Open Source Takes the Lead: A Milestone Moment for WordPress and the Open Web

WordPress has been growing steadily in places that matter most: high-traffic, high-stakes websites with real technical and editorial demands.

That growth recently crossed a meaningful threshold. Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic, recently pointed out that this may be the first time open source has reached a majority among the world’s top 5,000 websites. WordPress alone powers roughly 47% of those sites, a share shaped by years of steady, incremental progress rather than sudden change.

WordPress at Scale

WordPress has always been an unlikely success story. It started as a simple blogging tool and grew, incrementally and sometimes imperfectly, into the most widely used publishing platform in the world.

What’s notable about this milestone isn’t just the percentage—it’s where WordPress is succeeding. The top 5,000 sites include some of the most demanding properties on the internet: global brands, major publishers, high-traffic platforms with complex needs.

These organizations don’t choose WordPress by accident. They choose it because it works at scale, because it’s flexible, and because it doesn’t force them into a single vendor’s vision of the future.

Why WordPress Keeps Winning

WordPress’s continued growth at the high end of the web comes down to a few core ideas that haven’t changed much over the years:

• Ownership matters. People want to own their content, their data, and their destiny online.
• Flexibility beats rigidity. WordPress can be shaped to fit almost any use case, instead of forcing users to adapt to the platform.
• Open ecosystems scale better than closed ones. Tens of thousands of contributors, developers, agencies, and hosting companies move faster together than any single company can alone.

The platform has evolved—blocks, APIs, headless use cases, performance improvements—but the underlying philosophy has stayed consistent. That continuity is part of why WordPress can grow without losing trust.

Open Source as a Competitive Advantage

It’s worth emphasizing that this isn’t open source winning despite the market—it’s open source winning because of it.

In an era shaped by AI, privacy concerns, and increasing centralization, openness is no longer just an ethical stance. It’s a practical one. Transparency, adaptability, and community governance turn out to be powerful advantages when the web keeps changing.

WordPress benefits directly from this. Being open source means it can integrate with new technologies without waiting for permission, and it can outlast trends that come and go.

A Milestone, Not a Finish Line

Reaching a majority share among the top 5,000 websites isn’t an endpoint. It’s a reminder of responsibility.

WordPress’s role now is not just to grow, but to grow well: to keep improving performance, accessibility, and ease of use, while staying true to the idea that publishing should be available to anyone with something to say.

This moment belongs to everyone who has contributed—whether by writing code, building sites, translating strings, teaching others, or simply choosing WordPress for their corner of the web.

Where This Meets Real Work

For teams building serious digital products, this milestone reinforces something Coma has seen for years: WordPress is no longer a compromise—it’s a strategic choice.

The difference between a WordPress site that merely exists and one that truly performs comes down to how it’s designed, built, and maintained. Architecture, performance, security, editorial workflows, and long-term scalability all matter—especially as organizations grow.

If you’re evaluating WordPress for a high-traffic site, a complex platform, or a long-term digital investment, this is the right moment to think beyond themes and plugins. It’s the moment to think about structure, sustainability, and partners who understand WordPress at scale.

At Coma, we help organizations turn WordPress into a reliable foundation—not just for today’s launch, but for years of growth ahead.

The web is moving in this direction. The question is how well you build for it.