a real security plugin, and choose a host that respects your work. The platform has earned that much from us.
Thank You, WordPress
Matt started the project. The core contributors have shipped every release for twenty-three years. Translators brought WordPress to 190 countries in languages I cannot pronounce, plugin authors wrote the tools that made the platform infinite, theme designers made it beautiful, forum moderators answered the same questions a thousand times with patience, and documentation writers did work that nobody had asked them to do. Between all of you, you built the software that gave me a career.
The project stayed free when every financial incentive in the industry said to charge for it. The people behind it kept going through the “blogs are dead” era, through the Gutenberg civil war, and through a decade of venture capital flooding into everything except open source CMSes. What they built actually matters to people outside of tech.
The project is still here, 43% of the internet is running on what the contributors built, and I will still be updating my blog with WordPress on the day it turns 25. Happy almost-anniversary.
~ SephX, Nova Heaven. Still using WordPress 23 years later and will still be using it on the 25th anniversary.