This is a question worth answering carefully, because the honest version is more nuanced than the marketing version. WordPress isn’t the right choice for every person in every situation — but for most small businesses, nonprofits, professional services firms, and growing organizations, it’s the right choice for reasons that go well beyond market share statistics.
Let’s get into it.
First, Let’s Retire the 40% Stat
You’ve probably heard it: “WordPress powers over 40% of the web.” It’s technically true-ish, depending on how you count and what you’re counting. But it’s also a little like saying a particular brand of hammer built 40% of all houses — technically interesting, not particularly useful for deciding whether to use one.
What actually matters isn’t how many websites run on WordPress. It’s what WordPress is, why it works the way it works, and what that means for your specific situation as a business owner or organization. So that’s what this post is about.
You Actually Own Your Website
This is the foundational reason, and everything else flows from it.
When you build a website on Wix, Squarespace, or a similar platform, you’re renting space on their infrastructure. Your content lives in their database, is formatted according to their data structures, and is accessible at their discretion under terms they can change. If they raise prices, change features, get acquired, or shut down a product line, your options are limited. Moving your content off those platforms is possible but often painful — there’s no perfectly-clean export across CMSes — no standard format, and typically no graceful migration path to wherever you want to go next.
A self-hosted WordPress site is different in a fundamental way. Your content lives in a database you control, on a server you choose, and can be exported, migrated, or handed off to a different developer or agency at any time. The files are yours. The data is yours. The relationship between you and your website is not mediated by a subscription to someone else’s closed platform.
For a nonprofit that’s been operating for fifteen years and needs to change hosting providers, this matters. For a restaurant group that outgrows its current agency and wants to bring a new team in without starting over, this matters. For a contractor who wants to take their site in a different direction in three years without rebuilding from scratch, this matters. Portability and durability aren’t exciting features to talk about — until you need them, at which point they’re the only features that matter.
Modularity: The Site That Grows With You
WordPress’s architecture is built around the idea that you add capabilities as you need them, rather than paying for a platform tier that includes things you don’t yet use. Need e-commerce? WooCommerce is the most widely deployed e-commerce solution on the web, and it lives inside your WordPress install. Need a booking system? A membership portal? A donation platform for a nonprofit? An events calendar? A job board? There are mature, well-maintained plugins for all of these, and most of them integrate cleanly with each other. No site can be everything to everyone, and WordPress’s extensibility makes it the best-positioned CMS to be there for organizations as they scale and their needs change.
This modularity also applies to the people who work on your site. Because WordPress is a dominant CMS in the independent developer ecosystem, the pool of freelancers, contractors, and agencies who can pick up your project and work with it competently is enormous. You’re not locked into one vendor relationship. If your needs change, your budget changes, or your current agency relationship isn’t working, you have genuine options. You can hand your site to a new developer in Alexandria, like PRÜF, or a freelancer in Portland, or an agency in DC — and they can reasonably hit the ground running without a lengthy onboarding process or a costly platform migration.
The Block Editor: Slow-Baked, But Worth It
Here’s an honest take that most WordPress agencies won’t give you: the transition to the Block Editor (Gutenberg) took too long, was bumpy for years, and frustrated a lot of experienced WordPress users who had built workflows around the classic editor.
But that difficulty is actually instructive about what makes WordPress valuable.
The Block Editor’s development was not an internal product decision made by a small team at a private company. It was a massive, messy, democratic process involving thousands of contributors — plugin developers, theme authors, agency developers, accessibility specialists, hobbyists, enterprise engineering teams — all deliberating in public about what a modern WordPress editing experience should look like. That process is slower and more contentious than what happens inside a closed platform. It’s also more durable as a result. Features that survive that gauntlet have been tested against real-world use cases at scale, hardened by critique from people who actually build sites for a living, and documented thoroughly because the community depends on it.
When Wix redesigns its editor, you find out when you log in one morning and things look different. The story for Shopify is similar. When WordPress changes something fundamental, it’s debated in public for months, released in stages, and supported through multiple versions with backward compatibility. That’s not always comfortable. On the whole, it is generally more trustworthy.
Open Source Is a Feature, Not Just a Philosophy
WordPress is free and open source software, maintained by a global community of contributors. Many of those contributors are volunteers who work at companies building WordPress products, at agencies like PRÜF building client sites, or as independent developers who have built careers and livelihoods on the platform. The incentive alignment is real: the people improving WordPress are, for the most part, the same people who use it professionally every day.
This has practical implications. The codebase is audited constantly — not just by Automattic (the company most closely associated with WordPress), but also by thousands of developers who have every reason to catch problems. Security vulnerabilities are disclosed publicly, patched quickly, and well-documented. Core WordPress itself has a strong security track record. The documentation is extensive and maintained. The support forums are active. The ecosystem of tutorials, guides, and professional resources is unmatched by any proprietary platform.
You’re not betting your website on one company’s continued interest in supporting a product. You’re betting on one of the most widely used and widely maintained open source software projects in the world.
The Security Question
WordPress has a reputation for being insecure that is mostly unearned and largely attributable to user error. The two biggest sources of WordPress security incidents are not flaws in core WordPress — they’re weak passwords and bad hosting choices.
Core WordPress itself has a dedicated security team and a responsible disclosure process. When vulnerabilities are found, they’re patched and pushed as automatic updates, often within 24 hours. The same is true for most major plugins from established developers.
The risk areas are predictable and manageable. Poorly maintained plugins from abandoned developers are a vector. Cheap shared hosting on servers that are poorly configured or never updated is a vector. Reusing passwords across accounts is a vector.
Choosing a managed WordPress host like WP Engine (affiliate link), keeping plugins updated, and using strong credentials eliminates the vast majority of real-world risk. The security story for a well-maintained WordPress site on good hosting is genuinely strong — and certainly not worse than the opaque security posture of a closed platform where you have no visibility into what’s actually happening under the hood.
Customizability Is the Point
Yes, “customizability” is a word, and it’s the right one here.
The combination of themes, plugins, and the Block Editor’s pattern and template system means a WordPress site can look and behave in ways that a Wix or Squarespace template genuinely cannot. Full-site editing in modern WordPress gives developers and designers precise control over every element of a site — headers, footers, archive templates, single post layouts — using the same block-based system that content editors use to build pages. The line between design and content management has blurred in useful ways.
For businesses that need their website to reflect a distinctive brand rather than a recognizable template, this matters. For e-commerce sites that need custom product experiences, this matters. For nonprofits that need donation flows integrated into their site design rather than bolted on, this matters. For organizations that want a website that doesn’t look like every other website built on the same platform, this is where WordPress earns its keep.
It Plays Well With the Tools Your Team Already Uses
One underappreciated WordPress strength: it handles copy-paste from common writing tools better than most platforms. If your communications director drafts posts in Google Docs, or your grant writer works in Word, pasting that content into the Block Editor preserves formatting intelligently — headings, lists, bold and italic text, links — rather than dumping it as a wall of unstyled text or a mess of invisible formatting characters. For organizations that have real content teams with real workflows, this is a small but genuinely time-saving feature that closed platforms frequently handle worse.
What’s Coming in WordPress 7.0
WordPress 7.0 was scheduled to release on April 9, 2026 (TBD at present), and it includes a feature that represents a meaningful shift for content teams: real-time collaboration. Multiple users will be able to edit the same post or page simultaneously, with live data syncing between sessions. Think Google Docs-style concurrent editing, but inside your WordPress site.
This is a big deal for publishing organizations, nonprofits with communications teams, larger businesses with multiple content contributors, and any organization where posts currently go through a back-and-forth email draft review process before someone finally logs in and updates the actual page. The friction in that workflow is real, and WordPress is now built to address it natively.
7.0 also brings visual revision comparisons (see exactly what changed between versions, not just when), improved responsive editing controls, a new Icons block, a responsive Grid block, and client-side media processing that offloads image resizing and compression to the browser rather than the server — which is a performance and workflow improvement for media-heavy sites.
The platform is not standing still. It’s actively being developed by a community that has every incentive to make it better.
A Note on the Ecosystem in the DMV
If you’re a small business, nonprofit, or professional services organization in Alexandria, Arlington, Washington DC, or anywhere in Northern Virginia, the practical benefit of WordPress’s dominance in the developer ecosystem is local and tangible. There are more WordPress developers near Alexandria, VA than developers who specialize in any other CMS — which means more competitive pricing, more options when you need ongoing support, and more people who can step in if your primary developer relationship changes.
That’s not a reason by itself to choose WordPress, but it’s a real advantage that closed platforms don’t offer. When you need a website designer in Alexandria, VA who can actually open your project and get to work, the odds are strongly in your favor with WordPress.
When WordPress Might Not Be the Right Choice
Honesty demands this section. WordPress is probably not the right fit if you need a simple brochure site with no ongoing content updates and no plans to grow it — a basic Squarespace or even a well-built static site may serve you better with less overhead. It’s also not the right call if you have no one to maintain it — WordPress rewards regular updates and at minimum some periodic attention, and a neglected WordPress site is more vulnerable than a neglected Squarespace site simply because the attack surface is larger.
But for most businesses with real digital ambitions — an e-commerce operation, a content strategy, a local SEO investment, a brand that needs room to grow — WordPress is built for the long game in a way that proprietary platforms aren’t.
