If you’re spinning up a personal CMS, great. Have fun, you’ll learn a lot.

But once you’re dealing with multiple users (tens or hundreds) it’s a different problem. How confident are you writing auth and password reset flows? How sure are you that the AI got it right? How solid is your approach to roles and permissions? Are you implementing 2FA? Supporting drafts, scheduled publishing, editorial workflows? Now you are also tech support writing the infrastructure as issues come in.

That's a very different scenario.

So please, if you're going to make sweeping statements on a CMS, please clarify if you're talking about a solo site owner situation or a multi-user setup.

Cloudflare is just jealous that most of their customers are actually running WordPress, but this is not something they will be able to solve with AI hype.

1. https://github.com/processwire/processwire

I know WordPress is going nowehere and if there is some special backend functionality, that is needed. But 95% of web does not need it.

A static site is always cheaper, and the bottleneck has always been that editing code is indimidating. Therefore, AI actually resolves a big problem here, and this is going to alter the future of platforms like WP.

I expect we'll see a further wave of CMS interfaces which provide a nicer editing experience on top of flat files stored in Git.

Maybe the strategic move for platforms like WordPress (and maybe Django too! The Django admin remains a very popular CMS platform) is to invest more in separation of admin editing from serving, such that there's an obvious path to edit your content in the CMS but deploy it as static files.

My own blog uses the Django admin and serves the site via Django (albeit behind a 15m Cloudflare cache to handle traffic spikes) but I have a scheduled GitHub Action that backs up the content to a Git repository: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup - it's not much of a stretch from that to having the Git repository feed content to a static site generator.

If anything, I’d expect more CMS work to occur as the cost of building, migrating, and redesigning sites keeps dropping.

There is a reason why Wordpress is (open source!) dominating the space ever since or more precisely, many niches.

To be honest, I had my fair share of "You might not need Wordpress" but in the end, nothing beats its versatility, its rights management and options. There is always a plugin for that.

I see no conntenter. Astro has its merits and use case - so have plenty of others (remember Hugo etc.?).

At a certain time you will hit a threshold or problems that are easy to solve using WP you usually disregard at the beginning.

I usually start out "No, WP isn't needed, just to regret it afterwards." There is a dilemma because customers only start to really utilize their website the moment it is setup. And it always went from "Just 5 pages" to "Can I add a marketplace?" to ballooning content as well as timed postings and social media integration.

I stopped questioning WP, because I really don't see alternatives in certain spaces.

Security is a concern, yes, but nevertheless, let's not talk about NodeJS in this regard.

Wordpress isn't a paradigm, it just works and while it seems to be some 20 years old odd code, quite many of the CMS in the React space struggled hard to getting to terms with the lastest paradigm shifts.

Wordpress is the reliable dude who looks boringly normal, but on the other hand never gets you into trouble.

So paraphrase IBM: No one gets fires for using WordPress.

And I would not say this about any other CMS. They are incredible hard, you have to get a lot of stuff right. But I won't implement my own CMS again. At a certain time everybody will come to this realization, most likely, when you have a deadline and miss out features that are hard to implement.

This is my opinion and I love playing and toying around with CMS ever since, even forums (phpBB?) or DIGG clones like Pligg back then. Great stuff, but I stick to WP.

My perspective comes from enterprise: we use(d) a marketing agency to run two websites. A few months ago I discovered our team was spending 30+ minutes just to publish a blog post written by a product manager. Everything was built on Elementor blocks. Articles pasted from Word kept breaking styles. 20+ plugins creating a security nightmare.

With AI assistance, we migrated to Hugo in three days. 800+ pages. 15 reusable components. Zero plugin chaos. Permissions handled at the git level. A simple HTML form to upload images and paste articles for less technical people, most were fine with markdown already. GitHub Actions for cleanup, validation, and spellchecking. Attack surface minimized. Performance improved drastically.

I’ll stand behind this: most people don’t need a bloated CMS. They need clarity on what they want to achieve, a solid process, and software that turns that process into a system.

I have used Wordpress a lot (too much) and came to the view that for most websites it is just overkill. So I built https://harcstack.org and vowed to write all my new sites in actual code.

HTMX to the rescue since you can write server side code in a sensible way and still have quite a dymanic UX.

I ended up switching to plain PHP, and it worked great. It is still mostly "static", but I can dynamically include the same content on multiple pages without having to duplicate/build it every time.

To me the latter is a legit move and much cleaner architecture for most sites. And the issue of editing code, or really just markdown files, seems to be a solvable UI problem with good editors like Obsidian, or something similar but more tailored for website building.

Greenfield rarely uses PHP in 2026, unless its wordpress.

But the CMS market has also shifted, AI can generate good looking websites fast. This means the traditional web agency shops are between a rock and a hard place. Clients no longer pay tens of thousands for a site, and demand is also going down as its semi easy to vibe something in a weekend.

That said rhere WILL be a demand for CMS sites (wordpress) but devs are a dime a dozen, and the quality will most likely be even worse than what youd see traditionally in PHP and wordpress.

CMS's like wordpress don't solve the problem of allowing non-technical people to manage a website. They solve the problem of allowing you to separate the content of your website from the logic of it.

Now of course these tools will change to be used by Agents, but honestly probably less than you'd think. AIs are very good at interacting with software like humans, so the transition will be pretty small

That's a weird thing to read. (Not criticism for the author or the article)

> Migrated his personal blog

Is that a thing worth mentioning? I did that over a decade ago.

> Astro, the hottest new JavaScript framework in town

I thought it's 2026 now, not early 2010s. People still do that?

> the blasphemous idea that not all sites need a CMS

Is it? People still haven't accepted this?

"Voted "Best Flat File CMS" in 2017, 2019, 2020 & 2021!" :-)

And, in the broadest sense, that human interface is a CMS; the agent is just another editor, albeit one that happens to read and write raw data rather than using a WYSIWIG (or similar) editor.

Nice turn of a phrase! I was surprised it was a GoogleNope except for you, op.

Using a CMS is overkill if you have a static website generator. And once you have that it's just another code base that you can unleash agentic coding tools on. Most websites are pretty straightforward code bases to work with for AIs. The only real argument for a CMS always was providing an easy to use environment for people to work in without having to worry about technology. They power editorial processes too. But you don't need one any more if you can let AIs coordinate those processes. Use a word processor of your choice. Hand your draft off to the AI and let it do its thing.

Once you have this dialed in, which doesn't actually have to take a whole lot of time, you can get very efficient around content creation and management. Having good guard rails and investing in those is critical here and makes the difference between slop and having something that is actually informative and fresh. The guard rails can also deal with approval processes, fact checking, translations, audio transcriptions, check lists, tone/wording checks, etc. You can make this as complicated as you need to.

But it needs a better headless capability. Most separate front ends appear to be grafted on relying on plugins. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

For example, my blog runs on Grav and I write articles in Markdown on my local PC (more convenient than admin UI for me) and even on the server it all remains file based - it’s reasonably simple, reasonably fast and still allows for dynamic behavior at render/cache time.

Compare that to the slop you get when you have a slow as fuck WP install with a crapload of plugins and the whole thing is brittle and slow and nobody has any idea how to fix it without breaking the current site. If people try applying it to every problem, that’s how you get bad attempts at building complex and bespoke ERP/CRM/e-commerce solutions in a stack that will never be easy or pleasant to work with in those domains.

But surely there is a middle ground - use CMSes where they make sense, reach for other stacks when you need a more generic web app (AI or not). Or heck, use the CMS headless for some parts of the overall thing. Actually, in that regard, I also kinda love Django Admin cause you get a lot out of the box.